Volume 2015, Issue 207 -

The article aims to illuminate the issue of symbolic potential in postmodern society through a semiotic study of car design. In Baudrillard’s terminology, we explore the experience and sociological and psychological materiality of objects that, being above objects’ perceptible materiality, constantly modify the integrity of technological systems (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]: 6). The target concepts are analyzed through Baudrillard’s lens of symbolic capital and his technological system of objects, coupled with the method of semantic differential (SD; e.g., Osgood 1979, 1981) against the insights of Tartu semiotics. Such a complex framework helps to establish affective attitudes of the subjects towards scales selected for their perceptual saliency. The analysis is based on the responses of students in a Polish university who were administered an instrument comprising 14 concepts and 37 scales. The results of statistical analysis yield a semantic space with two factors: potency and activity/dynamism, which we shall call social prestige. At this stage of the analysis we could not determine the evaluation factor. The scales that loaded significantly showed that there is indeed an increment of perceptual saliency in both extracted factors in the case of target stimuli (pickups and SUVs).

This article examines the multiple ways in which meaning is made in female spiritual autobiography by studying a specific text, the Vida by the Colombian Poor Clare nun Mother Gerónima del Espíritu Santo, neé Jerónima Nava y Saavedra (1669–1727). First, it analyzes this life story as a socially constructed assemblage of written words that have been shown by critics to create agency (dominant reading). Then, the article discusses how the materiality of its N1 manuscript also makes meaning and creates agency (non-dominant reading). Using the work of Van Leeuwen, Björkvall, and Karlsson, the study offers valuable insight into the meaning-making of Early Modern script in New Granada, an area that until now has not been placed under this particular branch of semiotic analysis. It also studies how the social practices surrounding the penitent/confessor relationship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the exigencies of reading and editing today are strong forces in shaping manuscript material into meaning. The article concludes that the materiality of the N1 Vida documents the shades and hues of agency that the language of the manuscript alone cannot.

Our signs are what we make them. To convey what they mean they must be interpreted, and how they’re interpreted depends partly on what form they take, misleading or otherwise. So the means by which we realize our interior signs into the exterior world must retain a perennial interest, because we can achieve such realizations only via our physiology, which affects our signs’ forms. Our mouths affect our spoken signs; our writing hands affect our written signs. (How could it be otherwise? Both tongues and fingers have limitations.) So a close look at how our writing hands realize our signs on the paper promises to be a good candidate for extending our understanding of how we physically realize our signs, and of how this both binds and frees us.

Describing the semiotic activity of multifaceted configurations of language presence in plurilingual contexts (spaces and objects) as multilingual semiosis, this article adopts a classical semiotic perspective on linguistic diversity and attendant artefacts. Accordingly, the juxtaposition of languages through associated linguistic and non-linguistic representations – embedded in a specific sociocultural and linguistic matrix – appropriates a second-order, supralinguistic layer of signification. The article develops a set of concepts and analytical tools to interpret a range of phenomena underlying the complexity and dynamism of language contact. To account for the hierarchy and semiotic flow of linguistic items and features, the article revisits the memetic concept of lingueme (cf. Croft 2000) – a linguistic type of cultural replicator – framing it as a primitive, distinctive unit of multilingual semiosis, associated with a respective language variety (lect). In its capacity as a graphic signifier, lingueme is a basic unit of semiograph, the latter concept denoting the material-digital form and conduit of the semiotic sign. In the flow of semiosis, language presence and modalities of linguistic representation may exhibit one or more of the following semiotic properties: iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity. The semiotic properties of linguemes are examined through the analysis of the gratuitous use of two dots – here termed floating umlaut – in the branding and names of heavy metal bands.

