Home The world has changed forever: Semiotic reflections on the experience of sudden change
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

The world has changed forever: Semiotic reflections on the experience of sudden change

  • Richard J. Parmentier,

    Richard J. Parmentier (b. 1948) is a professor at Brandeis University 〈rparmentier@brandeis.edu〉. His research interests include semiotic anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and Oceanic ethnography. His publications include Semiotic mediation: Psychological and sociocultural perspectives (edited with E. Mertz, 1985); Signs in society: Studies in semiotic anthropology (1994); and The pragmatic semiotics of cultures (1997).

    EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: October 19, 2012

Abstract

From a semiotic point of view, the experience of sudden change can involve either an excess of signs or an absence of signs, both of which lead to an incapacity to form coherent representations and, thus, understandings. The comparative study of ethnographic and historical accounts of sudden change requires attention to contextual contingencies, the role of semiotic markers, degrees of heightened consciousness, and modes of symbolic indirection.

About the author

Professor Richard J. Parmentier,

Richard J. Parmentier (b. 1948) is a professor at Brandeis University 〈rparmentier@brandeis.edu〉. His research interests include semiotic anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and Oceanic ethnography. His publications include Semiotic mediation: Psychological and sociocultural perspectives (edited with E. Mertz, 1985); Signs in society: Studies in semiotic anthropology (1994); and The pragmatic semiotics of cultures (1997).

Published Online: 2012-10-19
Published in Print: 2012-10-11

©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Masthead
  2. Urban morphogenesis
  3. The mirrored Madonna: Text and symbol in body writing artworks
  4. Termes d'adresse et liste
  5. Vision science: An empirical basis for Roentgen semiotics
  6. Do metaphoric gestures influence how a message is perceived? The effects of metaphoric gesture-speech matches and mismatches on semantic communication and social judgment
  7. Text semiotics: Between philology and hermeneutics – from the document to the work
  8. Audiovisual texture in scene transition
  9. Le chronotope littéraire de l'étranger
  10. Pointing to show agreement
  11. Intertextuality, translation, and the semiotics of museum presentation: The case of bilingual texts in Chinese museums
  12. Codes, heterogeneities, and structures: Visual information and visual art
  13. The world has changed forever: Semiotic reflections on the experience of sudden change
  14. Michel Foucault's moral subjectivity and the semiotic modeling of knowledge
  15. Peirce and the logic of image
  16. Shaking grounds, unearthing palimpsests: Semiotic anthropology of disaster
  17. A Romantic quest: Meyerbeer's adaptation of the Faust theme
  18. See no evil? Only implicit attitudes predict unconscious eye movements towards images of climate change
  19. Language contextualization in a Hebrew language television interview: Lessons from a semiotic return to context
  20. Semiotic value in advertisements in Silesian Catholic periodicals from the second half of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries
  21. Legal interpretation: Meaning as social construction
  22. Introduction to the semiotics of belonging
  23. The branding of a quality liquor as a symbolic effort toward bringing China forward culturally: A comparative study of Wuliangye and Absolut Vodka
  24. The encyclopedia in Umberto Eco's semiotics
  25. On semiotics in language education
  26. Icons of novel thought: A new perspective on Peirce's definition of metaphor (CP 2.277)
  27. Review of Søren Brier's (2008) Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough
  28. Tarasti's existential semiotics: Towards a functional model
Downloaded on 13.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2012-0089/html
Scroll to top button