Volume 2005, Issue 155

Psychiatric diagnostics can be meaningfully approached from the viewpoint of such concepts as normality of presented behavioral symptoms and signs, sincerity of the representation modality, and pathology of the patient’s internal state. The concepts form the basis for epistemological propositions that allow for a structured differential description of several psychiatric phenomena — such as health, mental illness, clinical deception, Munchausen syndrome, malingering, and personality disorders — along with a range of non-medical experiences. Placing a vast variety of clinical presentations in the new conceptual framework makes possible the explicit semiotic modeling of diagnostic decisions that medicine and psychiatry have the mandate to make.

This article looks at the semiotics of speech in a Hollywood film. Sound — and especially speech — plays a crucial role in the cinematic experience, but a minimal role in film theory and criticism. Filmic speech generally drives plot and characterization, while visual techniques are developed to construct and comment upon a film’s thematic statements. An interpretive analysis of the 1999 film Snow Falling on Cedars however, demonstrates that director Scott Hicks reverses this common relationship between the visual and the aural, deploying speech to construct and comment upon the film’s main theme of memory.

According to Charles S. Peirce we have to take responsibility for our scientific concepts. Having introduced the scientific world to a concept we have to revise it whenever further investigation alters the meaning of the concept. This article revises the definition of the fundamental sign, a concept developed by me and thus my responsibility. I define it in relation to Peirce’s formal conditions for communication and community. These formal conditions make it possible to understand the fundamental sign as part of a discourse community, carrying the qualities of the community — the sense of community.

L’abbé Aubain est un conte de Prosper Mérimée. On montre que dans ce texte la sémantique du récit engendre la structure narrative de surface et que l’attention du lecteur est surtout captée par la symbolique du bouquet. En effet, c’est un geste d’Aubain qui permet la narratrice de passer de la simple curiosité au désir, dès que les fleurs (symbole du premier amour) sont sacrifiées pour laisser le champ libre la deuxième femme, c’est-à-dire Mme de P. Les principes de dépendance entre sémiotique narrative et sémantique du récit, jadis laborés par Michael Riffatterre, sont ainsi vérifiés et nuancés.

Discourse-level topics are one of the most elusive and intractable notions in semantics, because they are inherently subjective and because more than one topic may be identifiable for a given stretch of discourse. Despite these characteristics of topics, much previous research into topics has attempted to identify a single topic for a stretch of discourse. In the present study, however, based on fuzzy logic, multiple topics are identified. Using data from an English language classroom at a Thai university, the identification of multiple topics involves, first, using six different approaches to analyse the data: theme-rheme progression, given-new progression, the speech act analysis of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), Hoey’s (1991) lexical analysis, association-based networks of concepts, and topic-based analysis. These methods were then validated through comparison with a control method of analysis, allowing weightings of importance to be assigned to each of the six approaches. The various topics identified by each approach, taking the weighting of the approach into account, were combined to identify a range of topics with values indicating prominence for each point in the discourse. The extent to which a given point in the discourse is centred on a potential topic was calculated using the concept of fuzzy entropy. Although complex, it is argued that this fuzzy approach to discourse topics provides greater precision in describing and identifying topics.

This article systematizes the manifestations of metonymy in natural language. The principal metonymical patterns in English nouns are discovered to be: resultative, causative, instrumental, objective, locative and possessive. Synchronically, a statistical analysis of their frequency is carried out. Diachronically, the historical-semantic analysis is undertaken to ascertain the development of metonymical patterns in the cases of categorial and prototypal polysemy. In the section devoted to metonymy in imaginative speech the hierarchical taxonomy of metonymical tropes and figures is presented. In conclusion, there is an overview of metonymy in comparison with other means of semantic change and some ideas on conceptual metonymy.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the symbolic and metaphoric representation of abstract concepts by the Samba Schools (Escolas-de-Sambas) of the main groups in the carnival parades of Rio de Janeiro (2004). I will focus mainly on the group Unidos da Tijuca that paraded science, emphasizing an extraordinary float that represented the creation of the world through DNA.

