Volume 2006, Issue 158

This article traces the comparative fortunes of the terms ‘semiology’ and ‘semiotics,’ with the associated expressions ‘science of signs’ and ‘doctrine of signs,’ from their original appearance in English dictionaries in the 1800s through their adoption in the 1900s as focal points in discussions of signs that flourished after pioneering writings by Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. The greater popularity of ‘semiology’ by mid-century was compromised by Thomas Sebeok's seminal proposal of signs at work among all animals, and Umberto Eco's work marked a ‘tipping point’ where the understanding associated with ‘semiotics’ came to prevail over the glottocentrism associated with ‘semiology.’

The phenomenon of play is evaluated as key theme in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, where self-referential paradox is used as a passage way into play, game, and ritual. Hermes as hybrid, semi-divine God, embodies the metamessage ‘this is play,’ incessantly capitalizing on the chaotic ambiguity and generative power of play and paradox. Designing a sequence of paradoxes, Hermes moves processually along paradoxical contiunua to create a ‘play reality,’ trapping his opponents in a world of illusion, ‘magic,’ and movement and utlilizing the trajectory of his new creations to propel himself along the larger continuum of his own essential hybridity.

This study looks at whether untrained observers are able to ‘read’ children's gestures, particularly those that do not match the child's speech. It also explores the frequent claim that gesture-speech mismatches can signal when a child is on the verge of learning a new concept. The diagnostic value of gestures is investigated by asking whether untrained adults are able to recognize this. Forty-two adult participants viewed twelve video clips of children's spontaneous explanations of a balance task. Each child produced only one type of spoken explanation, from four possible ones. However, half of the children conveyed a dierent explanation in their hand gestures. Participants assessed the children who produced gesture-speech mismatches as having more understanding of the concept than ‘matching’ children. Furthermore, they were more likely to assess these children as being on the verge of learning. Thus they were able to glean important information about the child's knowledge state from the children's gestures that was not indicated in speech alone.

Résumé Dans le cadre théorique de la grammaire applicative et cognitive, nous appliquons une méthode de linguistique textuelle, à des textes bibliques. Après avoir examiné certains commentaires d'un texte, il s'agit de s'interroger sur l'intérêt d'une méthode de linguistique textuelle pour ce texte ; nous expliquons l'application de cette méthode à un objet-texte multiple, délimité par rapport à l'intertextualité ; objet qu'elle commence par construire pour garantir l'objectivité des résultats obtenus, en vue de ‘faire parler le texte par lui-même.’ Puis, la méthode propose d'étudier la narration, l'espace-temps, l'énonciation et les dialogues du texte. Nous proposons enfin de rechercher des structures de la signification avec les prédicats du texte et leur suite ordonnée, parfois récurrentes dans le texte et organisatrices de sa signification. Ce dernier point de'gage des structures profondes et organisatrices du texte, au niveau génotype — un génome du texte.

In art connotations spread denotative structures. Correspondingly, the role of connotations in visual artworks should be as important as it is in systems of verbal information. Hence, developed connotative structures are found in visual artwork. Connotations of visual artworks are based on fundamental codes and develop their basic text. Representamens of denotations and connotations are interrelated and organized in system-structural formations of signals. Text of a visual artwork directs the actualization of connotations on the basis of its principal meanings and communicative structure. Connotations form semantic fields corresponding to basic meanings and text of artworks. These connotations, hidden from direct perception, are discussed with respect to the works of Vrubel.

The correspondence between the triadic sign model proposed by Peirce and the dyadic sign model proposed by Saussure is examined. Traditionally, it has been thought that Peirce's interpretant corresponds to Saussure's signified and Saussure's model lacks Peirce's object. However, our analysis of the two most widely used computer programming paradigms suggests that Peirce's object formally corresponds to Saussure's signified, and that Saussure's sign model is obtained when Peirce's interpretant is located outside of his model in the language system.

Genes and proteins are molecular artifacts because they are manufactured by molecular machines that physically stick their subunits together in the order provided by external templates. This implies that all biological objects are artifacts, and therefore that ‘life is artifact-making.’ Natural objects can be completely accounted for by physical quantities, whereas artifacts require additional entities like sequences and codes, or equivalent entities like information and meaning. Here it is shown that organic information and organic meaning are brought into existence by the molecular processes of copying and coding, which implies that, far from being metaphors, they are as real as the processes that produce them. It is also shown that they can be defined by operative procedures that make them as objective and reproducible as physical quantities. The result is that organic information and organic meaning are a new type of fundamental natural entities that here are referred to as nominable entities because they can be specified only by naming their components in their natural order. Any organic code is a correspondence between the objects of two independent worlds (genes and proteins) which is established by molecules that belong to a third world (RNAs). The elementary act of organic coding is therefore a relationship between three objects that can be referred to as ‘sign, meaning, and adaptor,’ whereas the elementary act of cultural semiosis consists, according to Peirce, of ‘sign, meaning, and interpretant.’ It is underlined that ‘organic semiosis’ is implemented by codemakers and consists of objective organic reactions, whereas ‘mental semiosis’ is performed by interpreters and is a subjective process. This means that organic semiosis does not require the existence of a mind at the molecular level, and the organic codes are natural processes that are based on objective, reproducible, and fundamental natural entities.

