Volume 2018, Issue 225 -

The similarity between language and genetic information transmission processing has been recognized since molecular genetics was founded. Numerous attempts have been made to use linguistics techniques to decipher protein genes. The modest informational impact of various approaches to decoding the “protein language” was predictable: this type of technique is limited by the processes of encoding and at best helps compile a dictionary of units. However, this technique cannot describe a language and identify the semantic and textual structures that are decisive for communication. Thus, the functions of a large amount of non-coding DNA remain unclear. A text (but not a sign) should be regarded as an artefact of the creation, transmission, conservation and transformation of information. A general theory of text should be capable of describing linguistic texts and the process of their structuring, functioning and transformation. It should also be able to represent the biochemical structure of a genome as a hypertext that consists of an ordered subset of other texts. A text can be considered to be a quasi-organism that possesses memory, creative-cognitive characteristics and communicative force, and a cell can be considered as a quasi-intelligence capable of manipulating abstract semiotic entities. Such an approach requires the construction of a new, multimodal, and text-oriented version of semiotics (next-generation semiotics), in which text and context are the basic concepts and signs and meanings are considered to be context-dependent variables and, simultaneously, context-forming operators.

Directing attention to features in the here and now (via individual or joint ventures) is the single, most basic purpose for Dicisigns in human ontogeny. To effectively individuate in the stream of relational awareness, attentional devices must maximize notice of the dynamicity of primary graphical displays. This is a complex process, in that it requires codification of several interconnected but individualized spatial systems and event correlates: associating objects with locations, utilizing other objects as reference points, using intrinsic sidedness and absolute points of reference to orient, and anticipating potential alterations of participants within the spatial array. Early awareness of shifting object location relies upon a double sign (index, icon) to identify and implement landmarks for precise object location. Afterward, establishing other persons/objects as referent points becomes critical. Determining orientation and motility ultimately requires individuating-shape representamen which can leverage spatial inferencing –defining participant action schemes via event profiles. In other words, expectations of action paths which attentional signs afford drives well-formed abductions of participants’ likely momentary orientational shifts. Nonetheless, to successfully predict these shifts, Dicisigns must supersede affiliation with single energetic interpretants; they need to incorporate logical interpretants realized in agent-receiver role reciprocation.

There seem to be two distinct aspects to the role played by the Interpretant in Peirce’s account of the sign relation. On the one hand, the Interpretant is said to establish the relation between the Sign and Object. That is, the Sign can “stand for” its Object, and thereby actually function as a Sign, only by virtue of its being interpreted as such by an Interpretant. On the other hand, the Interpretant is said to be “determined” by the Sign in such a way that it is thereby mediately determined by the Sign’s Object. How can we understand the relation between these two aspects of the Interpretant? This is the question with which this paper is concerned. I begin by drawing a distinction between what I call the first-order function and second-order function of the Interpretant, and illustrating this distinction using Peirce’s example of comparing the letters p and b in § 9 of the 1867 “On a New List of Categories.” I then show that this same distinction can be discerned in a significant passage in the second section of Peirce’s 1903 “A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic,” as well as in his early definition of the Interpretant in the “New List.” This double function of the Interpretant has been noted in the Peircean literature, specifically by Joseph Ransdell in his 1966 dissertation, and more recently by André De Tienne. However, an important aspect of what I call the second-order function of the Interpretant remains unclarified in Ransdell and De Tienne’s approaches, namely, its relation to the logical operation of hypostatic abstraction. I will show that the Interpretant, in its second-order function, plays a role formally identical in the sign process to the role played by hypostatic abstraction in Peirce’s demonstrations of the Reduction Thesis. This formal identity will afford us with a way of understanding the relation between the two aspects of the Interpretant in terms of hypostatic abstraction.

Cognition consists of multiple layers. Each neuron group in layers processes information and transmits it to other layers. The more information is integrated, the more obvious and usable signs become. Horizontally, signs in semiosis are associated and mediated with each other. Vertically, they collaborate beyond the horizon; from sensory neuron to reflective consciousness. Semiosis involves trying to reach final interpretant through following a possible interpretation-course by the force of a guiding principle. Whereas, in trans-semiosis, we attempt to integrate two semioses despite their conceptual gap. In that situation, transcendence occurs. If integration is impossible, semiosis would rev up excessively. Accordingly, intense neural stimulations are generated. Once probable routes of interpretation have rapidly accumulated in quantity, they cross a threshold where restrictions are broken or do not exist. Then, we jump to a stable belief, attaining trans-interpretance that has competence for casually suturing a conceptual gap without any adequate foundation. The overflow of stimulation integrates into transcendence feelings that deviate from cognitive boundaries. That momentary strong feelings and trans-interpretance are connected with each other by a memory mechanism. Trans-interpretance creation leaves some unresolved surplus, reminding us of the once ignored gap and reactivate semiosis. However, if trans-interpretance is reformed and semiosis comes to a lull again, they can be strengthened.