Wearable Computers create a personal augmented reality for people who wear them. Unlike virtual reality, wearable augmented reality could potentially alter mobility, interactivity, and beingness (existence) in the actual world. As wearable computers emerge as a medium of communication, several designers like Steve Mann, discuss their physical and political goals. In other words, these computers are actively being designed by the discourse that discusses them. This paper suggests that wearables ought to be considered in terms of semiotics and rhetoric during the early phases of media design. Treating wearable actions semiotically helps us understand the meaning-making potential of the medium. Treating the interface itself as a rhetorical text helps us understand how interfaces can be both manipulative and transformative. This paper uses Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric as a design framework, and it draws on the work of Marcel Danesi, Glenn Stillar and many others. It also examines many actual wearable computer inventions to foreground the nature of the medium.

It is shown that Schumann’s notion of the Symbolosphere, the non-physical world of symbolic relationships and Logan’s (2000a) Extended Mind model in which the mind is defined as the brain plus language entail a form of dualism. A distinction is made between the symbolosphere, which includes the human mind and all its thoughts and communication processes such as language and the physiosphere, which is simply the physical world and includes the human brain. No distinction is made between substance and property dualism, hence the use of the term neo-dualism. The neo-dualistic approach is justified on the basis that at our current understanding of neuroscience is unable to connect the functions of the mind with the actions of the brain and hence it makes sense from a practical point of view to distinguish between these two levels of phenomena. The neo-dualism formulated here is also used to critique strong AI and deconstructionism.

An overview of structuralism as a theoretical school is provided. The current relevance of structuralism is assessed, and an example of applicability is presented in an analysis of versions of a Native American creation myth. A structuralist approach to art allows for a more complete understanding of the content and form of the art. Through a structuralist analysis of versions of ‘The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,’ insight into geographical distributions of the myth and the cultural values held by the Senecas of New York and the Huron-Wyandots of Canada is possible.

This article examines the place of the body in Chinese art. It looks broadly at the case of literati painting and calligraphy and then offers a more historically focused examination of certain tendencies in modern Western-influenced Chinese painting, which was consciously antagonistic to literati values. Using Peirce’s distinction between iconic and indexical modes of signification, it argues that while evocation of the body was important in literati visual culture, this was achieved primarily by indexical means, whereas in early twentieth century Chinese visual culture, iconic modes of representation were to become dominant. This modern contestation of the visual economy of literati painting is found particularly in paintings of the female nude.

Current research in the biological science, particularly The Human Genome Project, has produced a proliferation of inscriptive metaphors that describes life processes in terms of signification. The embrace of semiotics as an explanatory tool of genetic behavior by some traditionally deemed ‘natural’ scientists inadvertently brings attention to the historical division between the natural and social sciences alike. This paper attempts to highlight the increasingly transparent division between the oppositional concepts of nature and culture in light of a post-structuralist perspective on the human genome.

This article analyses the aspects of theatre practice and theory dealing with body in space, or a theatrical space ‘constructed in relation to the actor’. It examines both the position of actor’s body with regards to a fictional space and an interaction between the stage and the audience using the example of Michael Chekhov’s notion of atmosphere — a sensory medium ‘that permeate[s] environments and Radiate[s] from people’. Atmosphere is a multi-layered text based on the anthropological, architectural, and emotional types of human relationships. It is both the Actor / Character / Spectator communication and the employment of theatre space as sign. Therefore, atmosphere is a dynamic process defining the aesthetic reading of a performance.

This review article considers the main contentions of David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge in relation to the semiotics of the visual image. The discussion is particularly relevant for the semiotics of image because it calls into question the paradigmatic and conventionalist assumptions that have prevailed in this field of studies. The article expands the discussion presenting a bio-semiotic explanation of how images are made if one takes into account the anatomy of neurological functions of the brain, it demonstrates how logical inferences of a deductive nature are what typify the depiction and the reception of images, as the result of the interaction of our two visual systems.