Volume 2017, Issue 215 -

We have conducted a video-based field study on work interactions between staff members in the corridors of a hospital outpatient clinic in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. In this paper, we examine a specific mobile interactional configuration: passing-by interactions in which staff members get involved as they walk following close and parallel trajectories going in opposite directions. We also examine a specific conversational activity performed in the corridors: checks – introduced by the French expression “ Ça va? ” (Going okay?) – with which one staff member verifies that the situation of a colleague conforms to a routine state of affairs. Adopting the approaches of multimodal and conversation analysis, we point out features of the interactional configuration and the conversational activity under consideration that participants combine in some excerpts analyzed in the paper. Passing-by checks are practically accomplished, on the spot, through the sequential, embodied and embedded conduct of the staff members. We identify resources involved in building close but non-convergent trajectories, limiting interactional involvement, and coordinating talk and walk for a fleeting co-presence. The article contributes to the study of “on-the-move” contingent interactions as they happen in hospital corridors.

Globalization is the global expansion of economic-cultural capitalism. The term “capitalism” today may mainly refer to the special economic mode shared by most countries regardless of their different political systems. The original essence of capitalism lies in the self-profit motive and commercial activities. Globalization makes this essence also penetrated into all aspects of society, culture and academia resulting in the systematically weakening of the scientific character of the humanities. The latter should be advanced to human sciences in order to be capable of balancing the cultural materialism caused by globalization. For carrying out this scientific task a subjective ethics is requested to form a minority of theoretical volunteers devoted to this revolutionary mission for reorganizing the humanities. The paper asserts that a multi-dimensional causal relationship exists between the materialist-globalization, renovation of the humanities, and subjective ethics.

The current study addresses the gender roles and the stereotypes produced in the context of Cypriot society, through their representations on postage stamps produced by the Republic of Cyprus from 1960 to 2013. The theoretical framework employed derives from relevant theories on social roles’ divisions based on gender, as well as the way these roles and stereotypes are expressed through images. The corpus has been analyzed by means of content analysis and semiotic analysis was employed in order to explore how the theoretical framework complies with selected stamps from the content analysis in respect of non-verbal signs. According to the findings, the role of women on stamp representations seems to be secondary and tied with emotional qualities, while men seem to hold a more prominent position in the society. This fact is reflected both on the quantity of stamps representing each gender in the respective thematic categories, as well as, on the selected stamps studied with semiotic analysis. Nonetheless, there have been strong indications that the social roles of genders and therefore stereotypes have started changing as the society progresses through the years. This process however, does not seem apparent on the imagery used for the stamps of the Republic of Cyprus.

In this article, we try to contribute to the new discipline Forensic Semiotics – a discipline introduced by the Canadian polymath Marcel Danesi. We focus on clues as information and criminal investigative processes as inferential. These inferential (and Peircean) processes have a certain complexity consisting of the interrelation between the collateral observations of the investigator, e. g., his background knowledge concerning criminal and technical analysis, the context that the investigator acts within or in relation to (the universe of discourse), e. g., the scene of crime or the criminal law, as well as the clues as information that will cause the inferential processes in the first place. We believe that this focus can tell us something about crime solving that is not just sensitive to epistemological factors (how to know), but also ontological (what to know) and normative factors as well (how to value the processes of crime solving).

The ideal of an “authoritative text” is no longer a taken-for-granted assumption among editorial and critical theorists of the literary text. Rather, texts are, and should be thought of as, composites of distributed activities of multiple social agents. This view has many virtues, but it quickly runs up against the deeply entrenched gestaltism of the “underlying work” stance, a perspective that invades some of the most commonplace ways of talking about Anglo-American literary texts. We explain the fundamental tensions that arise from this stance and offer a general ontology of literary artifacts that can account for the ways we habitually conceptualize texts and their effects. We provide a basic cognitive framework for understanding the ontology of the document, in its most generalized form, which can embrace a wide range of practices, literary and otherwise, that have significant implications for understanding editorial, authorial, and readerly behavior.

