Volume 2010, Issue 182

The terms “sign” and “symbol” have often been used with similar meanings and functions in several different fields (religion, science, art, philosophy, linguistic, semiotics, etc.). This causes not only terminological confusion, but also creates paradoxes as disorders in understanding and perceiving, and confusions of mind as to what, where, and how these words are to be perceived and used. This article aims to contribute to delineating sign and symbol.

Based on the hypothesis that Peircean semiotics can reveal how the construction of comprehension is at least partly a function of the structure of composition, the scope of this article is to present a new categorization of print advertising. The categorization consists of six different advertising types and is developed on the basis of an analysis of 150 quarto-, half-, and full-page advertisements from the Danish morning paper Berlingske Tidende . There are basically two tr aditions in advertising research — a semiotic one and a cognitive one. But none of these traditions have been used to suggest a possible relation between composition and the effects of comprehension, as the conceptual foundation for a categorization seems, as does the Peircean variant of semiotics, to be very limited in advertising research as such. Generally seen, the purpose of the development of the present categorization is to show how a Peircean semiotic approach can contribute to advertising research, including ongoing cognitive research in the advertising tradition.

This article studies hand gestures and specifies four different possible uses: (1) one-handed gestures; (2) symmetrical two-handed gestures; (3) symmetrical two-handed gestures in which the hands alternately perform the same movement; (4) asymmetrical two-handed gestures. The paper shows how a speaker employs various hand gestures to explain her teaching experiences and views the concurrence of gestures with speech, body posture, shrugs, gaze, and facial expressions as reciprocal actions to an interlocutor's responses. The final section of the paper discusses the flexibility of hand gestures and the different ways in which it is revealed.

In this study, we characterize a ground of meaning for each relate of a Roentgen sign. In this scheme, each relate ground includes a perceptual domain, a domanial segmentation, and a temporal phenomenology. The temporal phenomenology is selected to satisfy the requirements of diagnostic imaging and is based upon the categorical ontology of Peirce and the formal ontology of Grenon and Smith. Our objective is to show that these relate grounds provide the interpreter of Roentgen signs with the minimum collateral knowledge necessary to initiate the process of diagnostic semiosis.

According to Hjelmslev the verbal substance is only one of the possible semiotic substances in which the “universal principle of formation” is accomplished. Glossematics is not only a theory of verbal languages but also a theory of language or of the whole semiotic purport. As science of the functions which contains nothing except for its own form, this theory encounters Peircean iconism. The verbality and the linearity of the signifiant therefore lose their pre-eminence: the algebraic alphabet substitutes for the phonetic alphabet. The Résumé of a theory of language is a graphical representation, or a diagrammatical dictionary, and a terminological clarification of such an alphabet.

Genre has been a critical issue in discourse analysis as well as in other disciplines. Based on a literature review of the concept of genre and taking judgments as one type of genre in legal settings, the present study provides a corpus-based insight into the nature of genre. The literature review per se reveals that genre has one typical feature of a sign, that is, being subject to multiple and alternative interpretations; in other words, genre as a sign may have various interpretants. The present study unravels the actual generic structures, distinguishes different types of generic structures within the given genre, and then defines the dominant generic structure of judgments in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. This study also examines and contrasts the generic structure potential of judgments in each jurisdiction. In addition, the variation of Mainland China's judgments over time is briefly discussed. Comparing the generic structures of judgments among the three jurisdictions, as well as the structures of judgments in Mainland China over time, the paper argues that genre also has the essential features of a sign, that is, the characteristics of temporality and spatiality.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding should be read as an instance of an allegorical discursive practice of the English society during the Second World War. The allegory is interpreted as an interweaving between the apparent contradictory sides of a semiotic square and a Rubik cube that should merge through different permutations having as a final effect the knowledge that the children's innocence comes to an end. Our analysis unfolds the “semiotic web” (Sebeok) based on the metaphorical reasoning that the main characters, shipwrecked on a deserted island, use in order to make sense of the new environment.

