Volume 8, Issue 1

For a good translation the “interpretant sign” or “translatant” must not only repeat the “interpreted sign”, the “translated sign”, the original text in translation, but also must respond to it with interpretants of “answering comprehension”. In interlingual translation, the relation between the “interpreted” and the “interpretant” is oriented by the logic of responsive creativity, dialogism and otherness, by iconic similarity and abductive inference. Interlingual translation involves the disposition to respond to the word of the other in the form of reported, indirect discourse masked as direct discourse. The paradox of a good translation, which is the same text as the original but other from it, is the paradox of the sign.

A scientific language is created by combining the three layers of signs that I describe in this paper: technical terms (some of them being concepts), normal language and symbols. Every scientific language is different because the groups of signs that can express the main features of the particular science are different. If these features can only be expressed using pictures and words, the extent to which they can be deeply and unambiguously described is limited. If the objects under investigation can be given multiple designations using highly abstract signs (symbols), we must develop new ways to handle and analyze them

The construction of culture as a nonhereditary memory of the community is selective, with cultural forgetting functioning as one of its internal mechanisms. Based on Lotmanian Semiotic typology, cultural forgetting should be divided into such three types as forgetting of the text, forgetting of the rule and forgetting of the code. The main function of cultural forgetting is to ensure the formation and maintenance of cultural memory, which is manifested in three aspects: establishing cultural identity concerning the infusion of new texts, rules and codes, the external function concerning non-culture and anti-culture in the process of cultural interaction and expansion, and the internal cultural function concerning old culture and the past in the process of internal changes in specific cultures.

The music of Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil, in its composer’s premises, grows, above all, out of a fascination with the sea. This idea is realized, among others, by the musical piece Le soleil. It refers to three well-known paintings: Claude Monet’s Impression, soleil levant (Andante), Georges Seurat’s Un Dimanche a la Grande Jatte (Presto) and Vincent van Gogh’s Le chemin avec des cypress (Andante). Thus, the question arises regarding the relation between the paintings and the Polish composer’s music: Does this relation fit the category of ekphrasis, adapted by Siglind Bruhn from a theory of literature, to musical studies? To answer this question, the present study undertakes a search for quasi-painting structural features of Pstrokońska-Nawratil’s music in the context of the problem of musical space-time

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new type of novel appeared, i.e. the comic novel. The fundamental feature of comic novels is the symbolization of character images. Symbolized character images convey dual discourses: (i) a comic discourse that is produced by the special methods of cartoons and is characteristic of such aesthetic effects as fun, humor and absurdity, and (ii) a tragic discourse that is conveyed by symbolized character images and is metaphoric. The combination of the superficial comic discourse and the deep tragic discourse of the character images endows comic novels with unique artistic charms, namely the defamiliarization effect and artistic tension.

The analysis of the photographic image faces theoretical challenges within two large arenas - the analytical and the creative. What can be called a Semiotic Theory of photomontage is composed of studies that stem from diverse disciplines and theoretical schools of thought, ranging from structuralist studies to historical approaches. The focus of this review is to denominate the theoretical sources in order to carry out an analysis of photomontage from the standpoint of image semiotics, as rhetoric and poetics. The work at hand undertakes an analysis, evaluation and inventory of those studies, schools and theories that together comprise the necessary theoretical corpus in order to understand photomontage as a semiotic object within the specific field of visual and photographic production

Roland Barthes (1987) claimed that the creation of myth is the essence in mass media. Demystifying an advertisement for KONKA mobile phones uncovers the manipulation process of an ad campaign and finds that ads are designed to create myth today so as to exert influence upon their readers’ values and consumption habits

Since the days of Darwin and Wallace, evolution has been a leading unifying factor in biological theorizing, along with other key conceptual strands from thermodynamics, genetics, and molecular biology. Physics, whose explanatory resources underpin those of the physical sciences, has until quite recently stood impervious to evolutionary thought however. The thoroughly ahistorical conception of nature promoted by traditional physics, bundled with other philosophical preconceptions, conspired against any conceptual unification of physics with biology other than strict reductionism. This article aims to show that Peircean semiotics combined with new developments in both physics and biology augur new prospects for reversing this situation by means of a non-reductive unification of physical and biological theories leading to a truly evolutionary natural philosophy - including cosmology. For several reasons, such an upcoming synthesis could become auspicious to the incorporation of biosemiotic ideas as central explanatory resources in biology (in contrast to the present situation). To develop the reasons behind this expectation, I offer first a summary of some remarkable developments in cosmology, particle physics, condensed matter physics and biology, all of which relate to the notions of symmetry breaking, phase transitions and scale invariance. Next, I indicate how these trends merge with the rise of novel forms of causation (e.g. circular, downward, reciprocal) in systems biology and self-organization theories. Finally, I speculate on how the characteristic form of causation in biosemiotic transactions (i.e. semiosis) may relate to other types of causal action deployed within living systems.

