Volume 2018, Issue 222 -

In his 1959 paper “On linguistic aspects of translation,” Roman Jakobson distinguished between interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation. As Gideon Toury (1986, Translation: A cultural-semiotic perspective. In Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Encyclopedic dictionary of semiotics , vol. 2, 1111–1124. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) pointed out, such an approach centers on verbal systems and comprises only the translations that one or another way include some linguistic system, while it discards all the cases of translation from one non-linguistic sign system to another. Consequently, it seems reasonable to add intrasemiotic translation to these types of translation to encompass these cases. The paper follows from an assumption that translation studies could offer a productive perspective to describe the history and development of copy art, as well as to define and typologize the phenomenon itself. The copies in the collections of the University of Tartu Art Museum are analyzed as intrasemiotic translations, distinguishing between a number of different subtypes, while the basis for this distinction is the way and how the copy has changed in comparison with its prototype.

For explaining the dispersed extreme right movements that are presently flourishing in the online sphere, British historian and political theorist Roger Griffin has elaborated the concept of groupuscular right . The groupuscular right can be characterized by the non-hierarchic and the rhizomatic structure of intra-groupuscular communication. Our study on Estonian groupuscular right complements it with the ideas of cultural semiotics that help to explicate self-descriptions of particular groupuscular nodes (e.g., blog posts) but also to analyze their relations with other extreme right groupuscules and with the radical online sphere as a whole. Although the extreme right’s communication has become more heterogeneous in its form and content, it is still possible to distinguish central and peripheral meanings. Our approach allows us to understand a seemingly paradoxical problem: why, despite of the plurality of different view-points available on the web, are groupuscular communications still dominated by strict and homogeneous ways of modeling information.

The purely cognitive semantic approach to verbal distance representation has recently been enriched from the perspective of visual perception theory. Focusing on visual pragmatic effects, the present paper will use distance cues as a set of analytical tools and adopt the cognitive-functional model proposed elsewhere to further explore the issue of visual-verbal coherence through Guo Xi’s Early Spring and the bilingual museum catalogue entries attached to it, in physical exhibitions or virtual museums, with a particular view to explaining how a linguistics- or stylistics-based analysis endorses the interpretation of a specific artwork on discursive and cultural levels.

Deduction, induction, and semeiotic relate by each being a permutation of modus ponens . As deduction providing necessary inference is the means of mathematical proof, and induction establishing sound generalizations is the basis of scientific research, so semeiotic bringing to bear informed responses to experience is the core of human understanding. Semeiotic, specifically semeiosis, is shown to be Peircean abduction in the context of signs, thus producing informed response to experience.

This study investigates repair sequences between two nonnative speakers of English while they engaged in naturally occurring talk outside of the second language classroom. Eight hours of naturally occurring talk between native and nonnative speakers were collected and analyzed. The present study reports on one hour of the data which shows two types of repair: Self-initiated and other-corrected and other-initiated. The analysis of the repair sequences shows that the self-initiated and other-corrected repair sequences follow a distinct pattern of asking for confirmation on the production of a language item and receiving a correction, while the other-initiated repair is done differently from the ones found in the literature on repair and do not follow the rules of preference for self-correction described by some researchers in the Conversation Analysis literature. In addition, the other-initiated repair analyzed in this study does not appear to be modulated, that is, the person initiating the correction does not offer a candidate solution by asking a question and displaying uncertainty, as researchers found. The repair sequences show a particularly interesting expert-novice relationship in which one nonnative speaker relies on a more expert nonnative speaker to communicate with a native English speaker.

The five senses (vision, audition, touch, olfaction, gustation) constitute the essence of our ability to interact with the external world and make sense of it. This contact is transmitted through various sensory organs and the information for each sense is transmitted to and translated in various parts of the brain. The anatomical and physiological aspects of this external-internal interface are complex. Likewise, the philosophical approaches to this world-body communication and comprehension involves at least two perspectives, namely, the rationalist viewpoint (perception is brain-determined) and empirical (perception is externally acquired). This essay discusses how creative writers re-create sensory experience in their texts. It will examine each of the five senses and the strategies employed by authors to stimulate and arouse memories of previous reader experience both synchronically and diachronically. Writer and reader co-create and co-participate in this process.

There exist visual signs that have stood their ground throughout the ages for the simple reason that they fit the bill. They are evident or evidently true representations. The bill they fit are life, sentience, and sapience. Which is saying that it comes down to instinctive recognition, i.e., unexplainable, but unmistakably evident. They are true because we feel they are true . This paper attempts to counter the adage that “the obvious can only be explained to those that already understand it” by visually transforming the ancient sign best known as the “yin-yang sign” or Taijitu . The goal is to demonstrate that diagrammatical transformations reveal knowledge inherently present in the visual. In other words, an attempt to reinstate the status of diagram that the Taijitu originally had instead of an image, a visual, an emblem … labels that point more to what it demonstrates than to what it is, i.e., an actionable tool. To do so C. S. Peirce’s triadic sign will be juxtaposed to the sign under analysis, and his work on Existential Graphs will be used to orchestrate transformations, thus tapping into the diagrammatic nature of the sign. Following which, the similarities with Henri Lefebvre’s trialectics will be shown in the resulting diagrammatic transformations.

