Volume 2014, Issue 202

This paper explores Peirce's method of semiotic exemplification by a careful examination of his thinking about the relationship between interpretation and replication, the subdivision of signs into genuine and degenerate classes, and the role of logically necessary systems of representation in guiding the growth of scientific knowledge. Examples of Peirce's forays into topics usually treated within the social sciences and humanities demonstrate both the imperialism and the delimitation of his semiotic method.

This article introduces the notion of heterosemiosis to describe the overt juxtaposition of different sign systems in graphic narrative texts. Using Guibert et al.'s (2009) The Photographer as an example, I argue that heterosemiosis is typically signalled through the use of ellipsis, excess, and/or some form of metadiscourse. Heterosemiosis can be used to draw attention to the problematic nature of all representation, thereby disrupting the narrative power of the author(s)/narrator(s) and opening up the possibility of alternative meanings and story interpretations. I also explain why I prefer the new term heterosemiosis to the commonly used notion of “hybridity.”

This study explores the fundamental nature of the iconic gestures that speakers produce alongside speech in story-telling by analyzing whether these gestures are sensitive to the judged importance of individual elements in a story. The study focused on two individual semantic features, namely “size” and “relative position” and identified each and every instance of these in 180 narrations and analyzed whether these were encoded in speech, in gesture, or in speech and gesture. ‘Importance’ was assessed by asking ten judges (per story) to identify the five most important instances of “size” and the five most important instances of “relative position” and this was used, employing various statistical algorithms, to calibrate the significance of each element of the story. The study found that overall gestures were significantly more likely to encode high importance information than medium or low importance information. This was also found with the semantic feature “size” considered on its own but there was a reversal of this trend when “relative position” information was considered separately. An explanation is offered for this reversal in terms of the way that gestures encode position information in the first place.

The original reason for modern semiotic movement had been to make a general attempt to systematically increase the semantic clarification of the discourses of the traditional humanities through getting rid of the domination of philosophical-dogmatic stereotypes and by dint of intensifying interdisciplinary-directed theoretical practice. The emerging single-disciplinary tendency of the current semiotic scholarship caused by professional competitions and determinism of marketing has pressed semiotics to develop along professional-utilitarian and methodological-pragmatic directions. The result of these tendencies promotes its further disconnection from the original aim of contemporary semiotic movement directed to the scientific and rational progress of the theoretical humanities. Accordingly, this institutionalization of the single-disciplinary-directed semiotics could substantially weaken the scientific orientation and creative potential of semiotic-theoretical practice. This paper presents a double conception of institutional semiotics to deal with the subject.

Reported speech is the most important feature in the reproduction and transformation of language as a living phenomenon. Speakers generally draw on prosodic means to distinguish reported from reporting discourse. In multi-lingual contexts, change of language and translations add resources and constraints on setting reported speech apart. This study analyzes the phenomenon of reported speech in a multi-lingual context where the multi-lingual source texts are available in the setting. Prosody and (deictic, iconic) gestures are important means to set apart both direct and indirect reported speech.

That the wall paintings of the Early Stone Age, more particularly Upper Paleolithic, are more than mere forms of artistry has been widely acknowledged by now. Investigations into their background have resulted in interpretations as diverse as hunting scenes and metaphysical connotations. From a technical point of view the paintings appear to be more than a picture gallery. The animals painted, rather than being images are carriers of messages, language-like in nature. As vehicles of thought they combine a subject and a predicate: the depicted animal and a property attributed to it. Each message comprised in one symbolic image has been transferred from a spoken sentence to a pictured representation. On the painted cave walls we are confronted with the earliest writings of mankind.

Although legal terms are conventionally considered to have self-referential, self-closed meaning independent of context, a legal term only acquires its meaning within a given context. As long as the context varies, the meaning of the same legal term as a signifier may change correspondingly. Based on case studies by applying semiotics, we argue that a legal term is just a sign within its sign system; a legal term as an individual sign does not have any inherent meaning, and its meaning can only exist in the relationship with other signs or sign systems. In other words, a legal term only denotes in a particular temporal and spatial context. Through this study, we conclude four propositions about a legal term as a sign: first, the connection of a legal term with a legal concept is relatively arbitrary; second, the meaning of a legal term exists in a sign system; third, a legal term can be subject to multiple interpretations; fourth, the defining of a legal term may be affected by other sign systems.

