Volume 2014, Issue 200

In this study, we construct a general semiotic model representing the physiological and mental processes involved in visual perception. The model has the form of an ordered typology of perceptual processes, where the ordering is determined by the Peircean categories of thought. This method of semiotic modeling is then applied to the specific mental processes involved in the perception of camouflage and visual illusions. The typology of visual illusions includes a unified explanation for the perception of static visual illusions that is based on semiotic principles.

Peirce's ten trichotomies are presented as an elaboration of semeiosis, that is, a sign producing an interpretant. Sabre (2012) details how a sign can produce a metaphor, a hypothesis, or a decision. Here decision about metaphor results in art; decision about hypothesis results in science; and decision about decision, value.

This paper outlines a course for a new visual semiotics based on dynamic versions of semiotics (Thom, PetitotCocorda, Wildgen, Brandt). After considering the way in which visual semiotics functions in art history as a sort of privileged form of interpretation, I argue instead for a dynamic, naturalized project in which semiotic meaning emerges through a complex process of stratified semantic processes. After sketching the new approach, I consider the way it adjusts our understanding of the linguistic analogy, our understanding of code, arbitrariness, convention, the Peircean triad of icon, index, and symbol, and finally sketch the new topics that the dynamic outlook allows.

The origin of a system of thought today referred to as Semiotic(s) is typically traced to sixth century BCE Greek philosophy and medicine. It is argued here, however, that semiotics should not be seen as the exclusive product of western thought and that a parallel semiotics – a systematic exploration and organization of signs in a world constructed of signs – developed in early Chinese philosophy and medicine at approximately the same time or earlier. Both ancient traditions were scientific (though not in today's terms), rational, comprehensive, and based on a natural philosophy that saw the body and its functioning in entirely natural terms.

The issue of the conception of language in Beckett's works has given rise to many studies. The conceptual schemes that scholars have used to explicate Beckett's view on language range from modern language theories to post structuralist ones, and have contributed to locating Beckett on the twentieth century's cultural horizon. In this study I suggest a new perspective on Beckett's conception of language by employing a perspective on the historical genesis of possible-worlds semantics, suggested by the philosopher Jaakko Hintikka. The historical background of possible worlds semantics is tightly connected, according to Hintikka, to a gradual switch from one overall way of looking at language and its logic to a competing view. He calls the former the conception of “language as the universal medium” and the latter the conception of “language as calculus.” I contend that although in his writings Beckett seems to subscribe to some version of the first position of language, various aspects of his dramatic works also appear implicitly to reflect some intuitive version of the competing idea. It is his conception of language as calculus – I argue – that offered Beckett the possibility of elaborating strategies by which to escape the “trap” of language.

This study explores how those who control media create signs capable of equating the knowledge of experts with the beliefs and opinions of spokes persons who present an opposing point-of-view. Semiotic analyses of programming strategies that present opposing opinions from differing world-views demonstrate media practices and raise ethical questions about representations that facilitate social discourse affecting society's acceptance of new understandings derived from science. In addition several key concepts will be addressed that demonstrate how new work in neuroscience support Peirce's semiotic concepts including semiosis, the interpretant, and “law of mind.”

This paper addresses the issue of iconicity, which is largely neglected by Saussure for playing only a minor role in language. What it tries to show through ample examples is that iconicity exists at every level of language, but more importantly and contrary to popular belief, that the motivatedness of indices and icons does not in any way contradict the notion of the arbitrariness of the sign. This paper addresses the issue of iconicity, which is largely neglected by Saussure for playing only a minor role in language. What it tries to show through ample examples is that iconicity exists at every level of language, but more importantly and contrary to popular belief, that the motivatedness of indices and icons does not in any way contradict the notion of the arbitrariness of the sign.

Using the social semiotic theory developed out of the intersections of functional linguistics and studies of discourse and discursive practices, this paper analyzes how the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games constructs understandings of Chinese nationalism and globalization in its chronological and unifying narrative of the Chinese history and modernity. Focusing on interdiscursivity of semiosis and discourses circulating in the ceremony, the analysis demonstrates that the ceremony was engaged in a process of constant negotiations and reconciliations between history and modernity, between the local and the global, and between Chinese cultural values and universal Olympic ideals. These negotiations and recontextualizations presented a vision of Chinese history and nationhood that was intertwined with globalization, constructing globalization as both a historical condition in China as well as a global concern that was both rooted in and extended the immediate Chinese national context. This view of the nation and globalization can be explained with the social semiotic theory, whose emphasis on dialogism supports a generative understanding of the nation and globalization in the context of the Olympics. Teaming the study of the nation with the social semiotic theory allows us to establish invaluable contexts for knowledge of the nation that the social semiotic theory can help us extract from semiosis.

The paper aims to explore documentary evidence in legal discourse from a socio-semiotic perspective and argues there is reconstructive and deconstructive nature in legal narratives and the hegemony in legal narratives can be regarded as conventional. Based on case studies relevant to Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance in Hong Kong, the paper finds that spatial manipulation and voice manipulation were employed as strategies by court to create legal hegemony in narratives. Unraveling such strategies helps to deconstruct legal hegemony. The paper concludes that documentary evidence is characterized by the essential features of a sign, which can be subject to the influence of spatial and temporal manipulations, because such kind of evidence is subject to multiple interpretations.

