Volume 2018, Issue 221 -

In this study, I describe a potential challenge to semiotics, which exists in the fact that no interpretation of an instruction (text) can get us closer to doing what the instructional text describes. I provide a praxeological description of a situation in a software development firm where the instructions (rules) for a particular type of meeting are inscribed on the whiteboard in front of which the meetings were held. I discuss the gap between instructions and the behavior they describe and the moral order of praxis that is not inscribed in instructions.

Charles S. Peirce attempted to develop his semiotic theory of cognitive signs interpretation, which are originated in our basic perceptual operations that quasi-prove the truth of perceptual judgment representing reality. The essential problem was to explain how, by a cognitive interpretation of the sequence of perceptual signs, we can represent external physical reality and reflectively represent our cognitive mind’s operations of signs. With his phaneroscopy introspection, Peirce shows how, without going outside our cognitions, we can represent external reality. Hence Peirce can avoid the Berkeleyian, Humean, and Kantian phenomenologies, as well as the modern analytic philosophy and hermeneutic phenomenology. Peirce showed that with the trio of semiotic interpretation – abductive logic of discovery of hypotheses, deductive logic of necessary inference, and inductive logic of evaluation – we can reach a complete proof of the true representation of reality. This semiotic logic of reasoning is the epistemic logic representing human confrontation in reality, with which we can achieve knowledge and conduct our behavior. However, Peirce did not complete his realistic revolution to eliminate previously accepted nominalistic and idealistic epistemologies of formal logic and pure mathematics. Here, I inquire why Peirce did not complete his historical realist epistemological revolution and following that inquiry I attempt to reconstruct it.

Museums and luxury brands are today getting more and more involved with each other, in their communications as in their activities. While brands are looking for a cultural recognition, museums need additional sources of funding and program events and exhibitions related to fashion creators. Obviously, luxury brands and museums share common values, as they belong to cultural identity. But to what extent can their collective psyche be compared? Are there common structures of imagery between brands and museums? These questions have been explored in research conducted in France. Combining semiotics with a quantitative method, it casts a new light on the question of social identities and their impact on the public. It reveals that brands and museums both present an embedded architecture of imagery, in which specific visual signs stand as metonymic embodiment. It also questions the notion of myth, as universal and archaic symbols appear to lay in both cultural and commercial representations.

This paper will use several notions of Charles Peirce – his Categories and semiotics – and interweave evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and literary studies in order to connect the disciplines such that the natural sciences may be used as interpretive tools in literary exegesis. Despite the ostensible differences between literary texts and the endeavors of the natural sciences, Peirce’s ideas can put them into conversation. Current evolutionary literary theories like Literary Darwinism require a more solid footing and methodology from which to ground their hypotheses, and this paper will use a philosophical frame to connect the pieces. Peirce and those following his ideas provide the inroads for such a mixed methodology, which will undergird current evolutionary aesthetic practice without needlessly replacing other literary theories. This article will outline Peirce’s schema and a modern reconfiguration thereof, and then will posit that literature (here focusing on a short story) functions as a tension between the iconic, indexical, and symbolic modes of representation. Peirce’s Categories permit reality into the language/text/literature debate, and his notion of the Index can be used as reference to evolved traits in homo sapiens in literary representation. Peirce gives organization, coherence, and cohesion without limiting the interpretational possibility of a literary work.

In this paper, we examine the use of signs as instruments of thought in Semitic languages of the ancient Near East. We employ a Peircean concept of “sign” together with derived typologies based upon Categorical (after Peirce), temporal, and effectual relations between events, as conceived by the intended interpreter. Following a brief discussion of the “sign” concept as attested in extinct Semitic languages and in Biblical Hebrew, we perform a typological analysis of the use of signs in Biblical narrative. On this basis, we infer that some Biblical writers had a tacit awareness of a tripartite concept of “sign.” Furthermore, we demonstrate that different Biblical writers had different preferences for the use of signs: symbolic (abstract) signs were favored in the Torah and iconic (embodied) signs were favored by the Major Prophets.