The present paper discusses various suggestions for a philosophical framework for a transdisciplinary information science or a semiotic doctrine. These are: the mechanical materialistic, the pan-informational, the Luhmanian second order cybernetic approach, Peircian biosemiotics and finally, the pan-semiotic approach. The limitations of each are analyzed. The conclusion is that we will not have to choose between a cybernetic-informational and a semiotic approach. A combination of a Peircian-based biosemiotics with autopoiesis theory, second order cybernetics, and information science is suggested in a five-levelled cybersemiotic framework. The five levels are 1) a level of Firstness, 2) a level of mechanical matter, energy, and force as Secondness, 3) a cybernetic and thermodynamic level of information, 4) a level of sign games and 5) a level of conscious language games. These levels are then used to differentiate levels of information systems, sign and language games in human communication. In our model, Maturana and Varela's description of the logic of the living as autopoietic is accepted and expanded with Luhmann's generalization of the concept of autopoiesis to also cover psychological and socio-communicative systems. Adding a Peircian concept of semiosis to Luhmann's theory in the framework of biosemiotics enables us to view the interplay of mind and body as a sign play. I have in a previous publication (see list of references) suggested the term ‘sign play’ pertaining to exosemiotics processes between animals in the same species by stretching Wittgenstein's language game concept into the animal world of signs. A new concept of intrasemiotics designates the semiosis of the interpenetration between the biological and psychological autopoietic systems as Luhmann defines them in his theory. I am suggesting a cybersemiotic model to combine these approaches, defining various concepts like thought-semiotics, phenosemiotic and intrasemiotics, combining them with the already known concepts of exosemiotics, ecosemiotics, and endosemiotics into a new view of self-organizing semiotic processes in living systems. Thus a new semiotic level of description is generated, where mind-body interactions can be understood on the same description level. This is the direction suggested to work in to create a broad philosophy of information, cognitive, and communication science that makes it possible for us to see the different approaches not as mutually exclusive, but rather as mutually complementary in accepting an ontology where reality do have structures and processes, but the foundation is hyper-complex and therefore not to be reduced by any knowledge system.

This is a phenomenological study of the mental processes involved in the reading of Roentgen images. Its conceptual basis is in Roentgen semiotics, an adaptation of Peircean semiotics that incorporates the linguistic concept of markedness. It is shown that the notions of ‘abnormality’ and ‘change’ in Roentgen diagnosis are represented by signs of ‘difference.’ Differential signs for the detection, localization or identification of ‘abnormality’ or ‘change’ are constructed by means of Roentgen semiotic grammar.

Mythic algebra was developed in a trio of papers in the Journal of Literary Semantics . It models mythology and storytelling with algebraic sets. Expanded into a proto-mathematical system, it provides a hierarchical range of functions which can also apply to language and symbolic processes. Its relation to the three basic ‘laws of thought’ of classical logic is analyzed. Correspondences are also found with the Peircean division of a sign into icon, index, and symbol. Further applications are made to metaphor and irony.

In this interview, Peter Ladefoged, the world's leading phonetician and UCLA Professor Emeritus, speaks candidly about his long and distinguished career as professor, former President of the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and the Linguistic Society of America, former chair of his department (Linguistics), and currently one of the editors of the ‘Journal of the International Phonetic Association’ (JIPA). Among the topics treated are: the history and development of phonetics and linguistics in the USA and in Europe; the founding and growth of the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory; and the place of phonetics within linguistics, and more broadly, within humanistic and social scientific disciplines.

In this interview, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, the world's leading authority on grammaticalization and the history of English syntax and Stanford University Professor Emerita, speaks candidly about her long and distinguished career as professor, former President of the Linguistic Society of America, former President of the International Society for Historical Linguistics, and Stanford University administrator (Vice Provost). Among the topics covered are: her influence over the past 40 years in (1) linguistics in general and (2) in English linguistics and philology in particular, and her evaluation of the writings of Leonard Bloomfield, Zellig Harris, Dwight Bolinger, and Edward Sapir for the contemporary linguistic scene.

In order to support the goal of comprehensive detection of life with appropriate conceptual tools we should have a clear definition of life. However, it is known that the definition of life is far from satisfactory and it is doubtful whether a definition of life is possible or needed. In this paper, I suggest that it is possible to approach life from a biosemiotic perspective as a meaning-making process, i.e., a process that yields the system's specific response to an indeterminate signal.