Western languages have been marked by their lack of specialized vocabulary to express odor qualities, and thus it is stated that it is difficult – if not impossible – to talk about smell. To engage the issue of olfactory ineffability, this paper turns to actual instances of textual renderings of smell by paying attention to how the olfactory language of scent enthusiasts is rendered on the Internet. The methods that enthusiasts’ texts inscribe do not rely on specialized vocabulary but constitute a language that is turned toward the world . To articulate this character of olfactory language, the paper illustrates four discursive procedures employed on the Internet: embedding knowledges that are contoured and made available through their uses by the community; borrowing professional vocabulary and adapting it through humor; providing “recipes” for practical actions; and emphasizing the subjective character of scent to provide openings for conversation. The paper traces how olfactory talk becomes available as it is practiced, challenging the opposition between sensory experiences and the semiotic realm that is inscribed in the idea of olfactory ineffability.

Despite the widespread recognition of climate change as the single biggest global threat, the willingness of people to change their behavior to mitigate its effects is limited. Past research, often focusing on specific categories of behavior, has highlighted a very significant gap between people’s intentions to behave more sustainably and their actual behavior. This paper presents a new approach to this issue, by using more open-ended questions to map a much broader range of cognitions and emotions about good environmental behavior. Two key findings emerged. Firstly, participants were aware of the contradiction between their level of concern about the environment and their willingness to act in more sustainable ways. The qualitative analysis further revealed that this discrepancy often hinged on a lack of knowledge about how to act more sustainably; the analysis also revealed a desire for more information about genuinely green behavior. Secondly, pro-environmental behavior was often conceptualized by participants in essentially “social” terms; anticipated emotions relating to sustainable/non-sustainable behavior were as closely tied to the behavior of one’s peers as to one’s own behavior. This finding suggests that we must highlight the social dimension in any interventions to increase sustainable behaviors amongst the public.

This article is devoted to the study of naive geopolitical pictures of the world. The material of the study is “naïve” maps of participants from several regions of Russia. A semiotic approach was used on the description of the materially-produced results based on the analysis of two codes: graphic (location, toponomas, size, etc.) and verbal (verbalized representations). The study provides new knowledge about the importance of the regional factor, the ratio of the natural and social, the correlation of one’s own and somebody else’s world, etc., in ordinary consciousness.

This article traces the evolution of C. S. Peirce’s notion of abduction and proposes an interpretation of this evolution in light of the philosopher’s own theory of categories. It shows the shift from the inferential and propositional model developed in On a New List of Categories in 1867 and Some Consequences of Four Incapacities in 1868, focused on the category of Firstness (quality) to the post-1890 evenemential model. In this post-1890 model, Firstnesses, events expressed by the verb of the proposition, are generated in their opposition to other Firstnesses (the relation of Secondnesses) from a tendency to action or general habit, Thirdness. Parallel to this, the article also shows the shift from the first formulation of the notion of abduction, which replaced the multiplicity of qualities with a comprehensive predicate that implied all of them to the discovery of the diagrammatic reasoning and Logic of Relatives, which confers greater importance to the category of Thirdness and transforms the abductive movement into a transductive one.

Socrates remains one of the most prominent paternal figures of Western dialogism and phonocentric paradigm; the man who stirred up the dialectic imaginations of his days. In Plato’s Socratic dialogues, his inner voice (daimonion) sounds as a last-instance statement to cast the light on the final solution of the conversation. In the context of antiquity and following cultural tradition, Socrates was the only hearer of warning signals from inside. The rest of the voices were urging (voices of the imaginable cursed souls, saints, angels, etc.). There was no need for a “personal” dictating voice when a divine dictation was already present. According to Charles Peirce’s classification, a “voice without evident source” or a voice from the head is a dicent indexical legisign.

In this paper we develop a methodological proposal for the study of communications within organizations from a semiotic approach. This proposal includes a semiotic study based on three central concepts: 1. the sign and its development – we begin with Charles S. Peirce’s well-known concept of sign and continue with the discourse transformation perspective; 2. the development of operations for the analysis of semiotic expressions to find a specific mechanism which enables us to analyze interpretative-cognitive processes in iconic, indexical, and symbolic expressions; and 3. interpretation processes in organizations developed from the analysis of the role of dynamic objects in the creation of signs to try to develop a descriptive, analytic, and reconstructive approach on how dynamic objects work and go further in the description of possible semiotic worlds. We develop concepts such as social semiosis (as a system), semiotic expressions (as updates to this system) in organizational environments, and the concept of semiotic actors closely related to the construction of an organizational world. This study enables us to approach the dynamics in communicational processes within organizations in all its elements to perform a critical analysis.