This article introduces the aesthetic theory of François Delsarte (1811–1870) and his conception of semiotics. Delsarte created his “applied aesthetics” as a modern scientific method for artists, particularly performers, to investigate the nature of human being. Delsarte’s approach to performance involved the actor in observing human behavior, interpreting it through categories of voice, gesture, and language, and rendering it in an expansive display of types. Delsarte’s applied aesthetics involves the performer’s attention to signs and sign action, a study he called séméiotique. We see Delsarte’s program for inquiry into truth in what I call the actor’s task, which develops his or her human being through observation, analysis, and creation. This was Delsarte’s “orthopedic machine for correcting crippled intellects” – the crippled intellects being those intellectuals and conservatory teachers whose ideas on aesthetics he found to be neither systematic nor attuned to God’s reason. While it is well known in theatre and dance scholarship that Delsarte’s ideas and methods advanced the training of actors, dancers, and orators, particularly in the United States, my paper instead introduces him as a voice in nineteenth-century thinking on signs and semiosis. Delsarte’s aesthetics are firmly based in Thomist assumptions about a triune god whose nature is reflected imperfectly in man. Yet it is striking that Delsarte characterizes the sign relation as mediated in a modern sense, prior to Charles Peirce’s development of his own triadic sign relation, and semiotics as a modern method of scientific inquiry.

Having identified previously (Bonta 2015) the Peircean Category Firstness as the semiotic basis (or cultural Prime Symbol) for Australian Aboriginal culture, this paper examines the “lens” of Firstness as it is manifest in a variety of aboriginal (or “Shamanic”) cultures worldwide. By studying the semiotic contours of religion, language, social organization, and art, we find systemic prioritization of Firstness in its various manifestations, across a wide range of aboriginal cultures from Australia to the Indian Subcontinent to aboriginal Siberia and the New World. Shamanic culture, despite its ethnic and geographic variety, may therefore be represented as a semiotic type – and, in addition, one that, in its pristine form, is nearly extinct.

This paper is a corpus-based sociosemiotic inquiry into the translation of linguistic modality in government press conferences in the Chinese context, with an eye to its indication of interpreter’s identity. Viewing translation (including interpreting) as a process of social semiosis , the paper draws on theoretical insights from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and applies them to the analysis of modality in both English and Chinese – the language pair that concerns the present research. Results of the study show that, while modality distribution in the two languages are basically maintained at the same level, interchangeable uses between volitive and obligatory subtypes of modality plus the general increase of modality value in interpreted vis-à-vis source speeches indicate that interpreters are not deprived of mediating latitude which is believed to contradict their prescriptive stereotypes. Also, exemplary parallel concordance analysis of modality reveals that interpreters adopt various solutions to translating the same modal element. Further, the paper proposes a taxonomy for the analysis of modality shifts in interpreter-mediated encounters, with illustrative cases of each subclass examined and discussed. The findings are expected to shed light on the interpreter’s identity in political institutional settings.

Applying Peirce’s semiotics to the study of art history, this essay explores the order of signification in the Peircean theory and the visual order in Chinese landscape painting. Since the purpose of Chinese landscape painting is not simply to represent the beauty of scenery but to encode and manifest the philosophy of Tao, then, the author argues that the establishment of the encoding mechanism in Chinese landscape painting signifies the origination, development, and establishment of this genre in Chinese art history. In this essay, the Peircean order of signification is described as a T-shaped structure, consisting of a horizontal dimension of signs (icon, index, and symbol) while and a vertical dimension of the signification process (representamen, interpretant, and object). Correspondingly, the visual order in Chinese landscape painting is also described as a T-shaped structure as well: the horizontal dimension at the formal level consists of three signs (mountain path, flowing water, and floating air, the three constitute a compound sign), while the vertical dimension at the ideological level consists of three concepts (the way in nature, the metaphysical Way of nature, and the Tao). The significance of this order is found in re-interpreting the formation of landscape painting in Chinese art history.

Résumé Le but de cette recherche est de répondre qualitativement à la question de l’évolution de la culture de consommation et des valeurs culturelles associées au sein des cafés (espaces) d’aujourd’hui de la société coréenne. Cette étude cherche à définir l’aspect synchronique, avec une analyse des comportements de consommation, les attitudes des consommateurs et des concepts d’espace dans les trois stades : le niveau discursif, le niveau sémio-narratif et niveau thématique. Nos travaux s’orientent vers le consommateur par l’utilisation du « parcours génératif de signification » et nous aident à construire des images sur certains aspects de ce phénomène de la culture spatiale pour notre analyse. Ce processus en trois étapes de recherche a été appliqué en utilisant la méthode de l’observation, du questionnaire et de la sémiotique culturelle pour atteindre et trouver les valeurs culturelles fondamentales de cet espace. En fait, les comportements de consommation observés pourraient être interprétés suivants les valeurs /particuliers/ versus /communautaires/ et l’enquête-analyse des attitudes des consommateurs pourraient être définis par les valeurs /professionnels/ versus /sociabilités/ pris dans sa dimension sémantique.