This paper examines the relationship between surprise and wonder. Peirce develops a phenomenology of surprise as central to inquiry. In his essay “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”, Peirce examines this phenomenon of surprise in relation to the three semiotic universes: firstness, secondness, and thirdness. “Every inquiry whatsoever takes its rise in the observation, in one or another of the three Universes, of some surprising phenomenon”. Inquiry begins by contemplating one of the universes of signs, or their relations upon the discovery of some new and surprising dimension of these universes or their relations. Apparently one could begin inquiry and wonder about virtually anything, but what exactly motivates this process, and why is it motivated in some people sometimes and not others? And, further, what is the relationship between surprise and wonder when we consider that, for Peirce, surprise is ubiquitous throughout our experience? I argue that surprise is a form of error recognition, and that what distinguishes those surprises that lead to wonder is that they regard previous beliefs that we truly care about. Wonder in particular (as opposed to other inquiries) is prompted when a surprise reveals an error in a belief that we care about, making the pursuit to settle the question that arises a deeply personal one.

Semiotics can be defined as the study of what can err, thus generalizing Umberto Eco’s definition. Introducing the fourth section on the Tartu School of semiotics for Chinese Semiotic Studies, the focus is put on the recent developments and the current state at the center of semiotics in Tartu.

By the 20th century’s end, semiotics had definitively emerged as the most historically and theoretically proper name for the study of how signs work in human experience, both in its cultural dimensions and in its inevitable dependency upon the physical environment and universe, which extends far beyond cultural influence and which the very existence of culture presupposes. Probably the single most key figure, as it were, “presiding over” this emergence was the Hungarian-American Thomas A. Sebeok. But key to Sebeok’s weaving of the “semiotic web” of a global awareness of sign-action within the intellectual culture of the 21st century was his appreciation and integration within his vision and work of two key background figures, both associated with Tartu University, namely, Jakob von Uexküll and Juri Lotman. I would like to comment on how the heritage of these two figures have proved to be the foundation stones - in some ways more important even than the, so far, more widely recognized figures of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Peirce - for the future of semiotics within university life and intellectual life generally.

Shifters or referential deictics combine referential and indexical functions. As compared to non-referential deictics, functioning as spatio-temporal markers, shifters index speech events in relation to the narrated events and trigger shifts between referential domains: they alter the referential or experiential grounding of events and produce the effect of“ lamination”. In this paper I argue that Jakobson’s and Jespersen’s approach allows for a broad semiotic understanding of shifters as (1) cognitive operators, prototypical ways in which embodied mind relates to the world, and (2) fictional operators, or specific functions of fictional storytelling.

Spatial metalanguage is frequently used as a descriptive tool in social and cultural theories. This article analyses Lotman’s, Sorokin’s and Bourdieu’s models. Spatial models of the sociocultural world provide descriptions of the world and are at the same time doubly dynamic - first due to their aim of explaining sociocultural change and meaning-generation and secondly due to pragmatical aspects of modeling where these models originate. The understanding of modeling system in the field of semiotics as either a syntactic structure or as a field of sociocultural activities points also to two pragmatical fields of models of sociocultural space, the building of a conceptual world and the building of a material world.

This article provides a brief overview of the journal Sign Systems Studies, apparently the oldest journal of semiotics in the world. It was established by Juri Lotman in 1964, produced in Tartu and published by the University of Tartu Press. In addition, we provide a list of all semiotic journals currently published in the world, which includes 46 titles; from these 39 are printed on paper (among them 6 international journals on general semiotics, 14 specialized in some branch of semiotics, and 19 regional semiotics journals). Seven journals appear exclusively on the web. Altogether these journals publish articles in 16 languages.