This paper is about the problem of unusual prey. The author compares human and animal difficulties of understanding in damnatio ad bestias (execration, actually, public execution through beasts) in the arenas of Rome during antiquity. The prey’s signals to the predator consist of many components, including mimicry, spreading pheromonic scents, and leaving the footprints. Mimicry techniques, cryptic as well as conspicuous strategies are used by the prey. The survival of the Christians in the Roman arenas was due to the different message channels of men and animals. The Christians who survived never showed fear and therefore no predator touched them. If new prey bears no resemblance to normal prey, a predator could assume a surrender or playful position, while still cautious of the prey’s movements. The latter could be a possibly metacommunicated scene, which is universal for animals as well as humans. In that case, all possibilities of mimetic techniques and survival strategies from both sides are described here: how animals and their prey objects code their messages. Four types of arena interaction signs are presented here. The conclusion is: if the prey does not run, the predator considers it plausibly sick or poisonous. Even a domestic cat carefully avoids a mouse that dares to attack him. The cat considers it to be poisoned and leaves alone. The Christians’ “poison” was their faith.

Résumé Cet article étudie et confronte les usages que font quatre soldats aux profils scolaires différents des ressources imagières et linguistiques pour exprimer l’inexprimable. Il s’agira de déterminer si leurs utilisations des mots et de l’image attestent d’une “déchirure du pouvoir d’expression” (Balibar 1985: 406) entre bénéficiaires de l’instruction primaire et bénéficiaires de l’instruction secondaire. L’usage concurrent, synergique ou fusionnel des deux systèmes sémiotiques sera étudié via une analyse stylistico-pragmatique. Seront passées en revue les manières dont les soldats parviennent à imager les dires et dire les images, dire en images ou dire avec l’image, donner du sens aux mots ou changer le sens des mots à travers leur image.

It is shown here that Peirce’s ten trichotomies, specifically art as discussed in Sabre (2014), provides a structure for presenting a mathematical conjecture and provide a heuristic for going about attempting a mathematical proof of the conjecture. The mathematics is presented through the work of the mathematical proof theorists George Polya and Daniel Solow. Here a geometric conjecture is shown to be true using a ten trichotomy context for a proof. Thus through the structure of mathematical proof the ten trichotomy structure validates itself.

In his 2007 book dealing with poetry in English, Terry Eagleton sacrifices integrity on the altar of the popularizing impulse. His partial analysis of an Auden poem also treated by Michael Riffaterre reveals the advantages of a semiotic approach, which can show how images on the textual surface signify indirectly by pointing to an underlying matricial structure. The author’s expanded version of Riffaterrian theory accounts for the added complexity conferred by two matrices, each founded on a proposition. In sum, Eagleton’s employment of a traditional “lit-crit” approach – with its prose-based preoccupation with surface details – fails to identify the semiotic structure of the poem as a signifying totality.

While American media reportage of heinous crimes has long drawn on Gothic iconography to secure readers, the contemporary digital news market has engendered a trend in crime reporting that transparently imparts the conventions of Victorian horror, and by extension the nineteenth-century American Gothic. Employing a semiotic content analysis of Internet news stories ( n =240) detailing the case of convicted serial kidnapper, rapist, and murderer Ariel Castro, this paper situates online narratives of his arrest as the distillate of Gothic fiction in earnest. This analysis includes a critical overview of digital journalism’s liberal and recurring use of the genre’s literary archetypes and physical forms. This paper also addresses the broader sociocultural consequences of this trend on due process and credible criminological research.

Kenneth L. Pike’s tagmemic explanation of his etic-emic equivalence corresponds to the notion of “approximate” translation. According to a weaker version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Pike’s cross-cultural and multilingual perspective of Bible translation approximates the duality and triadicity of Peirce’s immediate/emotional, dynamical/energetic, and final/logical interpretants. Pike’s astronautical examples of the artificial language Kabala-X translated into English and the science fiction story of the Earthmen who invaded Mars are fictional and creative artifacts of human-alien cryptography leading, as argued here, to false semio-logical reasoning.

Connecting reception theory and social semiotics, this article offers a framework for the analysis of hortatory texts. An illustrative case uses the pronouncements of environmental regulators, with the reader group represented by a sample of executives in financial institutions. Although the participants thought the texts important, none had found any use for them. It is unlikely that financial institutions en masse will address environmental issues before and until communicators frame their material in terms of customary financial discourse and investors’ dominant cognitive rationalities. The depth of insights gained suggests wider application of the framework to a range of hortatory texts and authoritative reader groups.

