Volume 2014, Issue 199

Science in the modern sense has its origins in early modernity, while the concept of Lebenswelt comes to us from the late modern development of Husserlian phenomenology. Umwelt, by contrast, comes principally from the work of Jakob von Uexküll. Semiotics, by contrast both with science and with phenomenology, is a postmodern development – indeed, as far as philosophy is concerned, semiotics is the very heart of the postmodern turn of intellectual culture. My thesis is that the concept of ``environment'' most properly pertains to the understanding of science, ``Umwelt'' best suits phenomenology, while ``Lebenswelt'' requires a semiotic interpretation to achieve its richest potential.

When focusing on some examples of the new Berber experimental novels (in the Tachelhit dialectal variety of south-western Morocco), one could consider that the dimensional aspects of the new genre are less relevant than the experimentation itself, although the dimensional aspects could be grasped by understanding the hesitation between the analytical nomination and the aim of the authors to identify literarily and socially their texts as novels. Hence, the novelistic experimentation could be better explained by analyzing the process of preparing coherent uttering conditions permitting the plural voicing and the cognitive and semantic reception within an oral narrative culture. The narrative production is related to a scriptural process of both revealing and testifying a ``shift into writing'' to the reader by fictionalizing the limits and possibilities of the written language and by marking its invention in meta-textual levels. On the other hand, the experimental novels transform the socio-linguistic reality based aspects into fiction. Here semiotic and linguistic methodological frame could be a more productive way to deal with the texts.

This paper presents findings of a pilot project that supports a semiotic notion as a framework for understanding the lure of gangs among young people. The notion is called the Symbolic Power Effect (SPE), indicating that signs and symbols are powerful shapers of identity and, thus, major sources of attraction in gang membership. The project consists of three interviews of adolescents living in two Canadian cities that, when tabulated, show the force of the SPE in determining gang membership. Overall, we argue that semiotics is an effective tool in understanding behavior of this kind and thus should be used more in the relevant research on gangs.

This article reviews the situation-specific nature of documentary filmmaking that invites an ethical practice distinct from moral discourses about visual representation. It offers a philosophy of ethics and communication perspective on the distance between viewer, viewed, the experience of viewing, and the visual semiotics of overcoming that distance. The article is a revised and updated version of an invited lecture delivered at the Jerusalem Center for Ethics, part of the first Seminar on Documentary Ethics held at the 28th Annual Jerusalem International Film Festival, Israel, July 12, 2011.

Micropolitics examines how the signs of everyday conversation reinforce capitalist relations of production and the interests of the capitalist class. Review and assessment of published research indicate that Address, Self-Disclosure, Seating, Eye-Contact, and Touch are reliable and valid indexes of interpersonal hierarchy and solidarity. The claim is that high hierarchy/low solidarity messages establish an unconscious acceptance of the idea that social inequality and alienation are necessary, that is, the result of human nature. On the other hand, low hierarchy/high solidarity messages establish the foundation for a predisposition to respond to equality and compassion as socially acceptable ways to organize society. Cross-cultural research supports the claim that the signs of interpersonal hierarchy and solidarity in everyday conversation are learned behaviors, that is, the result of nurture.

At the core of this article is an interview to Boris Uspenskij, in which the well-known protagonist of the Tartu-Moscow School (currently Head of the Laboratory of Linguistics and Semiotics at the National Research University ``Higher School of Economics'' in Moscow) develops on semiotics and the sense and aims of semiotic research, communication and its central role in human consciousness, semiotic theory and methodology, in general and specifically referring to his personal approach. The interview is introduced by a brief essay, in which, by presenting and outlining the main thesis of Ego Loquens (one of the most recent works by Uspenskij, which so far has not appeared in English) and its articulations, Uspenskij's reflections on the semiotics of communication emerge.

The study questions the prevailing opinion that lexemes are the only relevant units conveying meaning in signed language lexicons. Content analysis performed on 560 entries taken randomly from Israeli sign language (ISL) show that the distribution of the formational parameters of the lexical forms is motivated in the core-lexicon by cognitive-perceptual features triggering lexical paradigms: hence, basic units are actually basic signs. The findings thus reject the separation of semantics and phonology in ISL. They suggest that invariant meanings motivate signals in all language and discourse contexts and deepen understanding of the role of iconicity in signed languages.