This paper addresses the need for a model of communication with a new, holistic conception of language within it. The resultant process model is called the Communicative Wheel . It consists of three communicative products: the sender’s input corresponding to his/her experience of a situation (symptom), an output corresponding to a piece of information to the receiver (signal), and the receiver’s intake corresponding to a description of the situation referred to (model). What the model of the wheel suggests, is that the understanding of “utterance” as symbolic needs to be replaced by an understanding of it as indexical .

Although representation may be a recurrent theme in research on journalism and advertising, as well as in studies of other social discourses, there may be less clarity regarding its epistemological and methodological aspects. One example is the frequent use of Social Representations Theory (Moscovici), despite its research object is a cognitive phenomenon. Beginning with a literature review in which I examine several sources (for example, sign theory, the philosophy of language, and rhetoric), the following article presents a theory of discursive representation, as well as associated semiotic, epistemological, and methodological theories. My aim is to provide a conceptual framework to help guide and prompt further research in this area.

What can be translated from one language to another? What relationship exists between the translator and the text being translated? This article shows how Peirce’s semiotics, with its array of concepts that function as tools for the textual analysis, can shed a clarifying light on the explorative nature of a translation. In fact, what is described is the dynamic focusing on a transfer of meaning from one text to another, characteristic of human language, the presence of which can be observed in those circumstances where an “abductive” performance is specifically required, such as in the translation.

Mythic symbolic type is a unique cultural structure that permits no exit to the one who has lost his “self” to it. The semi-commune Little Home housed a community of mythic symbolic types which engendered a ritual of their own in which the men trapped within the type moved between its two edges, purity and impurity. But since there is no exit from the type, the question is how and when the ritual begins and ends? What kind of ritual is the mythic symbolic type’s? As an answer, the following article presents an ethnography of the ritual in the semi-commune Little Home where mythic symbolic type was found, and a conceptual map of this world with the help of Bateson’s play paradox and a self-correcting model.

In this essay, I argue that the apparent historical inaccuracies contained within Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (Nordan, Lewis. 2003 [1993]. Wolf Whistle . Chapel Hill: Algonquin) represent a systematic repeal of the controversial history surrounding the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Nordan reconstitutes the principle characters to function as iconoclasms of the historical record. As iconoclasms, these representations undermine our culture’s accepted model of history, what Hayden White terms the “historical account” (White, Hayden. 1975. Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 30).

This paper proposes the idea of “activity-semiotics,” which is characterized by three modes of semiosis, namely, representation, indication, and interpretation, based on dialogical interaction. This activity-semiotics or thought-activity as metasemiosis emphasizes the power of interpretation with a processual-functional approach through a discussion of sign and meaning. In this regard, the dialogical processes involve three interpretants in each semiosis, namely, emotional interpretant, energetic interpretant, and logical interpretant, which are to be examined as to how they are connected in relation to object. My argument for dialogical semiosis is intended to reveal the teleological nature of semiosis where goal, means, and action are cooperative in semiosis in which learning, knowing, and living are engaged. This activity-semiotic model is thus characterized as anthroposemiosis, and yet it adopts not an anthropocentric but an anthropomorphic stance. For this reason, logical interpretant is critical and generates an intellectual concept incorporated with emotional and energetic interpretant. I illustrate how activity-semiotics as dialogical semiosis is operative in traveling narratives or narratives of travel, leading to self-interpretation. Thus, the action of travel in the three modes of semiosis will be represented as metaphorical, transitional, and transformational concepts, respectively, of travel as object.

