Volume 2015, Issue 203 - Double Special Issue: Linguistic and literary aspects of perspectivity De-essentializing authenticity: A semiotic approach

The relationship between meaning and perspectivity has been recognized for a long time both in linguistics and in literary theory. It is well-known that the perspectival character of our sensory experiences constitutes an important factor in the determination of meaning. But the nature of the relationship between meaning and perspective is heavily contested. Perspectival phenomena are sometimes treated as isolated or local issues. In some cases, however, they are conceived of as playing a fundamental role in scientific theorizing. This introductory paper gives a short overview of the current trends and results from this ongoing research.

This paper offers a model for the interpretation of stories as referential scenes in narrative discourses as joint attentional scenes (see Tomasello 1999). It is proposed that narrative interpretation crucially builds on the context-dependent processing of the physical, social, and mental worlds presented by the narrative, pertaining to spatio-temporal relations, interpersonal relations, and the mental states of participants, respectively (see Tátrai 2010a; cf. Verschueren 1999). Set against the background of social cognitive linguistics (cf. Sinha 1999; Croft 2009), the model has a strong pragmatic orientation with its focus on the role of two context-dependent vantage points in the generation of a discourse universe (see Sanders and Spooren 1997). The first is the referential center that forms the basis of the situative grounding of the narrative's spatio-temporal and interpersonal relations. Second, the subject of consciousness plays a fundamental role in providing access to the mental processes of participants. The paper demonstrates the model's applicability by a pragmatic analysis of “That Will Be Fine” by William Faulkner.

In today's literary theory there is a consensus regarding the concept of authorial intention, namely, that it is obsolete and useless for the interpretation of literary texts and has relevance only in such discourses as legal discourse or literary history. The aim of my paper is to reinterpret the concept of authorial intent from the aspect of Darwinian and cognitive theory. I will argue that the authorial intention is not a fallacy that necessarily results in misinterpretations of the text, but a way of reading narrative according to its fictional status. I will demonstrate on some examples that the strongest stimuli for making assumptions about the authorial intention are passages that do not allow the reader to follow any intradiegetic perspective but force a global view on the fictional work.

The present paper aims to differentiate various social forms of language use such as communicative, informative, and manipulative ones on the basis of speakers’ and hearers’ intentions, which are assumed to be involved in the intentional viewpoint of their perspectives. The paper analyzes how speakers can realize their intentions through their perspectives and what perspectives speakers intend to develop in their partners of verbal interactions in various forms of language use as well as how partners in verbal interactions of these social forms of language use can infer the speakers’ intentions evaluating and taking speakers’ perspectives on the basis of indicators provided by speakers and according to their own perspectives. The analyses presented in the paper have shown that the success of informative, communicative, and manipulative forms of language use seems to be partly predicted according to what extent the speakers’ and hearers’ perspectives coincide or differ from each other.

Within the framework of this paper we undertake the task of trying to make explicit the combinability of words, or on the contrary their non-combinability by making use of the findings of Pierre-Yves Raccah's work on the semantics of the viewpoint, with the hope of offering new perspectives for the reading of narratives. With the help of laying down the topical foundations of lexis we may get closer to finding out how linguistic units construct meaning, or rather how they enforce the adoption of given points of view before the question of referentiality would arise.

David Kaplan elaborated a so-called two-step method for the analysis of indexical expressions. In the first step of the method, the content of indexical sentences is determined with respect to a particular collection of contextual parameters. The second step of the method identifies an actual or counterfactual circumstance with respect to which it is possible to ask for the truth values of sentence contents. In some cases of language use, however, the two-step method cannot be applied in its original form. In fictional discourses, for example, indexical sentences seem to shift their content. Truth Perspectivism is a Kaplanian view that conceives the phenomenon of content-shift as an effect of perspectival operators. It is argued in this paper that Truth Perspectivism has some counterintuitive consequences. For this reason, an alternative view is proposed that is able to explain the underlying mechanism of content-shift in a less controversial way. This alternative view is introduced here under the label Meaning Perspectivism.

The aim of the present paper is to discuss the question of why readers accept a literary narrative discourse attributed traditionally to an “omniscient third-person narrator” unconditionally as true. I will advocate two theses. First, that this characteristic of narrative comprehension is a consequence of a grammatical feature of the narrative discourse, namely, the absence of the “narrating-I.” This format mimics what Cosmides and Tooby label as scope-free representation, i.e., a representation that is not bound by scope-operators and thus treated by a cognitive architecture as architecturally true. Second, narrative discourse ascribed traditionally to a third person narrator should be understood as the linguistic representation of the true states of affairs of a narrative world.

This paper shows how we manufacture authenticity by blending a variety of semiotic resources, some of which are sufficient (“enough”) to produce a particular targeted authentic identity, and consequently enable others to identify us as “authentic” members of social groups within different “micro-hegemonies.” In contexts of rapid sociocultural change (for instance in the case of migration in the present-day superdiverse conjuncture), we can expect enoughness to gain increasing importance as a critical tool for identity work. We propose the framework outlined here will enable us to engage with the complexities of contemporary identity practices and the complex field of authenticity.

In this article, I consider competing notions of “alphabetic authenticity” and indigenous authorship among Mexican indigenous authors and activists. Orthographies form a special focus, as choices about them entail envisioning particular kinds of texts and, hence, types of readers. I focus on the divergent strategies – all fundamentally semiotic – that people advocate in developing “authentic indigenous writing” and in using various meta-semiotic processes to harness competing authenticities to language revitalization initiatives. I suggest that the friction between these conflicting models is both contentious and generative, producing new possibilities for engagement even as the interstices between them may hide possibilities not yet explored.

This article describes the semiotics and politics of “real” and “false” selfhood in American therapeutic discourses of the World War II era, focusing on Karen Horney and Carl Rogers. Giving a semiotic analysis of their work requires developing an account of Erving Goffman's understanding of commitment that can then be used to illuminate the form of politics that underlie their ideologies of selfhood. The article culminates in an account of the ironies of the neoliberal politics infusing these therapeutic ideologies. At stake is a historical period characterized by a knotting of ideologies about commitment, their semiosis, and the neoliberal imagination.

Drawing on Kress's notion of semiotic design, this paper engages with the issue of authenticity as semiotic processes in the margins of globalization, namely, Enshi, a rural minority area in Central China. Two cases are examined: Internet dialect rap and Tujia heritage tourism, both of which provide new semiotic opportunities during Enshi's processes of globalization as a margin. In both cases, authenticity is a salient imperative of identity making that involves strategic, complex processes of semiotic maneuvering that orients towards multi-scalar, polycentric systems of norm. The outcome of these is “inauthentic authenticity” – semiotic innovation and transformation for translocal mobility.