The purpose of this article is twofold: First, within a Peircean framework it shall be demonstrated how there is a relation between the compositional structure of certain types of print advertisements and their bringing about inductive comprehension, and how the consumer can be understood as a bundle of habits. It is the assumption that advertising that supports an inductive effect particularly appeals to the cognitive tendency of habit formation in the consumer. Second, it is asked whether advertisements that predominantly invite inductive processes of comprehension also influence the formation of consumer satisfaction; the perspective is that of the confirmation paradigm within advertisement research. Inductive advertisements support cognitive habit formation through confirmation, and the confirmation paradigm explains exactly consumer satisfaction with reference to confirmation. Hence, the article can be seen as a contribution to a Peircean inspired semiotics of advertising that also concerns the discussion of some of the many processes and parameters active in the influence and formation of consumer satisfaction.

The present paper asks tackles questions that can be briefly formulated as follows: 1) how to visualize power or hegemonic relationship? and 2) does visual rhetoric have anything to offer to research on the visualization processes of hegemony? One of the instruments through which power relations are established in society is photography. The following paper discusses the relationship between the theory of hegemony as elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and the semiotics of culture of Yuri Lotman. The reason for believing that this incorporation will be successful is the very apparent theoretical congeniality between them. They both traverse the Saussurean ontological terrain. Using the photo of the Song Festival (1950) in Soviet Estonia as an example, I attempt to reveal the hegemonic signification process and how the concept of rhetoric may help to clarify this process. The main categories of analysis are tropes, metaphor, and metonymy.

This article looks at the different cultural codes that create the luxury sign value. Research data were gathered from a sample of 1,372 magazine ads taken from six magazines, comprising twelve product categories. We deal with only three products from this sample. The analysis focuses on the construction of perfume ads. Our main hypothesis is that the image of perfume as a luxury product is lowering. Until well into the 1960s, perfumes were exclusive luxury products. Since the 1970s, however, the perfume industry has developed explosively. The article examines the effect of this boom on the construction of the perfume sign value within advertisements. A comparison is made with ads of exclusive watches on one hand and household appliances on the other hand. The results confirm the devaluation hypothesis, showing a few luxury codes combined with advertising codes regularly found in advertisements for mass consumption products.

Even though semiotic analysis of media texts has always viewed advertising as an exemplary object of investigation, only a limited number of research studies has concentrated on unconventional social campaigns. As we will try to demonstrate through the analysis of some international environment-oriented case studies, social advertising is not merely a subgenre of advertising language, and the effectiveness of communication strategies used by social campaigns in fact depends upon a sort of ``semiotic autonomy.'' Using a textual semiotic approach, we will focus on some of the most frequently recurring unconventional strategies in environment awareness campaigns, with the aim of exploring the issue of social advertising effectiveness in depth.

This paper presents the analytic apparatus I have developed to uncover the underlying structure of conversation in American culture, the Verbal Flow Structure, by applying it to an unusually complex case, Jim and Bonnie's Telephone Conversation, previously partially investigated by Schegloff. The basic constructs are Nucleus (the main line) versus Satellites (excursions from the main line). The nucleus has three slots: Entry, Core, and Exit. Entry and exit are optionally filled. The core is always filled as the core unit conveys the information defining the sequence. The core unit is constituted by a single init or by a core unit proper and one or several extensions. The core unit may have two types of satellites: (a) close satellites, Back Channels and Remarks; (b) distant satellites, Incidental Queries. This paper shows how the participants' repeated use of these building blocks may yield as complex a Verbal Flow Structure as the one underlying the Telephone Conversation. In concluding, some suggestions are made regarding how the Verbal Flow Structure can provide the analyzed context within which to pursue further investigations.

The 2011 Thai general election was seen by many Thai political analysts as a watershed moment that would hopefully be the tipping point of socio-political reconciliation in the drawn out political struggle that has characterized Thai politics since 2005. The highly contested nature of Thai politics becomes salient when viewing campaign posters pictorial and linguistic content. The most controversial of which was the ``Vote No'' campaign taken on by the For Heaven and Earth Party, which is a political party nominally associated with Thailand's conservative People's Alliance for Democracy. This study seeks to unwrap and decode the semiotics of this party's political campaign posters in Thailand's 2011 general election by providing cultural context to the application of multimodal discourse analysis and critical semiotics framework. I will argue that the ``Vote No'' campaign and its campaign posters depicting politicians as animals is a continuing political discourse of conservative Buddhist philosophers/scholars that reaches back to the 1980s. Furthermore, the ``Vote No'' campaign seeks to create dissonance and reinstate conservative rule via monarchial and/or military intervention by creating political deadlock thereby undermining democratic rights and rule by the exercising of democratic rights of voting, thus disenfranchising citizens by their own hand.