Oswald Spengler first showed that every macroculture can be conceived of as an accretion of signs representing in various contexts a single abstract Prime Symbol. But this semiotic model of culture is not confined to the so-called “great civilizations”; it is applicable to every culture. In seeking a typology of Prime Symbols (and hence, a semiotic typology of cultures), we show that that the Peircean Categories Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (including the “degenerate” Categories Firstness of Secondness, Firstness of Thirdness, and Secondness of Thirdness) are exemplified in the great range of cultural semiotic types, and that, because of their universality and generality, these Categories are the best semiotic lens through which cultural Prime Symbols can be understood.

This article takes seriously Edward Sapir’s observation about poetry as an example of linguistic relativity. Taking my cue from Dwight Bolinger’s “word affinities,” this article reports on the ways sounds of poetry evoke and convoke imaginative possibilities through phonological iconicity. In working with Navajos in translating poetry, I have come to appreciate the sound suggestiveness of that poetry and the imaginative possibilities that are bound up in the sounds of Navajo. It seems that just such sound suggestiveness via phonological iconicity and the ways they orient our imaginations are a crucial locus for thinking through linguistic relativities.

This article analyzes the language of fashion in postmodern society with the hypothesis that fashion trends mutate when social trends change, in a relationship of reciprocal construction that we can define as social semiotics. The analytic approach ranges from social semiotics to the fashion theory field. If social semiotics focuses on the study of signs, spaces, and language mutations in the system of social discourses, fashion theory provides a perspective combining lifestyles, worldviews, personal meanings, and social values about custom: indeed, in fashion we simultaneously observe participation in collective trends and the expression of individuality.

The article highlights a semiotically relevant aspect of Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems: its reception of the Saussurean dichotomies signifiant/signifié and langue/parole . Luhmann’s position is weighted against the Cours as well as Saussure’s original writings, sampling their approaches to form, meaning, the sign’s two-sidedness, and the relation of linguistic structure and speech events. Ultimately, the article proposes a social ontology of linguistic abstraction in line with general semiology that explains the motility of language through communication, thereby accounting for variability and optionality. It also indicates as to how the theoretical framework can feed into a model of linguistic description.

Around 10,000 BC, rapid global warming led to the development of agriculture, sedentary life, and the long distance transport of goods, services, and knowledge – the precursors of contemporary civilization. Concurrent with these events arose the utilitarian philosophy that the natural world should be exploited for material advancement and that parcels of land could be privately owned and developed. This practice continues to the present day through individual ownership of houses and their surrounding yards. Interviews with American homeowners can provide semiotic insights into how the land under their direct ownership is viewed. Findings lead along a complex trail of images suggesting that the relationship between humans and nature is deeply conflicted. Tracing this relationship back in time through various philosophical positions regarding nature suggests that humans may not be ideologically committed to environmental preservation.

One of the most problematic concepts in film theory, photogénie, refers to the dimension of “the Other,” which is not fully covered by the process of cultural signification, and obviously verges on a zone “beyond” the semiotics. Exactly in this site Epstein, Balazs, and Barthes ought to affirm the existence of the problematic “the Other” level of signification – an autonomous entity as a potential semiotic threat. Yuri Lotman’s view on cinema, in particular, his thought on “the mythological” essence of cinema, can provide productive insight into the question: how can the semiotics of cinema deal with this elusive and ineffable phenomenon, which is extremely difficult to manipulate? His thoughts on “the mythological” as another (asemiotic) level of semiosis, and his concepts of close-up as “proper name” can give us a chance to admit positively this essential “alterity” of cinematic signification, not just denying or transcendentalizing it as some mysterious “thing-in-itself.”

