Volume 2015, Issue 204

Aims. The aim of this study is to investigate the level of gender equality within the Swedish child health centers' (CHCs) waiting rooms. Methods. A total of 31 CHCs waiting rooms were analyzed using semiotic visual analysis to explore who the waiting rooms represented by coding the pictures, brochures, and magazines by gender using a manifest analysis, where the researchers coded what the pictures physically entailed, and a latent analysis, where the meaning of those pictures was discerned. In addition, 281 parental observations were completed at 25 of the CHCs by two observers. Inter-rater reliability was established and consensus was reached by using prescribed definitions of the waiting rooms. Results: Only 8 CHCs were categorized as Family-Centered, while 12 were Mother-Child Centered, 6 Child-Centered, 2 Women-Centered, and 3 were Neutral environments. The different designs between the categorized waiting rooms affected fathers', but not the mothers' involvement with respect to playing with their child and reading the posted information. When analyzing within one categorized environment, fathers were more likely to play with their child compared to mothers. Conclusions: CHCs should consciously redesign their environments to also be inclusive of fathers so that they more habitually participate in their child's health.

This paper investigates a writing activity for therapeutic effect by means of self-regulation through which emotion and thinking are welded to discover the self and other. This activity is undertaken with a Peircean semiotic approach. Accordingly, a feeling of emotion as a material quality of thought-sign is observed as to how it develops into higher psychological processes by virtue of object of thinking, friendship, and love, as external stimulus. This is found in Michel de Montaigne who arrives at a feeling of unity between nature and culture by way of gravity of narrative as a remedial method in narrative mind.

This article outlines some representative epistemological attitudes in translation studies and presents a model for defining translation. Basing our reflection on the work of translation scholars, we identify approaches that avoid the problem and others that claim to deal with it but fail to do so. The article is guided by the following questions: Is there a need to define the object of study when studying translation? If so, what are the origins and consequences of such a definition? How might this affect certain beliefs in the translation theories? Drawing on a Greimassian semiotic approach, we present a new model for defining the concept of Translation.

We all construct models of the world by which we make sense of the phenomena we encounter. But rarely is the model of the women who wear the burqa considered. We hold that the world must be perceived through the body of the other before meaning can be assessed. We argue that the burqa is not an object, but a set of human relationships. It has no singular interpretant by which it can be understood. It is a highly nuanced semiosic phenomenon that we believe can best be understood by placing the burqa within a specific human umwelt.

The most distinctive, and probably the most striking, assumption of Donald Davidson's well known ‘paratactic’ analysis of the logical form of saying ascriptions is that the “that”-clause that, in such an ascription, specifies the content of the ascribed act of saying, is neither syntactically nor semantically part of the sentence effecting the ascription. The present paper identifies a neglected problem that this assumption engenders for the Davidsonian analysis. The problem arises in connection with instances of saying ascriptions that are both self-verifying and self-referential, and consists in the fact that, given the Davidsonian assumption, these ascriptions must be assigned logical forms that misrepresent their logically relevant properties.

During the last forty years there have been a number of attempts to understand verbal irony in relation to specific kinds of speech acts (negating, echoing, pretending, alluding). This article argues that these theories can account for certain subsets of ironic phenomena but not others precisely because of their focus on substantive kinds of speech acts rather than more general relational semiotic properties. The article proposes two conditions based on relational semiotic properties. These conditions, it is argued, allow for a unified account of ironic phenomena and a better understanding of irony in relation to other tropes.

This study investigates the organization of interaction through comments on the social networking site Facebook. Facebook offers a range of affordances that allow communication between users. These include written language in various settings (messaging, commenting, posting), as well as a range of non-verbal resources, such as uploading photos, sharing links, the “like”-button. Our analysis focuses on the post+commenting section, which users treat as a quasi-conversational space. Much as conversation is organized through the sequential unfolding of turns through time, the interaction in the comments section is organized according to a pattern that lets users “make sense” of the communication as a coherent exchange. This comment organizing mechanism, which is enacted through tying practices, operates on written language rather than spoken, and so needs to accommodate different affordances than turn-taking does: it has to be able to co-ordinate contributions not just through time, but through space as well. The theoretical significance of this research then is its exploration of a complex mechanism that is used by humans to maintain social order through writing and reading practices. In particular, it takes into account how the context of the website shapes people's communication through the resources made available.

The aim of this study was to reveal whether French and English Canadian print advertisements show different functional connections between headlines and visuals. For that purpose, a content analysis was conducted on advertisements drawn from two Canadian women's magazines. As theoretical construct, Rentel's (2005) typology of logical-semantic connections between visuals and headlines of advertisements was chosen. The results showed that the strategies of visual-verbal analogy and hyperbole were used more frequently in the French than in the English advertisements analyzed. Hence, French advertisements appear to stimulate a higher level of cognitive elaboration on the part of the recipients.

The main topics in this essay are reported in the section titles: Moving towards global semiotics; Encounters; Terminological issues and semiotic horizons; On biosemiotics and its recent history; Signs and life, the Gaia hypothesis; Signs and non-signs; Icon, index and symbol; Speech, language, and modelling; Communication and speech; Communication among others; Homologies and analogies in zoosemiosis; Totality and otherness; Otherness and nomination; Semiosis with language and semiosis without language. This theoretical excursus concludes with an interview with Professor Sebeok from the mid-1980s, here published in English for the first time.

