Volume 2007, Issue 166

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Within five days, forty-one countries began deploying troops to Saudia Arabia in a buildup of mass manpower and weaponry. On the morning of January 16, 1991, Coalition troops began intensive air strikes. On February 24, 1991, the ground war began. It lasted a mere one hundred hours. There were 148 combat deaths among Coalition troops. Troops were home by June. It had been by all accounts the ‘perfect war.’ A few months later, Coalition troops began to complain of strange symptoms. Within a year of the soldiers return, the press had created a disease which as yet had no ‘biomarkers’ and an unbounded set of symptoms. They called it Gulf War Syndrome. I write here about a process whereby a new ‘disease’ was created and two competing etiologies battled for primacy for the right to explain the nature and cause of this mystery ‘illness.’ This is about differing methods of seeing inside the body and the ways in which knowledge about disorder is produced.

In 1999, the first episode of The Matrix movie trilogy was released, marking the beginning of a new trend in science fiction movies and also in the perception of motion pictures as interactive social and commercial events. This paper will analyze an aspect of The Matrix trilogy promotional campaign (1999–2003) focusing on the interplay between verbal and visual semiotics through a select corpus of posters. The method of analysis will be based both on the grammar of visual design developed by Kress and van Leeuwen, and on the Hallidayan model of analysis. The Matrix movies are set in a present (not future) ‘real’ world that is actually a ‘fiction of science,’ rather than a science fiction vision of a future reality. They are based on the idea of a very fuzzy border between real and virtual reality, which has become a major issue in these last fifteen years due to the advent of the internet and the fast growing number of internet users all over the world. This analysis will show how posters encode different kinds of promotional messages according to the social impact of each movie.

Neither reality nor language is genuinely objective; rather, both the interpretation of reality and the use of language to create and manipulate reality represent a subjective understanding of both. This paper examines the role of language in creating, representing, and manipulating realities, using the 2003 German movie Good Bye, Lenin! as a vivid and striking illustration of the role of language in constructing alternate realities. When the protagonist's mother, a committed East German socialist, awakes from the coma she entered after a heart attack on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the doctors warn her son that any shock could kill her. In order to prevent his mother from learning of the demise of her beloved socialist Germany, Alex manipulates the reality of post-wall East Berlin to match his mother's (perceived) reality of an earlier socialist East Berlin. In so doing, Alex makes the viewer question what reality is and how reality can be constructed and manufactured. There is no absolute objective reality, but only realities based upon the beliefs and preconceptions of participants, which may be and often are, manipulated by the use of language in the presentation of ‘facts.’

This study explores how continuity is essential to the processes of social discourse and specifically focuses on its application as a communication strategy used by writers for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on the Comedy Central television network. The concept of continuity is central to making individual experiences meaningful through social discourse. Broadcast journalists contribute to social discourse by using words, sounds, and images to represent stories about events that happened to other people, at other times, and in other places. As young people watch late night comedy shows such as The Daily Show for information about news and politics, they must recognize the meanings of signs that refer to past events and people from remote locations. This essay demonstrates how The Daily Show writers effectively inform an audience that lacks historical perspective about public affairs and politics and is primarily interested in being entertained.

La photo du supermarché américain d'Andreas Gursky (99 cent) s'inscrit avant tout dans la lignée des photographes allemands. Pour l'approcher, le plaisir bien sur du regard toujours recommencé … Mais aussi une approche d'abord par une grille sémiotique stricte, puis par une vive réaction personnelle à la manière d'une présence humaine, mouvante, fluctuante, mettant surtout l'accent sur la polyphonie des couleurs. Quelle approche vient le mieux couvrir de significations cette photographie ? La scene du supermarché se charge d'un sens nouveau.

The systemity of visual artworks can be described by the interrelation of several semiotic models as: (a) interrelations between verbal and nonverbal systemities; (b) interrelations of the three semiotic aspects, both internal ones and those with the three semiotic aspects of artwork verbal basis; (c) signs formed by codes, systems of linguistic type, text, and context; (d) sign form including denotations, connotations, and organizing structures, and finally, (e) sign system of individual elements and details. The Holy Trinity painted by Rublev illustrates developed interrelations of these models.