Drawing on a corpus of online reviews, my article carries out a qualitative study of readers' responses to the child narrators of two contemporary novels, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Emma Donoghue's Room (2010). What these narrators have in common is that they are both are affected by developmental disorders: Christopher, the protagonist of The Curious Incident , is on the autistic spectrum, whereas Jack – the five-year-old narrator of Room – was born and brought up in captivity. Through my analysis of the reviews I explore the interplay of defamiliarization and empathy in readers' engagement with these “strange” narrators; I also show how empathetic perspective-taking can work in tandem with sympathy (feeling for a character from an observer position).

On the basis of a single case analysis of a meeting in a Danish company, the article shows how participants cooperate and draw on different semiotic resources in their co-construction of a new idea. Thus, the article provides detailed descriptions of the first phase of an innovation process. The analysis is conducted on the basis of a video-ethnographic method and tools from multimodal studies and conversion analysis. The article shows how a new idea is constructed in a context of rejection by participants' affiliated response and distribution of cognition.

The logician and philosopher Georg Klaus (1912–1974) used to be the sole pioneer in establishing semiotics in former East Germany, becoming a forerunner for its later broad acceptance within disciplines like philosophy, cybernetics, linguistics, aesthetics, etc. On the occasion of Georg Klaus's 100th birthday in 2012, the article describes the importance of his semiotic writings within the broader context of his works and discusses its influence on the development of semiotics in Germany.

Sign studies are traditionally divided into two major traditions: Peircean and Saussurean. However, other thinkers theorized the sign in radically unique terms. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is one of these parallel thinkers. Rather than considering the sign in exclusively logical or linguistic terms, Heidegger claimed that the sign grounded existence itself. The sign was at the very heart of being. Strangely, Heidegger's contribution to sign studies is, on the whole, disregarded. With this paper I will explain Heidegger's conception of the sign, in hope that this will broaden our field's theoretical encyclopaedia.

The aim the following the paper is to provide a theoretical backing to the semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories. The logic of mythological thinking operates within conspiracy theories, with their organizing principle of homomorphic resemblance. Conspiracy theories do not interpret events as a coincidence, but rather as being motivated by one originary cause – evil. The non-mythological type of signification also functions in the logic of conspiracy theories. This leads to the perception of the conspirers as a strictly organized group, divided into complex sub-systems. The main goal of this article is to explain the interaction between these two contradictory signification-tendencies, for that the concept of code-text is used. I will illustrate my arguments with examples derived from the commentary posted at the Para-Web forum under the topic of “The death of the Polish president and the rest of the elite.”

Surveillance is a part of our everyday lives, and it does not include just the cameras watching over individuals safety and collecting images of them. Surveillance includes all kinds of techniques of data gathering, for instance, the keeping of medical histories and the conduct of surveys. Directly related to the medical sphere is the notion of biopolitics. The aim of biopolitics is to control and normalize individuals lives by subjecting them to treatments, proposing to them possibilities of a better life (or death), etc. This paper deals with biopolitics and its relations to surveillance (it can be said that surveillance is a set of techniques used to implement biopolitics). To mediate between these two concepts I have chosen a disorder called Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, which is becoming ever more prevalent among children and lately also adults. I will investigate how this disorder – which is definitely not an irrefutable medical fact – is being constructed through surveys and biopolitical techniques and what kind of a subject ADHD treatment hopes to create.

In the absence of melodic and motivic structures, how does signification function in atonal music? By extending the properties of actoriality, this article focuses on the goal-directedness of kinetic energy as an independent property of actoriality. The demonstration focuses on various modalities of goal-directed kinetic energy in meaningful segments of György Ligeti's second string quartet (1968) in order to promote an understanding of the overall design. Because time and space are integrated in the various modalities of atonal musical processes, a conceptual framework for making sense of signification in Ligeti's string quartet as a whole becomes possible.