The design of motion picture title sequences in 1930s Hollywood employs one of two approaches: (1) superimposed text where the background is independent of the typography, (2) the integration of the type and background imagery to produce a single, composite effect. The title design for the 1936 film The Big Broadcast of 1937 enables a consideration of how these two approaches intersect with the structure and role of the title sequence in relation to the main narrative that follows, and the interpretative modes employed in deciphering this exemplary title sequence.

Consumers clearly have a role to play in the global fight against climate change, since even relatively small changes in patterns of household consumption could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But what evidence is there that consumers do consider the environmental impacts of products when shopping? Indeed, how psychologically salient the carbon footprint labels that are now appearing on a range of products in various countries? Here we test the psychological salience of this information using eye tracking to identify, on a frame-by-frame basis, individual fixations on various features of the packaging, including carbon footprint. We found that the mean fixation level for carbon footprint was 12.2%, indicating it was indeed as salient as other important features. High or low levels of carbon footprint had no significant effect on gaze fixation. We also found no significant relationship between self-reported attitudes to low carbon products and overall level of fixation, nor was there any significant relationship between implicit attitude and level of fixation. But implicit attitude did significantly impact on the point of first fixation, in that those with a strong positive implicit attitude were significantly more likely to fixate first on carbon footprint information. This suggests that carbon labelling could potentially be effective for some consumers – those with the right implicit attitude. Measures of explicit attitude, on the other hand, seemed to be largely irrelevant. The implications of this finding for sparking a “green revolution” in consumer habits through the provision of carbon footprint information for consumers is discussed.

The article proposes to take seriously the notion of otherness in anthropology and to assign it paradigmatic function for the discipline. Building on phenomenological philosophy, in particular Merleau-Ponty and Waldenfels, the Other is approached as alien, as something that essentially eludes the orders of self and culture, while at the same time challenging them. The article then discusses several ways in which this altered understanding of otherness might productively inform anthropology as the “science of the culturally Other.” Ethnographic representation, cultural and ritual orders, and social events are conceptualized in exemplary fashion as responses to an alien demand.

This article demonstrates a socio-semiotic problem – whether one brand could replace, substitute or supplement identity. It describes the postmodern situation in which the traditional meta-narratives need to be reinforced or even replaced by more adequate and resonating stories and it points out the place of “legendary” brands in it. The latter are based on cultural preconditions and their power should be reinforced by advertising. The cultural background of Harley-Davidson and its communication gives us a chance to take a deeper look at its storytelling process which attracts so many consumers. A couple of analyses and illustrations clarify its “DNA structure.”

This paper examines habits, and particularly habitus as the locus of semiotic constraints and artful practices comprising human conduct. The disciplinary contexts of communication in semiotics and semiotics in communication are contrasted. Winfried Nöth's recent take on C. S. Peirce and habits is interpreted from the perspective of semiotic phenomenology. Culture is argued to be the threshold of the human world, and habits are a key to understanding human conduct in that distinctive Umwelt. John Dewey's rendering of Peirce on habits is further extended with Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical construction of the habitus. Habitus accounts for the mediation of culture and person in the communication matrix. The argument is for a new disciplinary habit in communicology, the science of embodied discourse, which bridges semiotics and communication with focus on the experience of communication.

In “Réflections inédites de Saussure sur les phonèmes” (1973: 287–295), Roman Jakobson mentions an untitled manuscript, described as “étude phonetique.” In it, Saussure provides an interesting equation: phonème = valeur sémiologique. The equation stresses the purely semiological aspect of the phoneme and will serve as a focal point for the analysis carried out in this paper. The discussion will also explore two other related concepts introduced in the manuscript and in the only book Saussure ever published, Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européens (1879): coefficient sonantique, and ‘équivalence sémiologique’ ” (Jakobson 1973: 294). This study attempts to draw implications for a semiotic theory of phonology based on acoustic cues found in a case study of consonant / liquid / consonant (CLC/#) clusters that occur as congeners in two cognate Slavic languages: Polish and Czech. Apart from the semiological insights of Saussure, the study's analytical perspective also builds on the semiotic oeuvre of Roman Jakobson and Boris Uspiensky (Tartu semiotics). The Tartu notion of cultural text is a sort of time center, or a groove for the discussion. The empirical section analyzes a corpus of recordings of CLC clusters in various languages collected by the author, treating particular spectrograms as cultural texts in the Tartu understanding of the term: as visual data generated by a particular speech community.

This paper is a semiotic study on modality in Chinese Criminal Law (CCL) and its English version from the perspective of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar, Saussure's semiotic study, and Chinese semantic and pragmatic characteristics. The research aims to investigate what signifieds are used as modal expressions in CCL and its English version, the characteristics of their distribution, types (modalization and modulation), and values (high, median, and low), and the functions they serve in CCL and its English version. By probing the signified of modal expressions concerning types and values, the results turn quite positive that the signified used as modal expression of obligation and commands in English version of CCL are mostly realized by modal verbs of high value, the attitudes of permission by modal verbs of low value, the meaning of probability and ability used to be delivered by modal verbs of low value, and the prohibition of illegal acts used to apply modality of high value in negative form. Much importance should be attached to the functional study of modality to appropriately understand the signified of modality in Chinese legislations and its English translation.

This article presents a system of music notation that uses a combination of colors and shapes to represent sound. This system may present advantages over the traditional system of music notation, as its symbols are inherently related to the musical information that they communicate. The present article explains the basic workings of the system. It then describes an ethnographic study in which the system was used to teach music literacy to a group of elementary school music students. It concludes with the implications that such a system might have in the spheres of music performance and music education.