Résumé  Notre projet est, depuis une dizaine d’années, de proposer une approche du comportement animal alternative à celle, quinquagénaire, ubiquitaire et féconde, inaugurée par Thomas A. Sebeok. Née de la rencontre entre l’éthologie cognitive et la sémiotique greimassienne, cette éthosémiotique, moins attentive à la communication, au « paradigme peircien » (Brier 2008), aux signes ou à une modélisation systématique et englobante (comme celle de la biosémiotique de Kull), essaie plutôt de rendre compte de la diversité et d’une altérité animale qui ne soit ni totalement hermétique ni réductrice ni hiérarchique (anthropotéléologique). À partir d’une reprise critique de la notion uexküllienne d’ Umwelt , trop fixiste et close, et d’une sémiotisation des notions de compétences phylogénétiques et ontogénétiques, nous proposons de considérer des modèles alternatifs, en particulier : celui du phénoménologue Maurice Merleau-Ponty qui propose en 1942 de distinguer des formes de comportement animal à partir des degrés d’adhérence du sujet à son milieu et celui du psychologue Jean Piaget traitant d’accommodation et d’assimilation, deux notions-clés pour rendre compte de la perméabilité et de la variabilité des sujets animaux. Même si l’exemple final d’une inter-accommodation et intercompréhension possible entre l’homme et son chien peut apparaître comme une invitation ou une incitation à reprendre les derniers travaux de Sebeok sur la communication interspécifique, à croiser un regard déjà formé et une approche en cours d’élaboration, il faut néanmoins noter les difficultés terminologiques, donc conceptuelles et interprétatives que pose toute approche interdisciplinaire.

Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad can be understood as a pentadic model of semiotic analysis. Dyadic, triadic, and other relational models offer valuable benefits, but Burke’s pentad is especially useful and relevant given its focus on both action and motive/purpose. Here we will look in more detail at some of these benefits of Burke’s schema understood in this semiotic light, and then we’ll apply the model to a few examples of object analysis. If it is true that Burke’s pentad works in this way as well as we think it does, then fruitful ground exists here for other researchers as well, particularly since Burke’s pentadic model features much less in the field of semiotics proper than do more common dyadic and triadic based models.

This text analyzes the question of linguistic violence in J. Derrida and in J. Butler and shows how this question implies a consideration of the relation between language and body. The starting point is Derrida’s critic of Austin’s theory of speech acts. Through this critic Derrida establishes a relation between speech acts and writing. This connection brings to the fore the importance of the iterability as a structural feature of speech acts. The iterability becomes fundamental in Butler’s analysis of hate speech in Excitable Speech . In this book the iterability is interpreted as the ritual character of the hate speech, which reveals its political dimension. Comparing Butler and Derrida’s ideas of speech act, I try in this text to make emerge the idea of a textual body as the possibility of the resistance to the linguistic violence.

In this recent address to a UNESCO doctoral summer school in northern Italy, the author argues that all cultural tourism has underlying and implicit philosophical-religious dimensions that are particularly important in the era of “late capitalism,” in which “the idiosyncratic has triumphed over the normative” and there is a deeply nihilistic drive and trajectory to the ascendant culture. After drawing on the sociologist Daniel Bell’s analysis of “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” the author argues that there is an irreducible sacred dimension to the human person ( res sacra homo ) and his or her life always has the character of a pilgrimage, cognitively comprised of a quest for significance beyond the separate meanings of the normal occupational and utilitarian life. Master-works of urbanism, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature offset the nihilistic dynamic of “late modernity,” and the author draws particular attention to literary works of cross-cultural understanding such as the trilogy of historical novels about India by L. H. Myers, The Root and the Flower and the novels of the great modern Japanese writer Shusaku Endo. As works of fundamental importance for orienting his analysis he adduces C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning .

The complexity and flexibility of tagmemic theory, as a semiotic theory developed by Kenneth L. Pike, can be better understood by examining how it applies to a simple semiotic system like traffic lights. We can then compare the result with how it functions in analyzing a piece of natural language. Tagmemic theory introduces three observer viewpoints – the particle view, the wave view, and the field view. Each view generates a suite of questions to answer. Any one of the views results in a “complete” description of traffic lights, from which the information about the other views can be inferred. And yet each view is distinct in texture from the others, and the existence of such multiple views – each with a claim to emic integrity and each serving as a perspective on the whole – has to be accounted for in a robust semiotic approach. The same phenomena occur when we apply the three views to the analysis of meaning in natural language. The chief illustration is to analyze the meaning of the word dog in multiple ways. The multi-dimensional potential for semiotic analysis highlights the limitations of Aristotelian logic and symbolic logic, both of which simplify for the sake of rigor.

The Charlie Hebdo magazine’s 1178 edition was published following the deadly attack against the magazine’s cartoonists on 7 January 2015. The cover portrays the prophet Muhammad holding a sign with the phrase Je Suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”), titled with the phrase tout est pardonne (“all is forgiven”). This paper utilizes two levels of semiotic analyses. The first applies a direct, first level, semiotic reading while the second applies Roland Barthes’ idea of “Myth.” The analyses identify the tension between resistance and reconciliation as a key dialectical axis that drives the interpretive process. Tensions between East-West, religious-secular, natives-immigrants, and Islam-Christianity are all invoked by this cover, generating an extraordinary example of the complexity that cartoons are able to carry out as a form of intertwining semiotic systems. The first level of analysis finds an appropriation of Muhammad’s image in order to deliver messages of reconciliation and solidarity. The second level of analysis – a reading of the cover through Barth’s “Myth” – finds instead a Christian martyr, a Jesus image, replacing Muhammad and functioning as a divisive force that feeds the discourse of cultural clash.