The objective of this article is to analyze and interpret a series of semiotic-discursive interventions that have occurred in the seat of the Chilean government, the Palace of La Moneda. Underlying these observations is the conviction that the Palace of La Moneda is not only an architectural construction but also a material object that must be read as a sign; that is, a representation of aliquid pro aliquod. This analytic observation will be centred on the years of President Ricardo Lagos' government (2000–2005), because it is the period in which a series of semiotic actions can clearly be identified; these actions have impacted La Moneda and, underlying this impact, a strategy of sense production can be found. These actions are considered legible, the bulk of which makes up a syntax that results in a global sense or semiosis, whose objective is to change what the representation of this Palace means to Chile from the 1973 coup d'état on. According to the above, there are semio-discursive operations of sense investiture (Verón 1984) that the above mentioned government carries out in its political practice and that are in direct relation to the tragic history of September 11, 1973. The theoretical body of psychoanalysis has been used to hold that after the coup d'etat the governmental palace represents a trauma understood as a wound in the memory. Changing the value of that sign by means of semiotic operations accounts for both the importance of semiosis in the political practice and the motivated character of the signs.

The present article advocates a multiculturalist approach to theoretical rearticulation of language and communication. It does so by arguing why this approach is needed and showing how it can be achieved. The first part of the essay takes up aculturalist tendencies in the case of discourse studies and examines their theoretical and political consequences. The second part proposes a multicultural-epistemological stance, i.e., a reflexive and critical position of meaning making in between Eastern and Western, North and South, and local and global regimes of knowledge/power. Finally, the article explicates how the multiculturalist theorist can construct a historically conscious and local-global-minded theory of culture-specific discourse.

The significance-effect is the right effect of meaning caused upon an interpreting mind. The right effect is understood as the right interpretation of an intended meaning caused by a sign communicated by an utterer. In the article, which is inspired by Charles S. Peirce's doctrine of signs, his semeiotics and his theory of communication, we account for the formal conditions that have to be present for the release of the significance-effect.

Twenty English-speaking listeners judged the emotive intent of utterances spoken by male and female speakers of English, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Tagalog. The verbal content of utterances was neutral but prosodic elements conveyed each of four emotions: joy, anger, sadness, and fear. Identification accuracy was above chance performance levels for all emotions in all languages. Across languages, sadness and anger were more accurately recognized than joy and fear. Listeners showed an in-group advantage for decoding emotional prosody, with highest recognition rates for English utterances and lowest recognition rates for Japanese and Chinese utterances. Acoustic properties of stimuli were correlated with the intended emotion expressed. Our results support the view that emotional prosody is decoded by a combination of universal and culture-specific cues.

Within the last decade, thousands of studies have described communication processes in and between organisms. Pragmatic philosophy of biology views communication processes as rule-governed sign-mediated interactions (rsi's). As sign-using individuals exhibit a relationship to following or not-following these rules, the rsi's of living individuals dier fundamentally from cause-and-effect reactions with and between non-living matter, which exclusively underlie natural laws. Umwelt thus becomes a term in investigating physiological influences on organisms that are not components of rsi's. Mitwelt is a term for the investigation of all rsi's of organisms. Living organisms are never solus ipse subjects of semioses, but share common sets of rules and signs. Life depends decisively on symbiotic communities. Serial Endosymbiotic Theory proved that the evolution of the eukaryotic super-kingdom was a merger of anchestral bacteria. The integration of bacterial genomes into eukaryotic genomes was also a step from analog to symbolic genetic codes. Now we know, that so-called ‘junk DNA’ has higher order regulatory functions on genome architecture and protein coding DNA plays only the role of a structural vocabulary.

The aim of this paper is to clarify the concepts of knowledge to develop a better theoretical understanding based on one of the eldest semiotic insights from one unfortunately often forgotten philosopher of modern semiotic: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). In his ‘Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate, et Ideis’ (1684), he develops a systematical, dichotomous characterization of the different levels of knowledge acquisitions. According to his view, knowledge is essentially symbolic: it takes place in a system of representations which possesses language-like structures and which can be characterized on specific hierarchic levels from ‘dark knowledge’ (‘notio obscura’) up to ‘distinct knowledge’ (‘notio distincta’) to be distinguished by the criteria of recognizing and communicating the single elements (‘notarum notae’) constructing knowledge as a continuum. From a semiotic point of view, the paper shows that the awareness of the hierarchy of knowledge intensity can supply a framework for conceptual analysis and modeling of knowledge creation processes. As a result, we actually should focus, not only in knowledge management, on the communication processes when creating knowledge. Leibniz shows the fundamental problem of decomposing knowledge in externalization processes, which is only possible by the use of symbols, needing clear explanations through symbols again. Therefore, organization should be concerned with the creation of shared representations and meaning systems with respect to different levels of explicitly as Leibniz showed us.