In Translation studies, it has long been understood that when translation is integrated into journalism, concepts such as equivalence and authorship become highly problematic. However, there is still no reference to a general method that might explain why news production impacts the very process of translation and affects the translated texts themselves. In this paper, we introduce a new semiotic approach that measures shifts in translated texts by using semiotic modalities and relates these shifts to axiologies by actants of the practice of translation. Translated texts by an Italian weekly magazine are adopted as a case study and an analysis of the textual corpora is coupled with think-aloud protocols by editors. The semiotic approach reveals that the actantial dynamics are conflictual: while the translators’ performance is compatible with the equivalence value, journalists endorse values that result in the content of the original being altered. The divergence between the axiology of the actant initiating the practice and the axiology pursued by the translators affects the way the concept of translation is generated.

Giambattista Vico’s philosophy foresaw a very postmodern sense of language, first as the underlying logical capacity for what Peirce called the symbolic argument, and second as a communication system per se. And in our view, much of these higher sign processes, especially in the everyday symbol use of human communication, is based in metaphor, very much in Vico’s notion of the term. This essay explores the dynamics of sign ordinary process through poetry, referencing also Vico’s synthesis of understanding and creativity, and the connection of poetry to the earliest Western philosophies.

How do brands do things (if, indeed, they do)? Using ethnographic data gathered inside a Hawaiian corporation, this paper examines how the brand form is developed imaginatively by stitching together the various voices of corporate stakeholders and also organizing the relationship between the corporation or their products and the targeted publics as participants in a hypothetical semiotic participation framework. The concept of commens of Charles Sanders Peirce is used to help explain how corporate actors seek to create a felicitous condition by which brand forms may ensure reception of messages as well as perlocutionary acts of consumption. It is suggested that contemporary branding practices are understandable as attempts to establish commens – a necessary condition for any effective communication between sign-producers and sign-interpreting social agents.

This paper explores the hypothesis that the three-dimensionality and continuity of film space is a mental construct based on our perception of the images projected on the screen and our knowledge of/about the world and our knowledge of/about film. Starting from Alberti’s (1804 [1435]) visual pyramid as a geometric representation of the vision of a stationary observer, such as a painter, and Gardies’ (1993) mirror ball representing the vision of a dynamic spectator, such as a camera, the paper proposes a new schema aiming to explain how the three spaces – real, virtual, and mental – participate in the construction of film meaning.

Intercultural communicology is a complex system of intergroup communication and, in consequence, is a specialized case of human communication in which discourse is constructed in a semiotic world of experience, i.e., the Semiosphere. I look at the Netizen (online citizen) application of semiotic phenomenological theories and categories as we explore their emblematic presence as cosmologies and logics in the sociocultural discourses of the People’s Republic of China. The analysis examines stories published (2010–2011) in the online version of China Daily, a quasi-official newspaper of the Chinese government. The analysis is the main task that Umberto Eco called the semiotic quest for “the logic of culture”. I shall periodically cite the longitudinal statistical research of Richard E. Nisbett reported in his popular book The Geography of Thought. It is important to note that Nisbett’s research confirms the applied practice of the cultural group semiotic in use, rather than theoretically describing the logic constituted by the semiotic systems, which is my goal. In consequence as we shall see, Nisbett makes the mistake of describing the Asian semiotic in terms of a Western logic perspective – not the Asian perspective per se!

According to the philosopher and scientist Charles Peirce (1839–1914) phenomenology is fundamental to all scientific inquiry and association is the only force that exists within the intellect. However, Peirce only gave his reader a hint about the relationship between phenomenology and association. In this article we will try to follow that hint and point towards a couple of main questions that can guide a Peircean phenomenological description of association. Hence, the conclusion of the article will not be a phenomenological description of association but rather a couple of main questions trying to determine how such a phenomenological description can begin in the first place. Our hypothesis is that the questions depend for their construction on the inter-relatedness and interdependence of certain central Peircean phenomenological concepts – especially, Thirdness, Secondness, and Firstness.