Music notation is a page-based multisemiotic resource for making meaning. I situate the use of music notation within the broader context of what music performance students are required to do. I briefly describe the various ways in which music notation constructs meaning. I present and describe examples from student texts to demonstrate how music notation and linguistic text work together, drawing on Royce's (1998) framework to demonstrate how meaning relations contribute to the structure and meaning-making of the text. This study draws on research into music discourse through the case studies of Honors Jazz Performance student research projects.

Contemporary transnational migration has given rise to a new ideology and semiotics of the foreign body – one that draws on the cognitive field of the primitive, marked, and abjected body. This foreign body is carefully differentiated from both the sphere of the local/national, and the “expatriate” professional who by virtue of economic and cultural capital is desired and assimilated into the local sphere. An aspiring cosmopolitan and global city-state like Singapore shows this semiotic differentiation to quite a marked degree, in the policies and discourses of barely-tolerated and abjected foreign workers whose racially-marked bodies are highlighted by typologies of violence, disease, sexuality (particularly in aberrant or promiscuous form), and mob assemblies. The semiotics of the foreign body in Singapore is also evident in other racial-cultural fissures elsewhere, including in countries with multicultural reputations such as Australia, and countries like the U.S., U.K. and France that are struggling to cope with large migrant communities of Middle-Eastern and South Asian peoples.

A methodological framework is presented for the analysis of the discursive function of the science exhibit, which is treated as a multimodal “text” with conceptual, structural, and operational features encoding science knowledge. This analytical model is founded on Bernstein's theory of cultural codes (classification and framing) and socio-linguistics (formality). By using this framework, it is hoped that the museum researcher, the science museum practitioner, and the science communicator are empowered to retrieve the science exhibit “message,” to reconstruct the image of the represented science, and the socio-cultural positioning of the model visitor in the communicative context of the science museum.

In the past decade over twelve thousand books and seventy-eight thousand scholarly articles have been written about terrorism. Less than 0.005% of these mention semiotics and only a handful actively explore the usefulness of a semiotic framework. These in turn concentrate either on the role of law (Skoll 2007; Ward 2009) or the influence of media in determining interpretants (Jaysane-Darr 2010; Lewis 2005). This study takes a different approach: in assuming that the terrorist relies on the spectacle of terrorism, it investigates through a Peircean framework the self-representation of the terrorist in the spectacle.

The Licheń pilgrimage center, managed by the Marian order, is a phenomenon in Poland beyond classification and a subject of hot controversy. Media attention has indicated various issues that remain unclear behind the construction and management of the center (see, e.g., Kwiatkowska-England 2007; Dzienisiewicz 2002). Studies by ethnographers show how its legend is being made ad-hoc, often with the help of local artisans (e.g., Marciniak 1999). The opinions of artists show a unanimous abhorrence of the artistic aspects of the statues and paintings located there. Nevertheless, the center continues to grow, burgeoning at an unprecedented rate. It claims to attract (data from 2008) some 1.5 million of visitors a year. This paper offers a semiotic ethnography of Licheń's alternative microcosm. Having carried out an exploration of some of the ways in which boundary issues are manipulated in the precincts of the center, the author proposes that the creation of a surrogate reality there may be one of the factors for Lichen's success. Using ethnographic material gathered during fieldwork in 2010, the paper investigates divisions of the phenomenological space at the center. The divisions are proposed to be rooted in the Batesonian concept of the double bind (cf., e.g., Newman 2004, 2009) coupled with the TartuMoscow version of cultural semiotics.

From a marketing point of view, front labels play a crucial role in the consumers' relatively quick decisionmaking process when buying wine in retail stores. The aim of this paper was to reveal which semiotic code systems, in particular, colors, visual representations, and designs, as well as verbal representations, Austrian wine producers use on the front labels of their red wine bottles. For that purpose, the method of content analysis was applied on a representative corpus of red wine labels. Our empirical study showed that the wine labels analyzed especially appeal to price sensitive customers through the employment of light colors. In addition, wine producers do not seem to apply the “visualtotaste lexicon” as the labels rarely show the color “red.” Furthermore, in a large number of cases the wine producers use their family names as brand names of their wines. Moreover, both the depiction of crests and landscapes and the application of indexical brand names, emphasize the Austrian origin of wines. Finally, the extensive use of English brand names appears to connect wines to the social stereotypes of modernity, prestige, and progress.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability of multivariate mapping techniques to the exploration of the rhetorical semiotic brand image structure of ad films. By drawing on correspondence analysis and multidimensional scaling, two techniques that are amply used in corpus linguistics and in marketing research, but also on the data reduction technique of factor analysis, it will be displayed how a set of nuclear semes and classemes or an intended semic structure that underlies ad filmic discursive structures may be projected alongside rhetorical figures by its internal stakeholders (i.e., a brand management team, an account planning team or a marketing research team) with view to attaining differential brand associations. The illustration of the exploratory analytical methods takes place by recourse to a corpus of 62 ad filmic texts from 13 subbrands of the 3 major brands in the UK cereals market and 321 ad filmic segments that resulted from the segmentation procedure. This paper seeks to contribute to advancements in the brand image and advertising rhetoric research streams by addressing distinctive modes of advertising rhetorical configuration at the level of the ad filmic text (as against print ads where the bulk of research on advertising rhetoric has concentrated), and moreover on a segmentbysegment level, rather than treating the ad film as a standalone unit of analysis, by adopting a multimodal outlook to advertising configurations that takes into account not only the verbal or the visual mode, but also interactions among modes, by adopting a product categoryspecific approach to advertising/brand textuality that draws on rhetorical semiotics and by employing exploratory statistical methods against the background of content analytic output.