Volume 2008, Issue 172

Résumé Le schéma narratif de Greimas résulte de l'analyse systématique des catégories d'actions que Propp a définies en complément de ses catégories de personnages. Or, la portée extrêmement générale de ce schéma invite à le considérer comme une véritable théorie de l'action. Wiener, créateur de la cybernétique, nous permet de mieux comprendre celle-ci. Par ailleurs, à partir d'une étude de la théorie des groupes en mathématiques et des oppositions logiques de Blanché, il nous est apparu possible d'améliorer la structure élémentaire de la signification et, ce faisant, d'améliorer le modèle actantiel de Greimas.

The American polymath C. S. Peirce had no theory of metaphor and he provided only a few remarks concerning the trope. Yet, some of these remarks seem to suggest that Peirce saw the metaphor as fundamental to consciousness and thought. In this article we will try to sketch a possible connection between consciousness and metaphor; a relation where the last mentioned is endowed with a special function within the first mentioned as a cognitive mechanism. We will use Peirce's concept of abduction as a bridge between metaphor and consciousness, since, according to Peirce, abduction is the only semeiotic mechanism that can convey new insights.

Turkey has been witnessing purification activities in the field of medical terminology for a long period of time. However, the purified terms have not replaced the original ones possibly because of the lack of interest on the part of those who are engaged with purism. This is why Turkish cannot be used by the Turkish people as a language of science. Since there is a strong relationship between language and thought, an individual can think and act creatively through his/her mother tongue. Therefore, the present study concentrates on the concept of language, the close link between language and thought, the concept of native language, and the concept of terminology. In so doing, this study aims to argue for the significance of using mother tongue as the language of science. Within this scope, the study further focuses on some examples of purification such as the purification of the medical terminology.

Equivalence has been a critical issue in translation, as well as in legal translation. Based on a literature review of the concept of equivalence and analysis of the features of legal discourses, the article adopts a semiotic approach to the translation of legal terms. By adapting some principal propositions in semiotics, the paper argues that total equivalence can be achieved via meta-lingual adjustment, because a sign is not born with meaning but invested with reference by a sign user. The paper also provides some linguistic strategies for realizing terminological equivalence in legal translation, such as the use of a semantic reference scheme, componential analysis, and the principle of productivity and economy.

This article examines environmental communication from within an enquiry perspective. It is argued that dissent is a vital part of any enquiry into environmental issues. Aspects of Charles S. Peirce's semiotic logic are introduced and discussed with reference to environmental communication and dissent. Environmental problems are shown to be at root disconnections between the sign use of humans and the sign use of an environment. Such disconnections arise when dissenting voices from an environment are ignored, misinterpreted, or suppressed. It is concluded that a semiotic approach to environmental communication offers a valuable insight into how dissent functions to resolve environmental disconnections.

Images provide an exceptional medium for drawing out nuances and contradictions that might not become evident in textual or oral discourse. This study examined premeditated images of teachers that were created by preservice teachers in a foundational teacher education course. Social semiotic analyses of these images as well as discourse analyses of accompanying textual descriptions resulted in readings of preservice teachers' conceptions of teachers and the teaching profession. While the constructed teacher images ranged across a continuum of intent from active, positively-oriented renderings to active, negatively-oriented renderings, a significant number of preservice teachers created a teacher representation that appeared stereotypical and superficial, and whose orientation, information value, and other modality cues presented a static, neutral, and somewhat middling individual. Because preservice teachers' conceptions of teachers and the teaching profession play a critical role in understanding and shaping educational culture, it remains important to examine their ongoing evolution within a postmodern world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein inverted and transposed Richard Wagner's operatic pathos. He knew Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersinger of Nuremberg) by heart and used to whistle the melodies. Die Meistersinger is no comic historical opera, as proclaimed by Wagner, but treats the issues of genius, artistic criticism, and the growth of art — with a flavor of nationalism and politics. Wagner's opera provides many triangles within Peirce's interactive categories — patriotism, nationalism, anti-semitism; Mythology, Volk, Kultur; irrationality, factuality, rationality; emotionality, reality, objectivity; abduction, induction, deduction; extratext, intertext, metatext — and the three points of Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds may be related in and outside the configuration of Die Meistersinger . To analyze the affinities between the philosopher and his musical talents, Wittgenstein brought out the intersemiotic translation between a meaningful sentence and a musical theme, performed side by side in opera. Wittgenstein was Wagner inside out. Wittgenstein's philosophical language is an emblem of master-song reason, but did he resound the Mastersinger's operatic sound in his philosophical-narrative work, or only in his carnivalesque travesty of Wittgenstein's whistling — a wordless game transformed into a musical art?

