Volume 2021, Issue 241

The theoretical debate on the nature of narrative has been mainly concerned with literary narratives, whereas forms of non-literary and especially pictorial narrativity have been somewhat neglected. In this paper, however, I shall discuss narrativity specifically with regard to pictorial objects in order to clarify how pictorial storytelling may be based on the activation of mentally stored action and scene schemas. Approaches from cognitive psychology, such as the work of Schank, Roger C. & Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, plans, goals and understanding . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Mandler, Jean Matter. 1984. Stories, scripts, and scenes: Aspects of schema theory . London/Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Schank, Roger C. 1995. Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, suggest that cognition crucially depends on the storage and retrieval of action scripts or schemata , that is, narrative structures, which may occur at various levels of abstraction. These schemas incorporate generalized knowledge about event sequences, such as the order in which specific events will take place; causal, enabling, or conventionalized relations between these events, and what kind of events occur in certain action sequences. There also are scene schemas that are characterized by spatial rather than temporal relations. Further kinds of schemas seem also to play a decisive role. Drawing upon considerations from schema and script theory, I will focus on some concrete examples of pictorial narration, more specifically depictions of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary , where narrative schema structures become involved and, indeed, the comprehensibility of the pictures as such presuppose mental script representations.

The aim of my contribution is to analyse the role that common sense has played in Umberto Eco’s work. After making clear the distinction between good sense and common sense, and highlighting a number of differences with the Scottish philosophy of common sense, I will consider the uses and functions that common sense assumes in Eco’s philosophy: namely, a phenomenological function, a regulatory function and a communicative function. I will demonstrate how the characterisation of common sense in Eco emphasises the importance of the historical dimension of Sens, the importance of the public and social dimension of semiosis, and how common sense plays a fundamental, pragmatic role in the disposition to act, whilst revealing the importance of the Peircian lesson and Eco’s consonance with Peirce’s positions.

This paper proposes a concept of creativity that stems from a semiotic and linguistic theoretical perspective, in which the formal frame of reference for variation and linguistic change considers and evaluates both the process of general interaction and the contact of languages as a global phenomenon. This method proposes an analysis of creativity that ranges from reflections of ancient philosophy to a contemporary linguistic perspective, incorporates international ideologies, and identifies, within the dimensions of use and social sharing, the principle capable of guiding potentially unlimited forms of linguistic creativity that are self-expressive and communicative, far beyond the grammatical patterns of regularity and norm. Interpreting the paradigm of creativity according to this model means placing the semiotic property in a position of prima inter pares , entrusted not only with the “role” of forming signs (words, sentences, texts), but the function of arbitraire , as a phenomenon of language creation. The following reading references the semiotic contribution of Tullio De Mauro, an Italian linguist who has contributed to the systematization of creativity, overcoming and synthesizing both Saussurian structuralism and Chomskyan generativism.

Jakob Johannes von Uexküll’s biological thought influenced a new path to approach the view of a living being throughout of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the past century, in Spain a “new vertebrate way of thinking” was generated, as Ortega would say. And the work of Uexküll initiated an interest in the circles of thinkers of the likes of Julio Caro Baroja, José Ortega y Gasset, and Xavier Zubiri among others. My aim is describing how Uexküll plays a part in the development in the foundations of thoughts of these thinkers; in particular, Ortega and Zubiri’s thought and their interactions between the circumstantiality and formality, respectively, and Uexküll’s Umwelt. In fact, Ortega’s biological thought was the foundation of his vitalism realism and made a giant step in philosophical anthropology existentialism in his Meditations of Quixote in 1911. We will also see the anthropologist Caro Baroja’s epistemic Uexküll influences. A retrospective view of Spanish thought will be developed, where the seeds of Uexküll made fruitful the development of several authors, as well as some transitive or indirect influences; even the generation of discrepancies in others. Finally, we will describe the development, in Spanish, that had the work of Thure von Uexküll, which includes the work of his father. With Thure, the Uexküll influences in Spain concluded until the start of interest in zoosemiotics and biosemiotics.

