Volume 10, Issue 1

Canada’s relationship to semiotics has been one of engagement, isolation, continued interest, and convergence. Semiotics in Canada has existed for a considerable period of time and, recently, has made itself a niche in the academic landscape by focusing on applications in three specific fields-forensics, robotics, and mathematics. Through our survey of the evolution of semiotics in adjacent and parallel fields, we demonstrate how semiotics serves as a veritable bridge between the sciences and the humanities. Providing a historical, contextual, and heuristic mapping of semiotics as it is currently used in Canadian institutions provides new inroads and applications that are required for the continued success of semiotics.

As general semiotics, semiotics provides a general theory of sign and correlate sign model. As such, semiotics avoids limitations connected with so called Saussurean sémiologie (in reality connected with information theory and the concepts of code and message). One limitation is glottocentrism which is phonocentric, anthropocentric, ethnocentric. When glottocentrism prevails, semiotics cannot adequately account for communication, modeling, and dialogism as generated in human biosemiosis, in the interconnection between verbal and nonverbal. We propose to critique glottocentrism in global semiotic terms, following European scholars (Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, Rossi-Landi) and beyond (Bakhtin, Sebeok, Morris). Dialogue among these voices is transnational, translinguistic, transdisciplinary. Moreover, as indicated by “semioethics” (introduced by Augusto Ponzio and myself), our approach accounts for the sign’s vocation for the other.

The aim of this work consists in constructing some epistemological foundations for the semio-anthropology of writing. While recognizing the conceptual discord on the ontological properties of writing, the author provides some genealogies of perspectives on writing including the extensive conceptualization inspired by J. Derrida. The author of this paper wants to insist on the epistemological necessity of graphic pluralism beyond the narrow linguistic notion of writing. In doing so, he would envisage to discover the broad and productive domain of semiotics of writing.

Gottlob Frege introduced a new dimension to the characterization of signs - that of ‘mode of presentation’. The same referent may be represented by different signs and in different manners, revealing it with dissimilar depth and profundity. The mode of presentation varies due to the fact that the same denoted object changes in the course of time and under alternating circumstances, but also because people designating it have unequal means for doing so. Herein I undertake to explicate these facts as they occur in semiotic reality.

Like the Roman divinity Janus, Western semiotics has two faces, one turned towards Europe including the Tartu-Moscow tradition, now renominated the Tartu-Moscow-Bloomington tradition, and the other turned towards semiotics in the United States. Semiotics today ensues from different phases of development across the twentieth century - from “communication (code) semiotics”, to “signification semiotics” to “interpretation (significance) semiotics”. In this paper we draw attention to some of the authors who have most inspired our research on sign, language, and communication, influencing its development in the direction of “semioethics” in a global semiotic framework. Fundamental concepts addressed here include metaphor, abduction, iconicity, homology, as that between linguistic and nonlinguistic work, otherness, singularity and responsibility, eventness and participative understanding.

This article investigates the design structure of ancient Decorative Chinese Calligraphy, an art form that is steeped in traditional Chinese philosophy, and explores the relationship between calligraphic form and its denotation. Three design characteristics are distinguished: “circle heaven and square earth”, “being symmetrical or balanced”, and “in harmony with myriad things”. Examples of Decorative Chinese Calligraphy are analyzed from the epistemological, semiotic, aesthetic, and cultural perspective of ancient Chinese culture.

In 1973, a collectively written manifesto titled Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures was penned under the leadership of Tartu scholar Juri Lotman together with his Moscow colleagues Vjacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Aleksandr Pjatigorskij, and Boris Uspenskij. The appearance of this work marked the birth of a new scholarly field of research called the semiotics of culture. In the present contribution we provide a bibliographic list of republications and translations of this seminal text.

The article describes the role of the Tartu semiotics school in the formation of the new academic field called semiotics of culture, particularly in the context of writing the Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures in 1973. Special attention is paid to the typology of languages of culture, and to the concept of culture as an object for semiotics.

In addressing the semiotics of utopia and the utopian, we target the semiotic techniques and principles applied in More’s seminal text Utopia (1516) that established the universal logic for utopian discourse, and raise the question of the legitimacy of describing certain cultural production as utopian. Utopian discourse is often tied with an urban context. We question this association. The semiotic interpause is hard to achieve in the context of the physical environment. Yet this is where the utopia, the city, the society, and the utopian come together. Thus it is useful to review the notion of utopia in connection with the quite practical development of the (urban) sociocultural life in which the status of objects in communicative situations is continually redefined.

This essay traces the reception of Tartu semiotics in the Chinesespeaking world, including Mainland China and Taiwan. Our preliminary survey covers materials of three main categories: (1) research projects, (2) postgraduate degree theses, and (3) publications in Chinese and other languages. A number of common features in cross-cultural reception are identified, such as the temporal gap in theory travelling, the role of a third language mediating source and target languages, the phenomenon of negative influence, and the political interference with the introduction and reception of foreign cultural products. Because of its predominant interest in the dynamics of culture as sign system and inter-systemic dialogue, Tartu Semiotics is becoming increasingly attractive to the growing Chinese semiotic community.