We often consider semantic-pragmatic properties of language independently of each other. In actual texts, however, the properties frequently interact. For this reason a robust theory should allow us to account not only for semantic-pragmatic properties in isolation, but also for the ways in which they are combined. This is especially important for the understanding of literary texts because the exploitation of semantic-pragmatic properties is characteristic of literary language. This article argues that it is possible to account systematically for the occurrence of metaphorical\literal poetic ambiguity in terms of the interaction of such properties. Using the notion of conceptual domains and subdomains, the article proposes two necessary conditions and shows how the interaction of these conditions allows for a simple account of metaphorical/literal ambiguity. The article concludes by suggesting that examining the ways in which basic semantic-pragmatic principles of language are used in literature to create poetic effects offers us another path in understanding the poetic, one which neither equates poetic effects with a distinct poetic language, as do many formalists, nor reduces the exploration of the poetic to the properties of everyday language, as cognitivists often have.

The article investigates emotions from a semeiotic perspective. The American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) defined the emotion as a legisign, which is a lawsign (cf. Savan 1981). Since the emotion is a general sign, it can be valorized; it can be identified, communicated, and reexperienced. Based on this semeiotic-inspired definition, we investigate community caused and created by emotions or rather the effects upon minds caused by emotions. We believe that any community carries an emotional center — a so-called Fundamental sign.

Before he gave the lectures that were to become the Course in General Linguistics , Ferdinand de Saussure undertook research into an ancient practice of inscribing anagrams into Old Latin poems. His primary concern in this research was the elusive question of ‘the origin.’ Commentators like Sylvère Lotringer and Jean Starobinski contend that, in seeking an authorial origin for the anagrams, Saussure was lured into a logocentric conception of language. However, a close examination of Saussure's theory of synchronic linguistics reveals that it is the language system itself that produces its own origin as a conceptual possibility. With reference the to theory of the ‘two Saussure's,’ this paper will argue that both the anagrams research, and the elaboration of synchronic linguistics in the Course, invite us to rethink the status of ‘the origin’ in Saussure's earlier work.

This study seeks to profit from theatre semiotics in order to investigate how semiosis can be implemented in the teaching of physics. It is based on the notion that in most human meaning-making situations, semiotic resources such as acoustic, spatial, and kinesic sign-systems evolve so as to complement and supplement one another. Traditionally, this particular view derives from theatre, where the signs conveyed from the theatrical performance effectively contribute to the construction of meaning; in terms of expression of dramatic signs, the actor is trained to compose modes in order to shape them on the stage. This article provides a classification of iconic gestural signs (i.e., movements of the entire body as opposed to gestures as mere movements of the hands), concerning physics teaching within a theatrical kinesic context. Through certain examples, corporeal functions and types are identified according to their cooperation with spatial semiotic resources, their temporal definition of actions, their proximity to the form of the referent, their relation to the content of the referent, and their collaboration with utterances. Furthermore, it is suggested that the practical implementation of theatre semiotics in physics education could help create a common, distinct and ‘tangible’ language among researchers, educators, and students.

In The Blood of Others and The Mandarins , Simone de Beauvoir encodes the experience of a resister in World War II. The objectivization of her particular vision is developed by the use of an idiosyncratic language through quotations and the coining of semiotic equivalents. She first defines her paradigms in The Blood of Others , where the theme of resistance against the Nazis is explicitly dramatized. In The Mandarins , she puts her semiotics to the test through phenomenological descriptions. Rich food along with the military authority to make the rules indicated by formal clothes point to abuse. Homologies are made with the abusive military authority and its substitutes, and the oppressed individual identified as the ‘other.’ Scenarios where the characters switch identities in resistance and rescue point to an underlying philosophy of the human being as a ‘being-for-other.’ Examples of transformations and substitutions are the characters Ruth, Yvonne, and Hélène in The Blood of Others , and Diego and ‘the first’ Lewis in The Mandarins . The compassion of Hélène for Ruth at her arrest by the Gestapo is a heroic response whereas in The Mandarins , Lewis's unexpected transformation from a husband into an enemy is the echo of the abandonments of World War II.

This article deals with the effects of some communicational restrictions, starting from a folk tale. Name, repetition, and programmed amnesia are three of the censorship conditions, and in the tale we refer to the dramatic end determined by the communication restrictions to which the three heroes are exposed. The nominal lexem is directly related to the story (Eco 1982) and, according to the meaning employed by Derrida (1997), ignorant repetition determines the entrance into the mythical space. Our article underlines the constitutive elements of the communication between the real author of the message and the addressee placed outside the writing.

In this article, I seek to study Whewell as writer of philosophical doctrines by focusing on his frequent usage of the metaphor of light, which symbolized (human) knowledge. It is my primary claim that Whewell choose to visually illustrate his doctrine of Fundamental Ideas, which are the bearers of ultimate reality and meaning in Whewell's epistemology, by means some key metaphors that made reference to light.

