Abstraction as a limit to semiosis
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Tahir Wood
Tahir Wood (b. 1953) is an associate professor and director of the academic planning unit at the University of the Western Cape 〈twood@uwc.ac.za 〉. His research interests include semiotics, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. His publications include “Between signification and the referent0ial act: the proposition as pure ideation” (2010); “Beyond signification: the co-evolution of subject and semiosis” (2011); “Hermeneutic pragmatics and the pitfalls of the normative imagination” (2011); and “Author's characters and the character of the author: the typical in fiction.”
Abstract
In highly evolved culture, discourse is made up of complexes of implicit and explicit inter-textual relations, which form the meanings for new signifiers. Meanings for common abstract nouns are derived from the modeling of typical situations in everyday narratives. However at a further level of abstraction, models of discourses, which themselves contain abstract concepts, provide meanings for what are called “hyper-abstract” nominals. Here a certain limit is reached, and it is argued that this diachronic, onomasiological process provides a constraint on the notion of “unlimited semiosis.” This constraint has both natural and ethical aspects.
About the author
Tahir Wood (b. 1953) is an associate professor and director of the academic planning unit at the University of the Western Cape 〈twood@uwc.ac.za〉. His research interests include semiotics, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. His publications include “Between signification and the referent0ial act: the proposition as pure ideation” (2010); “Beyond signification: the co-evolution of subject and semiosis” (2011); “Hermeneutic pragmatics and the pitfalls of the normative imagination” (2011); and “Author's characters and the character of the author: the typical in fiction.”
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Between the grid and composition: Layout in PowerPoint's design and use
- Beyond speech balloons and thought bubbles: The integration of text and image
- Abstraction as a limit to semiosis
- The multimodal representation of emotion in film: Integrating cognitive and semiotic approaches
- Hearing a shakkei: The semiotics of the audible in a Japanese stroll garden
- Towards a social semiotics of rhythm in popular music
- A carnival pilgrimage: Cultural semiotics in China
- Photography and intermediality: Analytical perspectives on notions referred to by the term “photography”
- An exploration of possible unconscious ethnic biases in higher education: The role of implicit attitudes on selection for university posts
- New insights into the medium hand: Discovering recurrent structures in gestures
- The multimodal construal of the experiential domain of recipes in Japanese and Chinese
- Cyberterrorist messages: A semiotic perspective
- A necessary condition for proof of abiotic semiosis
- Review of From First to Third Via Cybersemiotics
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Between the grid and composition: Layout in PowerPoint's design and use
- Beyond speech balloons and thought bubbles: The integration of text and image
- Abstraction as a limit to semiosis
- The multimodal representation of emotion in film: Integrating cognitive and semiotic approaches
- Hearing a shakkei: The semiotics of the audible in a Japanese stroll garden
- Towards a social semiotics of rhythm in popular music
- A carnival pilgrimage: Cultural semiotics in China
- Photography and intermediality: Analytical perspectives on notions referred to by the term “photography”
- An exploration of possible unconscious ethnic biases in higher education: The role of implicit attitudes on selection for university posts
- New insights into the medium hand: Discovering recurrent structures in gestures
- The multimodal construal of the experiential domain of recipes in Japanese and Chinese
- Cyberterrorist messages: A semiotic perspective
- A necessary condition for proof of abiotic semiosis
- Review of From First to Third Via Cybersemiotics