This study explores the morphology of iconic gestures during deception. Participants narrated a static cartoon story twice. In one condition they provided an accurate account of the story, in the other they were instructed to introduce false details. Participants produced significantly fewer iconic gestures when describing plot-line events deceptively than when narrating comparable episode units truthfully. Deceptive gestures had significantly fewer post-stroke holds and shorter stroke phase durations than those produced alongside truthful utterances. Following Beattie (Visible thought: The new psychology of body language, Routledge, 2003) three narrators in the deceptive condition produced gestures that in their morphology contradicted the semantic information encoded in their speech stream, and ultimately signaled possible deceit.

This article analyzes the discourse of propaganda in the apogee of the Stalinist era in Poland (1949–1953) as creating a quasi-mythical reality (mythopoeia). The analysis draws on the structuralist conceptions of myth-making following the work of Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes expanded to the paradigm of social semiotics. The study demonstrates how the positioning of social actors creates cosmogonic relations between them. In this way, it subscribes into the project of sémiotique politique . It is argued that the key technique underlying the propaganda discourse is the dichotomization of reality reducible to a basic contrast between “communism” versus “capitalism.” Following Levi-Strauss, I analyze this dichotomization along the vertical and horizontal axes. I follow Barthes in treating myths not as a fundamental story but as a new unity of sense that is built over the common meanings. The material that informs this article is drawn from the early editions of the most influential daily newspaper in socialist Poland: Trybuna Ludu (People's Tribune) and a lifestyle weekly Przekrój .

The article contains a concise presentation of a proposal for the explanation of the basic logical and conceptual structure of meaningful human experience as expressed in language. The core of the argument is that meaningful human experience is something that can only be derived from mutual interpersonal awareness. The article contains a proposal for a terminology for the conceptual details of the structure of inter-subjective experience and an attempt to base a command of natural language within this structure. The article ends with a discussion of the main thesis of the article as it relates to other recent approaches to the study of meaning in natural language.

The article examines the use of semiotics in media theory, advancing a critique of Saussurian approaches to media and harnessing Peirce's sign theory as a way to analyze media, with reference to the sign “terrorist.” The tiered model of media representation based on Saussure's sign relation is found to under-theorize the materiality of the sign, the indeterminacy of meaning, the significance of the speaking subject, and the ideological and institutional forces that work on the sign. The interpretant in Peirce's model allows an alternate approach to media analysis in which media can be considered a kind of material culture, produced by people in regulated settings and encountered by interpreting minds in various contexts. Metasemiotic frameworks are found to operate on the sign “terrorist,” but the ongoing process of semiosis also allows for the possibility of change.

The article proposes a short bio-bibliographic profile of the seventeenth-century Spanish polymath Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, exposes the main contents of one of his Latin works, the Grammatica Audax (litt.: “the Audacious Grammar”), and focuses on the passages of this work that shed new light on the history of semiotic ideas. The paper dwells, in particular, on the first part of the Grammatica Audax, the Methodica, where Caramuel adopts the linguistic approach of Renaissance speculative grammars and elaborates his ideas on the combinatorial nature of linguistic expression, the definition of meaning, the types of signification, the naturalness versus conventionality of signs and words, etc. Two points of the Grammatica Audax are deeply relevant vis-à-vis the history of semiotic ideas: first, Caramuel's speculations on signs as relations; second, his original conception of signification as “moral or virtual transubstantiation.” The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of rekindling the interest of contemporary semioticians in Caramuel's neglected works. Like most Catholic scholars after the Council of Trent, Caramuel conceived of signs, signification, language, and communication so as to provide a theoretical ground for early-modern Catholic spirituality against the critiques of Protestant theologians. Yet, such a theological effort gave rise to (proto-) semiotic insights whose importance for the development of modern and contemporary semiotics should not be underestimated.

We compared three types of auditory interface in personal computing environments: verbal messages, earcons, and auditory icons. We applied Peirce's sign theory to the three auditory interfaces to conceptualize verbal messages as “dicent symbol legisigns,” earcons as “dicent indexical legisigns,” and auditory icons as “remantic iconic sinsigns.” Based on theories of the triple triangle model for sign production (Kim, Semiotica 132: 75–100, 2000), we suggested that (a) the three auditory interfaces demand different levels of mental effort for interpretation and (b) the extent to which users are able to interpret the auditory signs of a computer correctly correlates to the communicability of its interface.