Against the background of two U.S. Supreme Court cases in 2005 on the question of the public display of the Ten Commandments in the context of the establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution, the article addresses the way the lawyers, especially the judges, discussed the status of the Ten Commandments as a text and as a symbol. The article relates to the legal arguments concerning such religious texts, and the ways in which decisions in favor of the public display of apparently religious symbols may be distinguished from decisions against their display. While many of the judges did not distinguish between text and symbol, those that did tackled these issues ‘semiotically’ — without using technical terminology.

Natural language as an example of a structural system is compared to programming language as a constructive system through analysis of how differently humans and computers process self-reference. An alternative handling of the halting problem in computer systems holds the key to a more natural computer environment and enables a greater understanding of human thought.

Our paper rejects Anders Søgaard's claim in Semiotica 169 (1/4) to the effect that our article ‘Waterproof fire stations? Conceptual schemata and cognitive operations involved in compound constructions’ in Semiotica 161 (1/4) goes astray in that it is ‘monoconstructional’ when it ought to be ‘multiconstructional.’ We demonstrate point by point that Søgaard's objections are wrong, not only as regards the argument, but also, as regards plain empirical assertions. In our paper we 1. redevelop our notion of ‘construction’; 2. refute Søgaard's objections, both formally and empirically.

The various assumptions on which linguistic elements, structures, or usages are subjective in which respect seem to agree in relating subjectivity to a speaking subject. In the communication process, this speaking subject is usually ascribed the agentive role, language is thought of as ready-made object, and the hearer remains a rather passive recipient. However, conceptions of subjectivity relying on these assumptions are circular (in referring to a speaking subject) and tautological (every choice of linguistic entities reflects a speaker's choice). This article argues for a sign-centred approach to communication as providing the basis for an adequate conception of linguistic subjectivity. Based on a dynamic and dialogical model of sign processes, linguistic signs are regarded not as ready-made objects waiting to be used, but as agents getting and keeping the sign process going. Linguistic signs are provided with an inherent subjectivity potential — their establishing differences between system(s) and environment(s) — which is realized through observation. Subjectivity is to be regarded not as some exceptional case within an objective linguistic code, but as inherent property of the sign system itself.

This article attempts to reformulate the relationship between two major interdisciplinary fields, semiotics and historiography, with both theoretically supporting each other within the interdisciplinary context of human sciences. On the one hand, semiotics is to enlarge its theoretical horizon in terms of historical theory and, on the other, historical theory will be reconstructed in terms of a semiotic approach. The two academic renovations can impact not only the theoretical structure of the humanities but also the way of social-political praxis of mankind. Besides, the author raises a new semiotic classification of historiography as a discipline that is not based on epochal periods but on the modes of producing historical texts. As a result, traditional ancient history is better reduced to a new intellectual history that, instead of historical facts, focuses on modes of historical faiths and their evolutionary trends. Either historical facts or historical faiths should be investigated in a rational and positive way. A practical result derived from this theoretical elaboration is a new positive view towards the true origin of historical faiths.

Using university mission statements from the 2006 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System from the U.S. Department of Education, the study generated network models of shared lexical patterns across institutional type. From the viewpoint of discursive institutionalism, this evidence, coupled with structural discourse patterns, suggested that university mission statements can operate as cultural-cognitive indicators, or ideational indicators of group solidarity, shared beliefs, and human agreement (Campbell and Pederson 2001; Meyer and Rowan 2006; Scott and Davis 2007). The implications for practice are to recognize patterns of taken-for-granted behaviors, then to ask ourselves if these static cultural-cognitive patterns serve to promote higher education ideology or work against discourse that promotes organizational change and evolution.

During lectures, a variety of signs are produced while the teacher communicates very specific conceptual meanings to students. In this article, we focus on particular signs constituted by both words and gestures that comprise a dialectical, indivisible unit, that corresponds to a double signifier, verbal and visual at the same time. From an illustrative case extracted from a database with twenty-six videotaped biology lessons, we analyze the repetition of gestures (i.e., catchments [McNeill 2002]) within and across lessons dealing with the same conceptual topic, and elaborate it as a special case of sign iteration (Derrida 1988). In each iteration of the sign, the unit of gesture and word produces and reproduces the meaning of the signified and of themselves as signifiers.

The formation of all sign systems is based on structures. Structures support the functioning of codes and organization of denotations, connotations, and groups of signs of visual art works. Due to codes, structure interrelations are manifested in characteristics, relations, differences-identities, and groups of elements, forming the structure of an art work. This role of structures was examined in the frames of theoretical ideas of antiquity and Renaissance. Its most complete application to the visual art is manifested in the ideas by Leonardo da Vinci. Developed structures organizing sign systems are illustrated by the analysis of Lady with an Ermine .