In the multidisciplinary field of memory studies, remembering and forgetting have mainly been analyzed following two ideal-typical models: memory-as-containment (exemplified by the notions of framework and site of memory) and memory-as-flow (epitomized by the notions of afterlife and mnemohistory). These two models are often presented as mutually exclusive and counterposed. Yet, in linking past with present, and when connecting different spaces and generations, memory is always the result of circulation (flow) as well as of local semiotic conditions of production and use (containment). By investigating memory-making and oblivion-making in processes of interpretation, the semiotic perspective elaborated by Umberto Eco allows us to envision memory-as-containment and memory-as-flow in a combined analysis, where the twofold conception of memory – either as movement or as form – merges. The aim of this article is, then, to provide an interpretative theory of memory, and to identify and describe the methodological tools capable of implementing such an approach. The memory of the former Italian concentration camp of Fossoli will serve as an exemplary and illustrative case study.

Résumé Depuis longtemps appliquée aux arts visuels avec le sens de “simplification”, la notion de stylisation émerge au cours du XXe siècle, héritière de l’histoire d’une approche dynamique du langage dont la source se trouve au XIXe siècle. La réflexion épistémologique récente tend vers une reconceptualisation de l’objet de la stylistique, passant du style à la stylisation, décentrement qui met l’interprétation au premier plan. Une stylisation “primaire”, par le créateur, se poursuit dans la stylisation “secondaire”, par l’interprète. Un détour par la sémiotique des cultures permet de relier l’herméneutique à une problématique sémio-anthropologique, contribuant à affermir la définition de l’objet de la stylistique et le statut scientifique de cette discipline. Objet de l’interprétation, le sens demeure une notion problématique. La stylisation est ici redéfinie comme une opération énonciative d’individuation textuelle visant à organiser du complexe à partir de quelques lignes de force, soit un processus de simplexification. Elle participe au mouvement de réunification des études littéraires et des sciences du langage sous le nom d’herméneutique matérielle.

Résumé La présente étude aborde la question de savoir comment l’œuvre du Marquis de Sade reste sur les développements des jeux du langage wittgensteniens, c’est-à-dire des pratiques langagières associées à la communication dans un contexte donné. Tout d’abord, une identification de la règle (en tant qu’élément organique d’une pratique langagière), et du rôle de l’abduction peircienne pour son application, montre que pour Sade «  faire la même chose » (c’est-à-dire suivre la règle) lui permet de créer un système sémiotique pour justifier une idéologie du privilège bourgeois. Ainsi conçue, la règle d’auteur devient expérience iconique d’hypervisibilité (fondée sur la frontalité de la sexualité) lorsqu’elle est appliquée par le lecteur (participant potentiel) à des nouveaux jeux du langage. En ce sens, les jeux du langage proposés par Sade visent à franchir les rets du livre pour justifier les illusions (im)morales de l’auteur, clés de voûte de toute son œuvre.

This study investigates whether there is a relation between the semantics of linguistic expressions that indicate temporal distance and the spatial properties of their co-speech gestures. To this date, research on time gestures has focused on features such as gesture axis, direction, and shape. Here we focus on a gesture property that has been overlooked so far: the distance of the gesture in relation to the body. To achieve this, we investigate two types of temporal linguistic expressions are addressed: proximal (e.g., near future, near past) and distal (e.g., distant past, distant future). Data was obtained through the NewsScape library, a multimodal corpus of television news. A total of 121 co-speech gestures were collected and divided into the two categories. The gestures were later annotated in terms of gesture space and classified in three categories: (i) center, (ii) periphery, and (iii) extreme periphery. Our results suggest that gesture and language are coherent in the expression of temporal distance: when speakers locate an event far from them, they tend to gesture further from their body; similarly, when locating an event close to them, they gesture closer to their body. These results thus reveal how co-speech gestures also reflect a space-time mapping in the dimension of distance.