The study of nsibidi , one of Africa's native writing systems, has mainly taken two routes — the taxonomic, which is concerned with the classification of nsibidi signs, and the genealogical, which attempts to resolve the question of where and how nsibidi originated. This essay undertakes a semiotic and literary analysis of nsibidi as an influential language of the crossroads. In modern Nigerian literature, for instance, the poetics of “ nsibidi ” may be said to include a weighty concern with cosmologies or trajectories of origin and the representation or renewal of an existential drama rooted in a myth of the crossroads.

In this article we discuss the concept of “materiality” within a framework created by two apparently divergent fields, which, however, converge with regard to their pedagogical and communicative content. Theatre semiotics proposes forms and structures that shed light on such material aspects of learning environments related to physics as the instantiation of “narrative spaces.” Our perspective focuses first on the modalities by means of which various sign-vehicles (i.e., verbal, visual, kinesic-corporeal or sound-related signs), being agents of narration, define spaces, and, second, on how such spaces as referents are linked with reality (i.e., on real, imaginary, and abstract spaces).

Victoria Lady Welby, Mary Everest Boole, and Susanne K. Langer, three original thinkers from different chronotopic backgrounds and with different sociocultural profiles who come together (ideally in the case of Langer, in real life in the case of the former two) on the basis of their common interest in signs, meaning, and understanding. This essay highlights significant aspects in the research itineraries of each of these three women in semiotics: Welby with her proposal of significs and concept of mother-sense, or primal sense; Boole who with Welby works on the problem of subjectivity and explores the realm of logic in relation to love, passion, and desire, beyond conventional boundaries in the order of discourse; and Langer who proposes philosophy in a new key with a special focus on signs, symbols, and signification.

This study contrasts two writings to demonstrate how semiotic discourses serve as sources of inspiration leading beyond academic responses to the creative composition of fictional texts. It will be shown how Saussure's theory of the sign purveyed the raw material for a short story by Peter Bichsel and how Plato's Cratylus provided the blueprint for two central characters in a novel by Joseph Roth. Using the conspicuous example of Bichsel's short story as a springboard to outline the creative technique called semiomimesis, the indepth analysis of Roth's Hotel Savoy affords a full explanation of what constitutes semiomimetic art.

The article deals with the subject of the ways of preserving non-genetic data in cultural communication. It is emphasized that there exist matrices that are responsible for transferring data through generations. The imitation matrix is a key concept of iconic origin that gives sense to the mimicking of an object. The referential matrices are embedded in the deictic structures of the utterances. The hierarchical senses embody symbol concepts. Behind non-genetic data stands the force of semiosis, that is, of autopoetic nature. The summary of the message is that humans possess stable “outer slots” to be filled with predictable content.

Reading multimodal (popularized) scientific texts predominantly is studied in terms of technical decoding skills said to be required. In this article, I take inspirations from anthropological and ethnomethodological approaches to reading generally that are consistent with a cultural-historical approach and develop them for my study of the reading of online (popularized) science-related texts. I develop a framework for reading science texts published online from a cultural-historical practice perspective and provide exemplary analyses of reading such multimodal texts.

There are basically three main problems that this article tries to address. First, it aims to elaborate and take to a more general level the main principles of the semiotic theory of hegemony that has been proposed recently. It takes as a starting point the discourse-theoretical approach to political analysis developed most notably by Ernesto Laclau and the Essex School, and tries to complement this with the insights provided by the semiotics of culture of Yuri Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow School. Second, it tries to develop a second-range model of hegemony that could be of service for designing empirical studies of concrete hegemonic formations and their different modalities. Third, it strives to provide a preliminary sketch of a concrete analysis of a hegemonic formation that has produced a dominating signifier “Singing Revolution” for identifying very heterogeneous set of events in Estonia's recent history.

The conceptuality of works of visual art is a manifestation of the conceptuality of sign systems in general. In visual art, concepts rely upon verbal sign systems, including texts that prevail in culture, as well as upon sign systems of visual art and its most famous works. Conceptual schemes are intensified by metaphors, metonymies, and interrelations of denotations and connotations. Basic senses of the entire conceptual scheme and separate concepts are accompanied by various meanings of visual signs. Developed manifestations of such conceptuality are revealed in the course of analysis of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's works, in which some Hieronymus Bosch's concepts and visual signs are used.