This paper presents case examples of experimental literature that tap into the potentials of multimodality in the creation of an embodied aesthetic experience. In each case, translation performs the contingency of meaning by traversing the interliminal space between discursive sites: two versions of the same language, two semiotic planes. By reading the multimodal aspects of these texts, the paper traces the function of translation in foregrounding the materiality of the linguistic sign. It argues that in enacting an embodied literature, translation is not primarily about the transference of meaning from one text-site to another; it becomes an intervening site in its own right, where signs, readers and media intercourse to create a sensuous fabric that adduces “the pleasure of the text.” The paper also discusses the nature of aesthetics created by translation-mediated multimodal literature, and argues for critical attention to the role of translation in advancing the corporeality of literature.

We analyze Estonian history-writing on Estonia's regaining of independence in light of the semiotic theory of hegemony. Besides articulating this theory as a framework for analysis we provide an account for the application of its general categories to history-writing as a specific system of meaning by introducing concepts from theories of history/historical memory. We chart how via representing Estonia's transition in the form of teleological narrative a political antagonism is constructed between the “proponents” and “opponents” to Estonia's independence, and how several important aspects of Estonia's process of transition are peripherized and excluded from the narrative representation of the transition.

This research discusses communication and meaning in the context of orality, using a variety of perspectives including memory theory, media and communication theory, and semiotics. Drawing on the work of Walter Ong, it provides new insight about the characteristics of oral narration by assessing the memes, tropes, and phraseological units in the testimonies of Armenian Genocide survivors. This research identifies replicable forms of stories and devices; it proposes that oral narration of non-fictional topics designed to convey information to others is intuitive, reactive, directed, fuzzy, and sticky. The focal point is the meaning embedded in the structure of the narrations.

The importance of online communication has pushed researchers from several communication-related fields to contribute to its design and evaluation; when it comes to websites, usability studies have highly contributed to improve the quality of online applications. Even though usability has taken the point of view of users, its main focus is on the application itself, and on how it should be better designed, and implemented accordingly. This article argues that actual usages by a website's users, as well as the business goals of its publisher should be included in the analysis, to offer a better understanding of website communication. To provide a wider, and more adequate approach to the issue, it is suggested that Austin's model of communicative acts can offer a clear map of all involved elements and needed viewpoints, helping in designing a comprehensive model for researchers in website communication.

This study explores some ways of perceiving and interpreting the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez's proposition as regards the status of painting. It draws on Saussure's and Hegel's approaches to creative consciousness, in which a subject is supposed not only to negate the distinctions between the past and the present, but also to open up his/her thoughts for the future. This paper begins with a series of questioning as regards a compositional scheme that Velázquez included in two of his major works, Las Meninas and Fable of Arachne . First of all, it is argued that it is essential to recognize the ambiguity of the actual object of representation in these paintings. Then Saussure is conjoined with Peirce in the light of Jakobson's charged interest in decoding artifices devised in the arts. Such a mingled approach helps to expand our perception by stringing Velázquez's works together with those of his forerunners. In the first stage of interpretation, his technique is appreciated as a result of the need to overcome rivalries or surpass previous achievements. However, in order to look deeper into the painter's mind, this study introduces another stage of interpretation by drawing on Hegel's radical notion of memory. This second stage underlines the paradox that we cannot really get rid of the past when coming up with any kind of genuine innovation. Velázquez's thoughts are therefore revealed as a continuous process of piecing together and modifying desirable elements found in his forerunners. Finally, both interpretations are integrated within the larger context of evolutionary epistemology that actually allows the coexistence of different truths within our consciousness. This context helps extend our perception to certain artists beyond Velázquez's time and environment. It is argued that Velázquez's proposition actually questions the thorny task of achieving objective representations. It is also discovered that his proposition has invited some collaborations in which artists engage with pleasure with the negativity between seeing and thinking.