Instagram serves as a powerful instrument for youth socialization, self-expression, and self-performance in visual online spaces. Using social semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis, this study examines the potential ideological meanings and implications of selfie-shooting and sharing on Instagram on young adults’ self-concept. A corpus of 110 questionnaires, including almost 85 captioned selfies, was surveyed as multimodal utterances. In doing so, this study argues that selfies can create young adults’ split-selves while constructing their multiple personas in visual online spaces. This marks the significance of viewing selfie-creators not only as authors of their selfies, but rather as viewers of a three-fold self: an ideal-self, a projected-self, and an internal-self, to negotiate social and power relationships, while (re)positioning observer-observed roles. This study claims originality in unraveling how young adults use visual and textual mediated communication to represent and perform their split-selves. It suggests that selfie-shooting-sharing has become a key self-performance tactic and behavior in online cultures. Therefore, young adults deploy selfies and captions to posit a redefinition of certain social values, such as aesthetics and freedom, while deploying their selfies and captions. Challenging certain orthodox social allegiances, they conceive wildness, messiness, and exuberance as emerging neo-aesthetics components of appeal. This study contributes to the literature on personal visual communication with insights on how Egyptian young adults perform their self-concept via the semiotic practice of selfie-shooting-sharing.

Interfaces have partially replaced editors. They now administer and have industrialized the processes of content circulation. Web platforms mediatize cultural memory and one example of this is that of online audiovisual archives which are a paradigmatic case involving interfaces mediating our image of the past. Therefore, their role as an enunciative framework is clearly worthy of thought and study. We will thus use a semiotic approach based on the starting hypothesis that digital interfaces shape our belief systems through a discursive framing of content to which they give access. By analyzing two case studies, we will argue that the transparency of interfaces appears to recall the notion of “mechanical objectivity” and thus refashion the reliability of the archives. However, a final counter-analysis of a document read in the framework of an on-site consultation invites us to reshape our considerations and enlarge the perspective from semiotic visual analysis to include the social processes linked to the publication of digital heritage.

Climate change is an anthropogenic existential threat that provokes extreme concern among climate scientists, but not, it seems, among all member of the public. Here, there is considerably more variability in level of concern and, it appears, in everyday sustainable behavior. But how does personality affect this variability in behavior? And how are underlying personality states like dispositional optimism linked to more sustainable everyday practices? Research in clinical psychology has suggested that dispositional optimism is a very positive personality characteristic associated with higher levels of hope and resilience, but applied research from other domains has reported that optimists can, on occasion, bury their heads in the sand and avoid attending to external threats, like climate change, in order to maintain mood state. So are optimists more immune to climate change messaging than non-optimists? And do they make fewer sustainable choices? A series of experimental studies, manipulating signifiers of carbon footprint (Study 1) and eco labels on products (Study 2) found that optimists made more sustainable choices than non-optimists and that both groups were influenced equally by climate change film clips in terms of sustainable choices (Study 1). Optimists also displayed a false consensus effect, overestimating the proportion of people who would behave more sustainably like themselves (Study 3). Given that global problems like climate change need concerted, cooperative effort, these optimistic beliefs about how others behave could be adaptive in the long-run. Designing climate change messages to appeal to optimists might be a critical consideration for the future.

This article demonstrates how Iranian classical music and Persian medieval poetry, taken as separate semiotic systems, form together, in certain contexts, a single hybrid semiotic system with overlapping structural features and shared aesthetic principles. Hjelmslev’s description of connotative semiotic systems serves as a theoretical framework to show the modalities of this hybridization. This phenomenon can be observed through comparative analysis of the interdependence of poetry and music in the Persianate World from a semiotic point of view. On the one hand, the quantitative (chronemic) meter of the Persian classical versification, called ‘aruz , as well as its extraordinarily heavy use of rhyme display a formal structure that evokes that of a musical phrase. On the other hand, the dependence of the structure of the Iranian musical system upon the rhythmic structure of classical poetry suggests a unique character of which few examples exist. This interdependence manifests itself particularly in the mystic (Sufi) poetry of the medieval period, specifically in the work of such renowned poets as Rumi, Sa’di Shirāzi, and Hāfez, who are among the best-known in the West. Examples of their lyric works are examined here to demonstrate occurrences of the collusion between the two semiotic systems.