Volume 15, Issue 1 - Special Issue: In honor of Per Aage Brandt; Edited by Peer F. Bundgaard

This text is a short intellectual biography written in memory of Per Aage Brandt (1944–2021). I present some of the main tenets of his scientific endeavor, artistic practice, and scholarly entrepreneurship.

Although formal linguists have focused on the deictic and (co)referential functions of pronouns, social categorization and identity are deeply involved in pronominal usage. I argue here that even the understanding of pronoun reference requires us to go beyond extensional (co)-reference. The extensive literature on linguistic categorization has focused on nouns more than on verbs, as has work on metonymy – but not on pronouns. Here I present two case studies, one of third-person pronouns and one of first-plural pronouns. In one I argue that cognitive science findings on categorization make it impossible for a masculine noun/pronoun usage to be truly “generic” in gender reference. The other examines the ways in which identity and group structure shape the possibilities for plural pronoun reference, in particular with respect to first-person plural ( we ) uses. To understand the principles of reference for these pronouns, we need to apply theoretical frameworks developed for lexical meaning: frames, category structure, prototypes, categorial metonymy and frame metonymy.

An axiom of Per Aage Brandt’s approach to conceptual blending, known colloquially as the “Aarhus model”, is that semiosis only makes sense when grounded in communicative interaction. Here we adopt that approach in relation to the reality of current, daily communication which is increasingly mediated by digital audio-visual technology platforms. We pursue this goal via a small set of case studies that explore how this technology changes and challenges social interaction and how participants exploit and adapt cognitive, embodied, technological, and semiotic resources in creating meaningful, collective, virtual spaces of joint social activity. In so doing, we expand the horizon of inquiry and contribute insights that have relevance for the new media ecology. This application of cognitive semiotic analyses of video meetings confronts the nature of “mediation” and its accomplishment, the status of “virtual spaces”, and “social presence.”

Tom Thomson is a doyen of Canadian art. Here, I argue one of his well-known pictures contains a hidden figure. In Thomson’s Islands, Canoe Lake , 1916, a blue-gray picture primitive richly affords a rock and a bear, a long-overlooked ambiguity, one that Thomson did not tell us he intended. Its picture primitives are contours and patches. They offer a limited set of scene primitives. A likelihood ratio of less than 1 in 100 supports the contention that the bear is a hidden figure.

Cognitive semiotics should not only use psychology and neurology as the background of multi-modal sign usage, but it must also take into account the biological, and specifically the evolutionary and developmental aspects of communication with signs, or in Cassirer’s terms, of “symbolic forms”. This article deals with questions of the emergence of religion (in general) and the morphogenesis of specific religious (and mythical) forms. As a theoretical background, it has recourse to René Thom’s “morpho-dynamics” and “semio-physics”. The contours of a catastrophe-theoretical model of morphogenesis of religions and their possible implosion after a phase of hyper-complexity are described with a focus on polytheistic features of Hinduism and its implosion in the Buddhist “revolution”. A section on Christianism describes the early phases of its self-organization (after the death of Jesus) and its stabilization as a state religion. The basic attractors of this morphogenesis are Jesus and (his mother) Mary. Finally, the further unfolding of religion, its semio- and ratio-genesis, are commented on. The morpho-dynamic modeling of religion avoids traditional, cultural and philosophical biases and raises the highly controversial topic of religion to a scientific level, accessible to mathematical treatment and empirical evaluation.

The present analysis discusses the narratological structures of the Danish folk ballad on ‘Germand Gladensvend’ (‘Happy Germand’, DgF 33). The text is preserved in six different manuscript versions, all of them written before appr. 1630, and in a printed version from 1591. Although the story is strongly related in all of them, including stanzas that are identical almost word for word, the different versions nevertheless have rather different narratological structures, depending on the strong variation between the conclusions of the different versions. In order to make these differences clear, the analysis uses classical narratological concepts, like movements of objects of value and the semiotic square. The narrative structures in the extant versions of the Danish popular ballad “Germand Gladensvend” (DgF 33).

After providing information about details of the song’s historical genesis and an exegetic Explication De Texte we proceed to analyze the lyrics as a modernist, surrealist narrative that is not always easy to make clear sense of, yet best can be understood as a classical structure of dramatic complications and possible catharsis with reference to Per Aage Brandt’s work on diegesis and narrative forces and spaces. Brandt’s contributions to cognitive narratology provide an extended framework of force dynamics, catastrophe theory and structuralist psychoanalysis – also with considerations of intentionality and imagination as integral parts of intersubjectively experienced story-worlds. Our empirical object of study departs from the original canonical recording song lyrics produced in 1968 on the album Music from Big Pink , where the many consecutive live performances by The Band and other artists remain quite faithful to the original text. To the best of our knowledge, a thorough scholarly analysis of the lyrics of The Weight has not yet been available until we now present our detailed, philological amplification on the details of this piece of art.

The concept of ‘enunciation’ was developed very early in Per Aage Brandt’s work. Giving Saussure’s semiology a prominent position, Brandt’s enunciation model became the basis for further development of a psychosemiotic model that was used in the analysis of persons in traumatized and psychotic states of mind. This paper describes this development and its claim that the enunciative, spoken words, statements or narrations, in which the enunciation is more or less silently embedded, is anchored or embedded in internal communicative components, which in themselves can be said to be enunciatively structured. These components will be described in detail as well as their characteristics encompassing the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of language.

This paper on rhythm is an adaptation of the semiotic research on rhythm in versified language presented as one of the seven types of poetic iconicity in Chapter 5 of The Communicative Mind: A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and Meaning Construction (L. Brandt 2013) entitled “Effects of poetic enunciation: Seven types of iconicity”. Defined by the linebreak, poetic language use engenders distinctive interpretive affordances, some of which manifest themselves as emphatically iconic sign relations contributing to the expressive whole of a text. In “Effects of poetic enunciation”, I explore syntactic, semantic, phonetic, rhythmic and rhetorical aspects of the phenomenon of semiotic iconicity, and its counterpart aniconicity, in language characterized by an intentionally (line)broken syntax and contribute a systematic account of the different types of semiotic iconicity relations, understood as figural or diagrammatic similarity relations – or, conversely, potent dis similarity relations, i.e. aniconicity – between expressive means and semantic content. Rhythmic iconicity is the fifth type of iconicity in this typology.