Piaget's system of cognitive development is analyzed, namely, the semiosis of indexical representation and use. His notion of scheme is discussed, capitalizing on index as the most primary semiotic tool in early ontogeny; afterward, advances in spatial skills (topological and projective reasoning) are discussed in light of the foundational role of index in unfolding these spatial concepts. Finally, index's primary function in the onset and perpetuation of perspective-taking competencies constitutes the essential thrust. The claim is that index is the most essential component to ascertain advancements in spatial logic, in that it organizes and triggers the coalescence of temporal memories of different perceptual states. These memories, in turn, serve as the foundation for complex spatial cognitions (decentration and reversibility) necessary to understand points of view.

Visual perception and visual connection are implemented thanks to many codes. Formation of code typology is one of the problem of semiotics. This typology may be substantiated ontologically – through universals of heterogeneity of visual art works. Groups of elements and relations of heterogeneity that are connected with structures correspond to various codes. In accordance with this fundamental types of codes, their subtypes and combinations are allocated. The suggested chart of code typology describes the differences and peculiarities of language-type systems and texts of visual information and visual art.

Following Richard Schechner, a current view is that the common denominator of theatre and performance art lies in their encounter of live performers and live spectators; i.e., in being subspecies of “performance.” That theatre is a performing art cannot be denied. However, I suggest here that (a) the category of “performance” is too abstract in order to learn anything about each of these artistic activities; (b) in contrast to performance art, the specific difference of theatre lies in the principle of “deflection of reference” that characterizes “acting”; and (c) this is not a matter of gradation, but of an existential gap.

This paper argues that America and Britain have succeeded in globe-cultural domination through visual semiotics and commoditization inherent in their music videos. The paper argues that Anglo-American music, often in different genres, has virtually penetrated different parts of the globe where it has been appropriated to suit the local context. However, the visual semiotics represented through their music videos reveal how they have succeeded as the de-facto authoritative authors of dominant discourses replicated elsewhere. The most visible aspect of this power play is represented in the symbolic and occasional explicit display of the American and the British flag in many of their music videos and the flashing of the “green back” – US dollar. The lyrical content celebrates the “successes” of global materialism and cultural neo-liberalism as championed by the two nations. The paper uses critical political-economy theories of the media in the context of cultural studies. It further uses semiotics as a methodology to critically deconstruct the meanings behind Maroon 5's “Like Jagger” music video from a Kenyan perspective.

Dinner, as the main meal in the West, is a symbolically laden practice. In this paper, we seek to better understand the cultural meaning of dinner by using a unique combination of a sophisticated quantitative methodology for studying non-linear dynamics and a careful interpretative cultural semiotic analysis. By using the Corpus of Historical American English, we retrieved the words significantly collocated with “Dinner” along 200 years. Using joint recurrence analysis, we have identified the words that synchronize with each other in a non-linear fashion and used them for constructing a representation of Dinner's semiotic field. By analyzing the graph, it was found that “Soup” is the main concept associated with the practice of Dinner along 200 years. The meaning of this finding is interpreted by proposing a semiotic explanation pointing to the “surplus” of soup in the semio-sphere of the Western culture.

The goal of this text is to compare trans-multi-interdisciplinarity and trans-multi-interculturality and to establish links between the trans, the multi and the inter in the general context of the legitimacy of symbolic and geographic displacement and of multiple encounters with alterity. These connections are then verified through the analysis of the encounter between two radical alterities, that of the human character Piscine Patel and that of the tiger in Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

Oswald Spengler's theory of historico-cultural cycles is based on the notion of the “prime symbol,” an abstract metaphor for space/extension manifested in the art, science, and religion of a given culture. This paper is a preliminary reconciliation of the Spenglerian semiotic anatomy of culture writ large with a few of the semiotic insights of Peirce. I propose that the developmental cycle of a given culture does not contain the Spenglerian Prime Symbol (Spengler's view) but is instead contained and conditioned by it. Inasmuch as a Culture in the aggregate is also a Symbol in the full Peircean sense of the word, I also propose that the development of each Culture is an effort of the Culture-Symbol to represent itself in terms of its Prime Symbol.