In this paper we approach a current issue related to the so-called concept of narcoculture . Several works in Latin America and the United States have addressed this matter and not only accept the term narcoculture, but also stress both the symbolic and aesthetic perspectives. In order to rethink the concept of narcoculture from different angles, we appeal to Juri Lotman and Boris Uspensky’s proposals regarding the concepts of culture, non-culture and anticulture. Rather than accept and reproduce the concept of narcoculture, by means of linking Lotman and Uspensky’s approach with the standpoint of complexity thinking and transdisciplinarity, we propose the treatment of drug trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture . We emphasize the contradictions inherent in the actors dwelling in this semiosphere, incorporating reflections from chaotic and barbaric processes designed to wreak havoc in Mexican society. The common acceptance of the concept of narcoculture does not acknowledge the current devastation and bloodshed produced by narco-traffickers and others in cahoots with the Mexican government and its militarized drug war strategy. During the last few decades, drug trafficking has inspired organized crime and their actors, spurring the representation of everyday societal features such as music, fashion, architecture, or traffickers’ social status.

One of the main components of the Peirce’s semiotics is interpretant , which is formed through the interaction of representamen and object in the mind of the subject. As meaning-production is an endless, infinite process, it is the interpretant that plays a key function in this process; in fact interpretant leads to the revival of some other sign and consequently makes the signification go on in an endless route. Peirce, taking this in mind, asserts that the study of the rules by which an interpretant leads to the revival of another new sign could be established under a comprehensive topic of pure rhetoric. However, the question of pure rhetoric and its rules is almost completely neglected in his writings and his arguments in this regard are no more than a couple of pages. As a result, the present research tries not only to analyze and justify the rules proposed by Peirce, but also investigate theoretically their application in the semiotics of poetry. The researcher, accordingly, by proposing a new model, tries to open up an infinitesimal aperture to the world of semiotics. This goal is somewhat achieved.

In this paper I examine cases where spatial composition produces intersemiotic translations for artistic and advertising purposes in a period where globalization permits and profits by the intertextual evoking of cultural texts. Thus globalization gives us the chance to promote new messages that contribute, in their turn, to a series of cultural interpretations that enrich the forms of modern communication. Accepting one of the basic theses of Translation Semiotics that intersemiotic translation or transmutation may occur among nonverbal sign systems, I will be examining cases of intersemiotic (intericonic) translations having as source texts artistic texts. My basic conclusion is that in these intersemiotic translations the source text although absent, is always present due to world cultural memory. Furthermore, the repetitiveness in the use of these old and well-known original texts, and their inscription in the collective memory as high cultural value texts, seems to affect the fact that they have been chosen as texts capable of being transmuted. Finally, I argue that translation can also be understood as a re-narration of cultural knowledge using different signs but on the same or similar sign space.

Urban space organization associates with specific characteristics in the transformation of society’s behavior and views; it is composed of principles of dichotomy that work as a system of signs to transfer meaning with conventional interpretation. The urban fabric as a context is full of signifiers that tend to convey a meaning implicitly carved in its space organization system. Therefore, it is not just a simple physical configuration. Instead, it is a translation of human experiences with the different synchronic architectural characteristics that needs a critical examination to segregate discrete layers of structural elements. The association is so prevailing that each portion has a significant role in creating a combination of mental prototypes of interpretation between the different factors that give the urban space its final form. The study aims to find the internal signs system within urban space organization that is a combination of signs that represents the aesthetic values of space. The study aimed to explore implicit space organization to make out what is internally powerful to work as aesthetic signs of urban space organization. We conclude that there is a difference as a result of intervening new concepts in the urban space organization without taking in account the existing sign system. This difference could be a source of misunderstanding and confusion in the space organization system and needs understanding and restructuring through the development of procedures.

For semiotics the precipitous arrival of the information age and the “attention economy” suggests a new theoretical standpoint: that semiosis is a function of the finiteness of human cognition and the allocation of that resource. Proceeding on this basis, a model is presented that offers novel definitions of semiosis and semiotics. Inter-agent similarity of cognition and its mediation through artefacts are then introduced to suggest how finite cognition may be determined and equilibrated through reticular mechanisms. Finally, an explanation of how artefacts evolve to consume cognition based on Foucault’s concept of corpora of knowledge is broached.

