Discourse analysis with Peirce? Making sense of discursive regularities: The case of online university prospectuses
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Jeoffrey Gaspard
Abstract
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.
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©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Sports utility semiotics: A semantic differential study of symbolic potential in automobile design
- Making meaning in women’s spiritual autobiography: Language, materiality, and agency in colonial New Granada
- What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? VII: Sleight of hand
- Towards a semiotics of multilingualism
- In the arena: Communication between animals and Christians in damnatio ad bestias
- Dire l’indicible et décrire l’indescriptible: Ressources imagières et linguistiques des poilus
- Mathematics and Peirce’s semiotic
- Icarus ignored: Riffaterre and Eagleton on Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts
- The “monster” of Seymour Avenue: Internet crime news and Gothic reportage in the case of Ariel Castro
- Kenneth L. Pike and science fiction
- Environmental communications: The reader’s perspective
- A Peircean typology of cultural prime symbols: Culture as category
- The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry: Navajo poetry, phonological iconicity, and linguistic relativity
- The language of fashion in postmodern society: A social semiotic perspective
- From Saussure to sociology and back to linguistics: Niklas Luhmann’s reception of signifiant/signifié and langue/parole as the basis for a model of language change
- The machine or the garden: Semiotics and the American yard
- Photogénie as “the Other” of the semiotics of cinema: On Yuri Lotman’s concept of “the mythological”
- Who said it? Voices in news translation, from a semiotic perspective
- Why semiotics, why poetry?
- How brands (don’t) do things: Corporate branding as practices of imagining “commens”
- Film space as mental space
- Netizen communicology: China daily and the Internet construction of group culture
- Questions toward a Peircean phenomenological description of association
- Colonial bodies: Slavery, wage-slavery, and the representation of race
- Discourse analysis with Peirce? Making sense of discursive regularities: The case of online university prospectuses
- Heidegger and the signs of history
- To be continued: meaning-making in serialized manga as functional-multimodal narrative
- Empiricism within the limits of postmodernism alone: On the emergence of the logically real within the multi-perspectival field
- Propaganda mala fide: Towards a comparative semiotics of violent religious persuasion
- Review article
- Peircean visual semiotics: Potentials to be explored