The forms of emblematic gesture and other communicative moves used in hailing taxicabs are shaped by the urban built environment and by the micropolitics sparked by what Goffman called the “loose coupling” of the interaction and social orders. Cabdrivers evaluate street hails and choose whether or not to stop for prospective passengers; hailers seek to communicate their desirability as passengers within the limited mode of the street hail. The conditions and constraints that underlie the practice and reception of street hailing are considered. A survey on methods used to hail taxis was sent to a listserv of taxi drivers in San Francisco, California. The drivers evaluated street hails in terms of two axes – clarity and propriety – and three levels of context: the immediate interactional context of the street; the anticipated interactional context of the cab ride; and the political context, or the political discourse framing taxicab regulation in the city.

In this study, we present a model of change in visual perception that is complimentary to a prior semiotic model of static visual perception. As in the previous study, a sign is defined to be a triadic relation that is derived from universal categories of thought, as first proposed by Charles S. Peirce. This semiotic model is based upon the empirical findings of Benjamin Libet in the neurophysiology of sensory awareness. He has shown that sensory awareness is a physiologically discontinuous process although it is experienced as a subjectively continuous process. Libet has demonstrated that, successive intervals of sensory awareness are separated by brief intervals of unconscious signal processing. We propose that this unconscious processing of sensory signals entails the formation of unconscious interpretants that mediate between successive intervals of sensory awareness. Furthermore, vision science provides empirical evidence that the formation of unconscious interpretants is governed by the Peircean categories of thought. On this basis, categorical typologies are proposed for both veridical and illusory visual change.

My paper draws on Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari and the work of the French multimedia performance artist Orlan in order to bring together the various theoretical strands that examine the body as a phenomenological and speculative entity that has the discursivity and potentiality to function as a performing body within a spatio-temporal framework (a body that is always already scripted within performance and society at large), as well as those theories that move from a Western metaphysics of presence to a de-subjectified semiotics, such as was evidenced in the 1980s and 1990s, and to show what is at stake in that politico-theoretical shift, as well as the implications of this for the performing and viewed/viewing body. Can a theatrical and performing body be confined to a purely visual semiotic framework? What is lost when semiotics – with its poststructuralist (or, in my view, almost antitheatrical) bent, views theatre (and of course the body) as imbricated in semiology or a system of cultural signs rather than perception? This work sets out to pressure these questions. At the same time, it seeks to examine how the performing body can break free from spatio-temporal boundaries and fixed identities and exceeds and even resists any definitive attempts at hermeneutic representation, in effect defying semiotic and semantic systems of representation.

The classifications of signs are among the most important topics of Peirce's theory of signs. The 10 classes of signs were developed from 1903 and represent an important refinement of the fundamental division of signs into icons, indexes, and symbols. In this paper we present two diagrammatic models for 10 classes, proposed by Peirce, and an interpretation of the reasoning behind their development, based on the analysis of preparatory versions of these models.

This paper will position the debate on plant intelligence as central to determining the efficacy of establishing a phytosemiotics proper. Memory, learning, and indexical salience may be operative features in determining plant intelligence and thus a ground for a more rigorous phytosemiotics. In order to move beyond the taxonomic boundary, we will consider phytosemiotics as receiving greater or lesser support from the Uexkull's concept of the Umwelt and Simondon's concept of metastability and transduction. It will be concluded that Simondon's ideas are more conducive to an explanation of emergence and becoming as useful tools in a future phytosemiotics, but that it resists any hylomorphist approach to understanding plant intelligence and behavior.

This paper is a rereading of Peter Fenves's readings of leading texts among Benjamin's early writings; readings contained in Fenves's important work Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. Of chief concern here is a crucial lacuna in Fenves's idea of Benjamin's thought, a blind-spot that reveals, in relief, Benjamin's radical and consistent rejection of a fundamental Cartesian/Kantian premise: what is commonly termed the ergodic axiom (aka “identity axiom”). In these early writings, it is argued, Benjamin was indeed constructing a new philosophical foundation, residing in dialogism. And remarkably, an almost identical foundation simultaneously was being built in Russia by Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Volosinov, leading members of the Bakhtin circle (1918–1929).