Between 1993 and 2004, I gathered about 340 pictures by apes and fifty-seven by human children to conduct a study of the similarities and differences between the non-representational output of chimpanzees, gorillas, orang utans, and human children. Excluding the one bonobo picture, I analyzed 396 works in terms of number of colors, first and last color preferences, use of novel colors, respect for boundaries, negative space, placement, and pattern. Where possible, I compared outputs by gender as well as by species. My most significant discoveries were the almost universal preferences for yellow as a first color (although blue occurred in more pictures), the high use of diagonal lines by all species, the preference for novel brown of all constructed colors, and the preference for centered patterns. The features that distinguished species included numbers of colors chosen, level of respect for boundaries, frequency of negative spaces in pictures, and last color preferences. Males and females showed overall differences in last color preference (which ends up being the final emphasis of the piece), males focused on the use of four colors, and showed less respect for boundaries. Females used a wider range of colors, a central placement, and nearly half the time, stayed inside the confines of the page. These differences strongly support the hypothesis that there are considered choices occurring in the production of these pictures which can reveal some idea of how various species see and respond to stimuli. These are definitely not random scribbles, and are worth investigation for their metacommunicative content.

Résumé La description de l'ellipse du régime des prépositions avec et sans doit faire intervenir des paramètres techniques d'ordre syntaxique et sémantique, mais si l'on veut évaluer comment se dégage le parcours interprétatif de l'énoncé qui contient cette procédure d'anaphorisation par zéro, la signification qu'il communique ou l'argumentation qui s'en émancipe, bref si l'on se concentre sur l'ellipse en tant que signe, on entre sur le terrain de la sémiotique. Ainsi, par exemple, seule une étude qui fait intervenir ces ‘autres’ paramètres pourra rendre compte de l'ellipse de régimes humains qui ont une charge individuante forte (noms propres, SN non collectifs, etc.), emplois que la grammaire étiquette trop hâtivement comme ‘vulgaires,’ dans une version tolérante, ‘inacceptables’ dans une version plus restrictive. Pour ce qui est des régimes non animés, là aussi l'on constate que la suppression même d'un régime constitue une sorte de message et peut s'avérer très avantageuse pour déplacer le centre de l'attention depuis ce régime vers ce que la préposition même dénote ou vers la somme combinée [recteur + préposition], ce qui engendre une multiplication de significations, situation que la version canonique n'aurait pas pu autoriser.

In this interview, Paul Newman, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, the world's leading Chadicist and Hausaist, and one of the world's leading linguists specializing in African and Afroasiatic languages and field linguistics, speaks candidly about his long and distinguished career on three continents as linguist, Africanist, and attorney-at-law. Among the topics covered are: (1) his influence in African, Afroasiatic, and general linguistics; (2) his evaluation of the Chomskyan paradigm; (3) his long association with the late Joseph H. Greenberg of Stanford University; (4) his evaluation of the writings of Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and Franz Boas; (5) his perceptions of his colleague of many years at Indiana University, the late Thomas A. Sebeok; (6) his views on academic writing and scholarly editing; and (7) his recent formal entrance into the legal field, having graduated with a J.D. degree summa cum laude from Indiana University School of Law in 2003.

This overview of Michael Riffaterre's work in poetics aims to trace the development of the key concepts of Semiotics of Poetry , from his initial ‘stylistics’ phase, moving through the subsequent New Criticism and Piagetian structuralist phases. There is an account of the debate with Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss over a valid method for interpreting a Baudelaire sonnet, in the course of which several elements of the mature theory are developed. These are treated in detail in the following section on Semiotics of Poetry , and demonstrated in the analysis of a Gautier poem. The concept of the ‘matrix’ is seen to require modification, as it is sugggested that a single matrix cannot account for the complexity of the underlying propositional structure of the text. After touching on Riffaterre's work on narrative, the author's work on the perception-changing effect of the modernist text is briefly discussed.

Résumé Dans cet article, nous proposons une approche de linguistique textuelle du livre de Jonas, dans le cadre théorique de la grammaire applicative et cognitive développée au laboratoire LaLICC. Faisant suite à une méthode pour l'analyse de textes présentée dans un article précédent, à l'analyse spatiale et des dialogues notamment présentée par Jean-Pierre Desclés, notre approche prend en compte les macrostructures. La structure dialogique, la cartographie spatiale du texte, la structure énonciative et prédicative du texte constituent autant de données extraites du texte, capables de le décrire non pas au niveau phénotype seulement mais également génotype. C'est pourquoi, ces données, notamment les prédicats peuvent maintenant faire l'objet d'une analyse plus détaillée, en vue d'une représentation au niveau du génotype. Dans cette perspective, nous proposons l'hypothese du génotexte et les résultats obtenus sur le texte de Jonas, lors de la recherche de chaînes prédicatives ordonnées et significatives, porteuses d'organisations de la signification dans le texte.

Three basic semiotic modes are presented that show an increasing number of referential relations: passive semiosis (monadic semiotic mode), active production of a sign referring to a state of the utterer (dyadic semiotic mode), and active reference to an external event or object for a partner (triadic semiotic mode). Symbolic systems arise when the third semiotic mode is combined with a combinatorial principle typical of information processing. Symbols are not directly representational, since they do not show the associative relation typical of the first two semiotic modes. The brain is not able, with its intrinsic resources, to give rise to a symbolic system, but needs external, physical units (phonemes, gestures, and so on) to be combined to form communicative structures as sentences and discourses. These units are both discrete and codified. Nonhuman primates' inability to possess a true language is due, at least in part, to their failure to discover the principle of combination. Symbolic systems may have arisen phylogenetically in close connection with cooperation for tool making.