One might have thought a television genre featuring the human body as the clue to a crime, a sign to be interpreted, was an opportunity to dramatize the struggle of the human intellect in its battle with the unknown. But on CSI this human struggle is supplanted by various prosthetic mechanisms: all-seeing, all-knowing technologies for which there are no mysteries. CSI ’s technologies of truth render the human struggle obsolete, and turn forensics as an essentially semiotic labor – the reading of recalcitrant signs – into a charade, a placebo, a perfunctory performance designed to distract us from the real and more sordid work being done. This is the work of necrosemiosis , the displaying and disposing of dead signs – signs with nothing left to signify. Criticism inspired by the CSI effect attempts to debunk CSI ’s scientific credentials, or its appeal to jurisprudence. Science (or the law), these studies suggest, is the screen CSI hides behind in order to engage in other, less savory practices (sadism, voyeurism, pornography, etc.). Left unexamined is the possibility that these same practices are also screens in their own right, obscuring the very signifying practices that make them possible: the life and death of signs and sign-systems. This article argues that the body whose death CSI so sanctimoniously mourns, whose dissection it so languorously dwells upon is, finally, that of the sign itself. It is because CSI deals in the signs of carcasses – in human bodies – that we can see them as the carcasses of signs. CSI is not interested in signs as signifying entities; it traffics in the remnants of signs, signs post mortem. This is the essence of necrosemiosis on CSI , which offers not the semiotics of death, but the death of semiotics.

This paper describes two typical semiotic resources blind people use when navigating in urban areas. Everyone makes use of a variety of interpretive semiotic resources and senses when navigating. For sighted individuals, this especially involves sight. Blind people, however, must rely on everything else than sight, thereby substituting sight with other modalities and distributing the navigational work to other semiotic resources. Based on a large corpus of fieldwork among blind people in Denmark, undertaking observations, interviews, and video recordings of their naturally occurring practices of walking and navigating, this paper shows how two prototypical types of semiotic resources function as helpful cognitive extensions: the guide dog and the white cane. This paper takes its theoretical and methodological perspective from EMCA multimodal interaction analysis.

Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote shares with Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius several central aspects in the construction of the text, fundamentally the doubling of writing: that of Borges and Pierre Menard, where both simulate to tell story that it never gets told; and the creation of a world that is generated from pure discursivity. The text is divided in two sections, as indicated by Borges himself: one is the visible work of Pierre Menard, and the other is inconclusive work (1962 [1956]: 48–55). The first part is a catalogue of Menard’s library and the second letters by Menard addressed to Borges. In what follows we will analyze the gesture of inscribing writing.

In this paper we examine the use of Twitter and Facebook in two dramatic earthquakes that hit Italy: L’Aquila (in 2009) and Emilia (in 2012). Indeed, disasters disrupt everyday life and engage people in meaning-making processes aimed at recovering meaning and control of their world. In these cases, we argue that the use of social media may contribute to social representations processes and functions: cognitive coping, social sharing of emotions, preserving self-efficacy, boosting identity, and community empowerment. Different methods were adopted to examine the use of social media in the immediate aftermath, a few days after, and in the medium-long term. Differences between the events, combined with the differences between Twitter and Facebook, entailed a multiplicity of uses. Nevertheless, the analyses point to the same conclusions: by fostering new forms of communication and encounters, social media played an increasingly important role during and after the earthquakes. First, they were used for providing information and material coping, then they favored the social sharing of emotions and joint remembering, and finally they contributed to claiming voice and control. Results thus suggest that the use of social media favored different representational functions, which progressively contributed to community empowerment.

This paper aims to elaborate an epistemology of metaphor in the Peircean semiotic tradition. As a logician, Peirce sees metaphor as a result of logical processes that create new meaning. His exposition on iconicity and iconic reasoning has laid a solid foundation upon which may be erected a fresh epistemology of metaphor fit for the contemporary study of language and mind. Broadly speaking, metaphor in Peirce can be examined from two perspectives: macroscopically it is an icon as opposed to index and symbol, whereas microscopically it is a subdivided hypoicon on the third level as opposed to image and diagram. Semioticians after Peirce have further developed his theory of metaphor. Through his concept of “arbitrary iconicity,” Ersu Ding stresses the subjective nature of metaphorization and tries to draw our attention to the specific cultural contexts in which metaphors occur. He also emphasizes the diversity and multivalency of metaphorical vehicles. Umberto Eco sees the interpretation of signs as an open-ended process that involves knowledge of all kinds. Encyclopedic knowledge thus serves as an unlimited source for metaphorical association. For Eco, the meaning of a metaphor should be interpreted in the cultural framework based on a specific cultural community. These ideas are in line with Peirce’s theoretical framework where the meaning of a metaphor depends on an interpreter in a particular socio-historical context. Based on the above theories, the present article proposes a cultural space where innumerable semantic features of objects or life situations are rhizomaticly linked on the basis of encyclopedic knowledge shared by members of a particular culture.