The primary aim of the present paper is to examine the interrelations between definite ideologies and literature, more precisely the ways established ideologies are modeled in literature. The article therefore tries to examine two interwoven systems of signs: ideology as a semiotic system per se and the ideology within the literature; each has its own logical semiotics. For instance, on one side the ideology of feminism, or ecology, has two strategies of modeling: destructive (the actual) and constructive (the idealized), and like every ideology it has to map the independent borders of each strategy. On the other hand literature makes every effort to blur the bold distinctive borders of these strategies by means of artistic tools. That is, literature remodels the model of ideology. One mission of the reader is to try to reconstruct each model and see the interaction between them. Without doubt, the two models affect each other in a way that influences the final representation. Semiotics has not concerned itself with feminist values per se, but with the way they act semiotically.

This study seeks to outline a neuro-evolutionary semiotic model for our perception and interpretation of moral ambiguities in the wake of neuroaesthetics. This model is actually an integration of the Saussurean network of differences and the recently discovered default mode network: it serves on the one hand to rectify automatic responses generated by the mirror system in real-life situations, and on the other, to expand the applicability of the sign system for our appreciation of eerie or scary details found in the arts. Such a framework functions not only to blur binary oppositions set between high and lowly arousal emotions, but also to enhance our skills and confidence in dealing with uncertainties and oddities found in the arts. As opposed to experimental schemes devised in neuroaesthetics, which quantify our instant ratings of specific audial and visual inputs, the neuro-evolutionary model allows us some freedom and flexibility to re-evaluate our perceptions of motives concealed in characters’ behaviors. This study therefore enlarges on a qualitative approach to conceptualizing spectatorship in the world of art. We as intelligent and self-governing spectators should manage to align with odd characters’ positions so as to regain meaning, understanding, and harmony from our dealings. By way of comparing and contrasting two film characters’ dealings with valuable paintings and endearing families, the author argues for the fruitful functioning of the neuro-evolutionary sign system in revising our biases against seemingly immoral characters. It is observed that the sign system is characterized with the capacity of multiplying meaningful connections between characters’ motives, choices, and actions. It enables us to sort out and to appreciate strings of actions that enlarge on characters’ persistence and consistence of achieving certain goals. All in all, our choice of engaging with the daunting and the disconcerting fosters not only our pleasure and intelligence of viewing, but also the survival of odd characters in our community.

This paper analyzes the attitudinal variations in multimodal literary works by comparing the manuscript, the original published edition, and eight contemporary adapted versions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . Drawing upon the appraisal system of attitude (Martin and White 2005, The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English . London: Palgrave) and the social semiotic approach to visual images (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006, Reading images: The grammar of visual design , 2nd edn. London: Routledge), the analysis demonstrates that the deployments of linguistic and visual attitudinal resources in the adapted texts differ from those in the manuscript and the original published work in terms of the semantic region, what is being appraised, positive or negative attitude, the explicit or implicit way of expression, and the degree of attitudinal commitment. Variations within different adaptations are found to accommodate the needs of different target audiences. It is also found that the intermodal relation in constructing the overall attitudinal stance shifts from complementarity in the manuscript to enhancement in the original published work and then to co-instantiation in the adaptations. The semiotic exploration may shed light on the understanding of the variations of meanings arising from the interplay of multiple semiotic resources in the different versions of the timeless multimodal literary classic.

Within the rich legacy left by Thomas Sebeok, there is a critical concept of semiotic modeling that directly addresses the core of the philosophy of education in the light of semiotics and affords valuable implications for the nascent interdisciplinary field of inquiry of edusemiotics or educational semiotics , essentially a philosophy of human knowing. The present paper argues that the concept of modeling as in Modeling Systems Theory has elevated us above the long-standing debate over nature versus nurture in the discussions of education and sheds light on the dynamic co-shaping relationship between the modeling subject and its models, as well as the fact that human brain function bio-culturally, as is evidenced by a crucial concept in the field of neurophysiology known as “neuroplasticity” and relevant experiment findings from neurophysiological and cognitive researches over the past few decades. It further claims that life-long education is not just something educators and educatees should keep advocating, but more of a de facto state of human existence. It concludes by confirming that in future edusemiotic studies more attention can and should be directed to the determination of the subject’s semiosic stage, for which the semiosic capacities of the subject are to be further explored, tested and facilitated.