This paper presents the notion that a metaphor is one of the discursive tools whereby people position themselves with regard to a change process. Based on Sebeok and Danesi's theory, I analyze two ‘root’ metaphors (articulated by an interviewee) to illustrate the assumption of positions and counter-positions and the way metaphors mediate this positioning. The paper suggests that in the specific context of organizational change, positioning plays the social role of denoting for people (who are considered members of this new social experience) the expected modes of behavior.

We discuss how Hjelmslev's denotation, connotation, and metasign could correspond to Peirce's icon, index, and symbol. Our argument is based on the application of both theories to the programming language problem of confusion as to whether a sign signifies a value, reference, or type.

The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between experiences with drugs and musical/visual experiences using a socio-semiotic theoretical framework. In recent collective research still underway, this topic is already being explored in many directions: first, by showing how sensorial alterations caused by drugs are ‘translated’ into different texts of pop culture, such as songs, video clips, movies, etc.; second, by reconstructing the themes and motivations of many subcultures (hippie, psychedelic, punk) that originated on the basis of an alteration of the senses achieved through the simultaneous use of music and drugs; finally, by proposing some formal similarities — and possible shifts — between music and drug experiences. In particular, I propose a comparative analysis of four texts that describe different processes of alteration by referring to different drugs: synthetics in A Clockwork Orange by Burgess and Kubrick; hashish in Uccelli da gabbia e da voliera by De Carlo; cocaine in Bright Lights, Big City by Mc-Inerney; and alcohol in Tratado sobre la resaca by Bas. What matters in this comparison is that although they talk about different substances, all of these texts end up proposing, each one in a different way, types of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations between substances that transcend the substantialistic and traditionalistic distinction between these drugs.

This article attempts to clarify Derrida's notion of écriture and to show, through a close reading of three lectures on literary figures (Valéry, Ponge, Joyce), how he puts theory into practice. Saussure thought that linguistics would be a branch of semiology, a general theory of signs and signification. His conventional logocentric privileging of speaking over writing was the initial step on the road that made phonology the dominant discipline within the science. Linguists and philosophers have trivialized, ignored, and repressed the other epistemological path, that of grammatology . Derrida's field of analytical inquiry (the signing of signs or ‘signs’ as both noun and verb), includes semiology in an even more general theory of signifying practices (oral communication, mathematics, painting, philosophy, history, literature, etc), since writing and the written are the conditions of their very existence. They all depend on inscription because cultural transmission requires repeatability, duplication, reproducibility, etc. Yet without writing spoken language could not be described and linguistics would not exist. Neither would ‘culture’ in general.

The emergence and cultivation of a programmatic research interest in what has been traditionally marginalized in Western intellectual practices (a marginalization based on race, gender, religion, class and socio-economic standing and so on) finds a textual correlative in paratextual theory. Simply put, paratextual investigation is concerned with the multitude of elements that surround the purportedly ontologically superior ‘main text.’ To be sure, one could draw an analogy between the notion of the ‘human’ placed at the center of the universe, as Pico della Mirandola tells us in the Oration on the Dignity of Man , and the traditional import given to the main text from which the pertinent signifying matters are to emerge. Paratextual research, as Gerard Genette conceives of it in works such as Palimpsests and Paratexts , contributes to the deconstruction of the hierarchy that privileges the body of the text over its prosthetic components. In essence, paratextual research deals with the pragmatics of transmission, in that in the category of the paratext we find elements such as the title, the subtitle, the preface, the book cover, the dedication, the table of contents, reproduced figures, images, engravings, along with foot- and endnotes, indices, and so on.

Henri Lefebvre discusses the problem of a spatial code for reading, interpreting, and producing the space we live in. He is not content with the linguistic approach where the notion of meaning is defined in terms of language. The semiotic theory of Charles Peirce provides the required elements for this kind of spatial code. Meaning is defined as a habit of action, and this notion of meaning can be applied not only to linguistic expressions but also to things like hats, tables, buildings, and squares. In other words, meaning is defined as use — use of objects and instruments, our own organic body included. This wider notion of meaning provides the required semiotics of space.

1. Introduction Gesture, a quintessential component of semiotic research, is the subject of the most recent book by David McNeill, Professor emeritus of linguistics and psychology at the University of Chicago. McNeill has distinguished himself in gestural research throughout his illustrious academic career. His basic scientific inquiry into this area has provided us with significant insights (McNeill 1992, 2000).