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Towards a semiotics of multilingualism

  • Dejan Ivković EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: July 17, 2015

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Marcel Pauluk, Ljiljana Vuletić and Jürgen Spitzmüller for their comments and suggestions.

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Published Online: 2015-7-17
Published in Print: 2015-10-1

©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Sports utility semiotics: A semantic differential study of symbolic potential in automobile design
  3. Making meaning in women’s spiritual autobiography: Language, materiality, and agency in colonial New Granada
  4. What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? VII: Sleight of hand
  5. Towards a semiotics of multilingualism
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  7. Dire l’indicible et décrire l’indescriptible: Ressources imagières et linguistiques des poilus
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  9. Icarus ignored: Riffaterre and Eagleton on Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts
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  16. 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
  17. The machine or the garden: Semiotics and the American yard
  18. Photogénie as “the Other” of the semiotics of cinema: On Yuri Lotman’s concept of “the mythological”
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  20. Why semiotics, why poetry?
  21. How brands (don’t) do things: Corporate branding as practices of imagining “commens
  22. Film space as mental space
  23. Netizen communicology: China daily and the Internet construction of group culture
  24. Questions toward a Peircean phenomenological description of association
  25. Colonial bodies: Slavery, wage-slavery, and the representation of race
  26. Discourse analysis with Peirce? Making sense of discursive regularities: The case of online university prospectuses
  27. Heidegger and the signs of history
  28. To be continued: meaning-making in serialized manga as functional-multimodal narrative
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  31. Review article
  32. Peircean visual semiotics: Potentials to be explored
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