This paper studies cross-modal distance representation in traditional Chinese landscape painting in a contemporary museum context with special reference to the classic three axes of distance, i.e. level, deep, and high “distance.” It observes how an artwork’s “meaning” can be perceived through the bilingual presentation of the “distances” to bring about the realization of a “meditative distance,” or the artist’s aesthetic aspiration for a spiritual “freedom.” Informed by the theory of three meta-functions in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Arnheim’s discussion about distance cues, the study has closely examined a classical landscape painting in conjunction with its Chinese and English bilingual museum captions, with a view to tracing out their discursive meta-functions based on the visual-verbal coherence of distance representation. In so doing, the study takes museum discourse as a holistic multimodal interactive process of different sign systems at three levels of communication (i.e. extratextual, intersemiotic, and intertextual) to enable the modern viewer to better appreciate the aesthetic aspiration nursed by the meaning of the pictorially depicted distance(s) in an ancient landscape painting. The findings of the study will not only contribute to a better aesthetic contextualization of the traditional Chinese visual arts but also, in a practical vein, to the construction of a more informed museum discursive environment conducive to a spiritual journey, or a mental transcendence, that keeps the mundane world at a “meditative distance.”

This article is dealt with at a historical-strategic level. Historical processes can be functionally divided into two sections: the social-material-directed Power-organizing part and the cultural-spiritual Ethic-thinking part. Thus there exist two corresponding dynamic-operative functions in history, which are guided and impelled by different motivations, methods, and destinations involved in the two functions. The Ethic-practicing praxis has been always performed through the empirical-humanist-rational ways, which today can be more effectively embodied in human sciences to be reorganized by the general-semiotic (GS) strategy. So there are two kinds of human historical courses: the one as the materialist-directed power-organizing part and the other as spiritual-theoretical-directed ethic-reflecting part. From a historical-philosophical point of view, the former is to prepare the material-conditions/means for supporting the latter as the ethic-spiritual mission that is directed towards exploring the meaning/value foundation for human existence. Lacking in the internal link between the two historical-pragmatic functions the ethic-spiritual praxes should manage to find a separate strategy for actively continuing its independent ethic task by dint of wisely/bravely shunning the materialist-determinism issued from the technical/commercialized globalization era.

The present article explains the tenets of an updated version of semiosic translation . Many of the ideas in this paper have been brewing for some time. For example, the integration of the Peircean notions of sign and abduction and the Wittgensteinian concepts of rule-following, complex-fact , and hypothesis . It turns out that this synthesis leads to some new proposals about translation semiotics that seek to move the field from the reification of objects, concepts and practices toward a broader conception of translation and translating centered on the translator’s agency. What this means is, among other things, that semiosic translation avoids a delimitation of signification (things and actions conveying meaning) by rejecting any conceptual appeals tinged with foundationalism. Rather, my argument will concentrate on elucidating the unpredictability of semiosis as a determinant of all forms of translation across sign systems.

This article deals with the problem of the formation of new epistemological fields, which appear simultaneously with a new interpretation. Based on the semiotic approach described by Umberto Eco in Lector in Fabula (Eco, Umberto. 2003. Dire quasi la stessa cosa: Esperienze di traduzione [To say almost the same thing: Experience translation] . Milan: Bompiani.), we analyze several works in the context of their synchronization with a reader’s reality. We also deal with the problem of intersemiotic translation – a text’s transmutation (including its translation as a particular case of transmutation), and how it contributes both to intercultural interaction and to construction of new epistemological fields of conceiving consciousness. According to the hypothesis stated in the article, different ideas form different meanings as objects of a reader’s/spectator’s thoughts. A new aspect of interpretation brings forth new text transmutations, which appears as the process of transformation of the concept idea as an abstract essence or an abstract object. We suppose that diachrony, being the main factor of a text’s interpretation, determines a variative set of meanings.