For a sign to be a sign it must bond an object (quality), a signifier, and the idea to which it gives rise (CP 1.339). The paper focuses on the iconicity of silence as a hypoiconic signifier, exploring the semiotics of silence in light of the notions and studies of iconicity. Fascinating parallelisms hold between iconicity and silence. These raise many challenges to the study of each separately, let alone dealing with them jointly. Some icons and some silences are qualities in the real world, others are semiotic forms (signifiers) standing for or denoting objects. Simple, intuitive qualities of iconicity and of silence are naturally grasped and shared from antiquity to the present by cultures and peoples. The paper employs Peirce’s initial basic trichotomy of iconic classes as well as his later hierarchies for studying the iconic stance of silence as a hypoiconic signifier (Secondness). Analyzing and illustrating the possible complexities between forms (a silent signifier), contents, their relations and their interpretations, group hypoiconic silences into silence as an image, silence as a diagram, and silence as a metaphor.

In the autumn of 2015, Star Wars once again rattled the world with a new episode, The Force Awakens . The first movie of the series was released in 1977, and ever since the 1980s emerging new episodes have turned this epopoeia into a recognizable mass cultural text that is well-known all over the world nowadays and which has been transformed into a wide range of forms such as series, comic strips, video games, toys, stickers and other forms of mass culture. However, what happens when a mass cultural text gets fused into a new context of political discourse? What kinds of unpredictable clashes of meanings might be evoked on the threshold of mass culture and ideology, dominative hierarchy and democratic masquerade, or even communist and capitalist semiosphere? What mythological meanings appear when a fictional hero acquires a real body and becomes a politician? The present paper puts forward a semiotic analysis of the eccentric performance of Darth Vader the politician in the contemporary Ukrainian political life. The case employs the concepts of text and transmedial world, as well as notions of remediation and resemiotization, in order to make sense of how political masquerade appears in the semiosphere of the Ukrainian spectator. In addition, the paper introduces the examples of semiotic interaction between the contemporary fictional character Darth Vader, his namesake politician, and the collective memory of both: the traditional culture and the Soviet ideological past.

The discourse of broadcast news is shifting toward being more “conversational.” As a consequence, rather than assuming the traditional poker-face style of delivering news on television, news readers as televised personae are becoming more “informal” and “dialogic” in order to better relate to audiences. Eyebrow flashes, as a communicative resource in television news presentation, play an important part in construing the expressiveness of presentation and engaging with audiences. Drawing upon insights from nonverbal communication studies (especially the pragmatics of nonverbal communication) and discourse analysis, this paper explores the pragmatics of eyebrow flashes as a marker of expressivity in news delivery, and the interaction of eyebrow flashes with the verbal context, based on data collected from Chinese broadcast news in English. The analysis shows that eyebrow flashes are widely employed to initiate the theme of the agent in news messages (implicating “I know something”), to emphasize the focus of the news statements (implying “I am thinking now”), and to respond to the attributed statement (indicating “I want to know more”). Therefore, eyebrow flashes function to assist viewers in construing alignment with authors or reporters of news, as well as alignment with audiences. In addition, they serve to distill personal emotion to hybridize the institutional voice of news, thus rendering television news more “watchable” and engaging.

Résumé  Ce compte rendu de Formes de vie de Jacques Fontanille (Liège, Presses universitaires de Liège, coll. « Sigilla », 2015a, 274 p.) cherche à montrer que l’ouvrage s’inscrit dans une certaine continuité, notamment par rapport à Pratiques sémiotiques (2008), mais qu’il constitue aussi un nouveau tournant, qui fait évoluer la sémiotique et la positionne dans le champ des sciences humaines et sociales. D’abord, nous discutons le fait que, selon Jacques Fontanille, les formes de vie font « vaciller » la frontière entre la nature et la culture. Nous soulignons le fait que Jacques Fontanille développe après Descola, Latour et Lotman les notions de régimes de croyance d’identification, de mode d’existence social et de sémiosphère. Ensuite, l’accent est mis sur le « vivre-avec » comme macro-expérience. Il s’agit de mesurer les conséquences d’un double choix qui permet de dépasser le stade de l’auto-organisation : d’une part, le rapport au monde est médié par l’actant-corps ; d’autre part, l’activité sémiotique consciente d’elle-même est une activité méta-sémiotique. Enfin, il importe d’évaluer la part du culturel dans la constitution des formes de vie. Nous nous interrogeons sur l’« instanciation » des formes de vie dans un lieu et dans un temps déterminés.