C. L. R. James’ text The Black Jacobins opens new avenues of inquiry with respect to the Haitian Revolution, both from the perspective of a traditional Marxist reading of labor relations, as well as the perspective of the post-colonial subject. In a similar frame, Angelo Herndon’s 1937 text Let Me Live theorizes race relations and economic relations within the context of American slavery, which had been abolished some seventy years prior. This essay will claim that James’ text, as an historical document in postcolonial studies, retheorizes the position of the black subject in contrast to the traditionalist conception of “History”; and furthermore, that Herndon’s imprisonment was a direct result of his challenge to that same culture and the maintenance of white-centered hegemony. In context, The Black Jacobins represents both a deconstruction of a Western “historical” project, as well as a critique of the contemporary imperialist and post-imperialist culture of globalizing trans-national capitalism. Let Me Live , on the other hand, critiques the power structures that systematically oppress black subjectivities on economic, social, political, and cultural fronts. These texts, and their interpretation, will provide a framework for understanding the colonized black subject as the signified in an oppressive semiosis of race relations.

We discuss online promotional texts presenting French-speaking European public universities. We suggest that these descriptive texts (a particular academic institution being the semiotic object being referred to) combine homogenizing generic and interdiscursive regularities that assure the control of their interpretation: on the one hand, generic regularities show that the specific social practice of promoting universities online produces a speech genre that is highly patterned (when it comes to its morphosyntactic, stylistic, and compositional features); on the other hand, interdiscursive regularities show that the descriptive procedures at play mobilize an exogenous discourse that is ideological in nature (i.e., European political discourse on higher education and research) and therefore mirrors the changing sociopolitical context that the sampled institutions are embedded in. More globally, we suggest that a series of concepts originally developed by traditional continental (French) discourse analysis (dialogism, interdiscourse, communication situation, etc.) deserve to be read and re-invested in light of Peircean semiotics.

Heidegger’s conception of the sign formulated in Sein und Zeit (1996 [1927]) may shed some light on his disastrous, philosophical and political experience with Nazism. In order to show this, I propose to assess how Heidegger establishes the relationship between signs and history in his magnum opus. Then, relying on the fact – central to Heidegger’s thinking, and to sign studies in general – that ideas are linked to the world, I will proceed to examine how Heidegger’s philosophical meditations stand up to his real-life engagements. My final remarks, more interrogative than declarative, will raise the question as to how Heidegger was lured into believing that Nazism represented a moment of truth.

This paper discusses meaning-making in serialized adventure manga (Japanese comics) by examining its metafunctional organization. Manga, whose components cover a multimodal cline from graphics to verbals, is seen as a multimodal narrative whose features are mapped onto the different metafunctions: time – experiential, with diegetic time lapse defining the start point to construe experience; cause-effect – logical, with relative positioning of components reflecting logical relations diegetically; space – compositional, with diegetic and extradiegetic spaces contributing to the coherence and cohesion of the story. The overarching interpersonal aspect of manga makes it a medium of exchange between the author and the reader and encourages the reader to actively decode idiosyncratic meanings.

This essay offers a semiotic account of the Logically Real as an emergent category of multi-perspectival experience. Such an approach is supported by phenomenological, developmental, and cognitive discourses, which conceptualize the emergence of object permanence through sensorimotor interactions. Within this frame, I argue that humanities needs a form of native empiricism – by which I mean a discourse of the real, articulated through monosemic practices that symbolize the literal – as a component of the revitalization being wrought by the digital humanities. I adopt Sartre’s concept of the analagon complemented with a notion of codon to explicate what I call the sign dominance of the image, which is explored in relation to the experience of the sign as an act of imagination. Forms of practiced monosemy concatenated around the experienced permanence of objects is offered as a viable humanist discursive strategy toward revivifying empirical methodologies.

Not all religious proselytizing is conducive to violence, yet some is, and adopts specific words, images, sounds, and other signs in order to convey its message. Defying frontiers among historical epochs, confessions, and disciplines, the essay develops a cross-cultural, trans-historical, and comparative reading of violent religious propaganda, focusing on messages and media that promote radicalization and the consequent mission to defeat the enemy disbeliever. In particular, the essay puts the current phenomenon of jihadist online propaganda into historical and comparative perspective.