In Cosmos , Onfray argues in favor of a (re-) conceptualization of communication based on recent scientific discoveries. Similar to many researchers in the field of biosemiotics, the controversial philosopher posits that all life forms engage in constant semiosis. As opposed to being a singular characteristic that only homo sapiens possess, Onfray contends that all organisms are endowed with semiosic faculties that enable them to exchange information in purposeful and meaningful ways. Appealing to scientific logic, the philosopher debunks the common misconception that non-human vocalizations are merely the product of an internal machinery. Onfray offers concrete examples from both the animal and plant kingdom illustrating the astounding complexity of non-human semiosis. Nonetheless, in his reflections about the advent of hyperreality, the philosopher nuances his philosophical position by underscoring what makes the human primary modelling device of “language” the most sophisticated form of semiosis that exists in the biosphere. Although all material beings communicate with each other effectively in order to survive, to relate to each other, and to reproduce, Onfray recognizes that humans appear to have a heightened predisposition for symbolic exchange. The philosopher affirms that the human Umwelt is the richest and most complex semiotic space of all. Due to the pervasive nature of human semiosis in the modern world that threatens the ability of other life forms to create, stockpile, emit, and interpret signs, the philosopher also insists that preserving the fragile semiosic diversity of the “soundscape” is the key to averting the impending, anthropogenic eco-apocalypse.

The aim of this article is to construct a model that demonstrates how human communication, involving all kinds of media, may not only correspond to but also put us in contact with what we perceive to be the surrounding world. In which ways is truthfulness actually established by communication? To answer this, the notion of indices is employed: signs based on contiguity. However, an investigation of indices’ outward direction – creating truthfulness in communication – also requires an understanding of their inward direction: establishing coherence. To investigate these two functions, further concepts and various elementary categorizations are proposed: it is argued that there are several types of contiguity and many varieties of indexical objects, which invalidates the coarse fiction–nonfiction distinction.

Giambattista Vico first published his masterpiece The New Science in 1725, but it did not receive much attention from the academic world until the middle of the twentieth century. The last fifty years of academic research have witnessed a so-called “linguistic” and “cultural” turn which has revived our interest in this great Italian thinker. Looking at the Vichian scholarship of the recent past, it seems that Vico’s theory of poetic wisdom has gained a great deal of recognition and deservedly so, but his concept of sensus communis is yet to be fully appreciated. The present article thus tries to discuss the constructive and imaginative function of language and culture not just through the notion of poetic logic but also in relation to that of common sense, which hopefully can shed some light on the perennial debate over the criterion of truth and aesthetic judgement.

Mathematics and language appear from one angle very alike. They seem to have similar structures and maintain similar grammars. However, they are regularly used in different situations to achieve different goals. This suggests that they have quite distinct functionalities. This paper explores this tension between the similarity and difference of language and mathematics by focusing on mathematics’ intrinsic functionality as conceptualzsed through metafunction in Systemic Functional Semiotics and Social Semiotics. Unlike many studies in these traditions, however, it does not assume the metafunctions developed for language will unproblematically transfer over to mathematics. Rather, it derives the metafunctional organization of mathematics from its paradigmatic and syntagmatic organization. This method illustrates that although metafunction is a productive category for understanding mathematics, its metafunctional organization is not the same as that for language. In particular, mathematics displays an expanded logical component, while giving no evidence for an autonomous interpersonal component. In addition to allowing a principled comparison of mathematics and language in terms of their intrinsic functionality, this method suggests that if Systemic Functional and Social Semiotic studies wish to understand the functions of various semiotic resources, they cannot unquestioningly assume metafunctions will occur across all semiosis.

Ciudadanos is a new Spanish political party that, in the last two years, has won a position as an important force in Parliament. Among the distinctive characteristics of its discourse, the use of the neutral stands out, which the party uses to distance itself from old-style politics. This article analyzes the discursive strategy of Ciudadanos from its founding up through the present day, and uncovers the operations of ideological camouflage that it uses to construct its apparent neutrality. In this way, the article seeks to recover the spirit of the Barthesian mythological analyses, dedicated to unmasking contemporary myths.

Many countries throughout the globe function in a system that allows the usage of more than one language. Such a multilingual social reality’s construction, especially in societies like the one in which I am living, is perceived in many different ways: attempting thus to provide for the process of differentiating identity’s oneness and sameness into various cultural subcategories, which already represent new realities (and/or otherness in terms of identity’s conceptualization). Due to newly created social realities, semiotics naturally discusses the differences and/or oppositions that can contribute to various cultures’ mutual exclusivity or inclusivity, in terms of various heterogeneous “transformations,” which would thus overcome dualities, and be viewed as single acts of signs, or as a result of a process of singularization of their constituent components. I shall also attempt using a semiotic style that may enact a semiotics of action, grounded on the semiotics of passions, through a way of producing semantic taxonomies as pride versus humiliation, hegemony versus subordination, etc., obtainable due to disjunctive and/or conjunctive semiotic relations such as contextualization versus de-contextualization.