Volume 2022, Issue 245

In this paper I propose to read and understand gestures as logical tools within a synthetic paradigm of knowledge. This interpretation of gesture is drawn from a new pragmatist reading of reasoning in general, and synthetic reasoning in particular. Complete gestures are actions with a beginning and an end that bear a meaning. It is our regular way to embody vague ideas into singular actions with general meaning. The tool is forged by a dense blending of icons, indices, and symbols and by a complexity of phenomenological characteristics as feelings, actual actions, general concepts and habits (firstness, secondness, and thirdness in Peirce’s phenomenology). The paper illustrates this new way to look at gestures and different kinds of complete and incomplete gestures.

We address issues of description of the origin and evolution of the genetic code from a semiotics standpoint. Developing the concept of codepoiesis introduced by Barbieri, a new idea of semio-poiesis is proposed. Semio-poiesis, a recursive auto-referential processing of semiotic system, becomes a form of organization of the bio-world when and while notions of meaning and aiming are introduced into it. The description of the genetic code as a semiotic system (grammar and vocabulary) allows us to apply the method of internal reconstruction to it: on the basis of heterogeneity and irregularity of the current state, to explicate possible previous states and various ways of forming mechanisms of coding and textualization. The revealed patterns are consistent with hypotheses about the origin and evolution of the genetic code.

It is common for us to see models as exemplars of things that exist. Models, instead, are merely Peircean indexes, in that they only point to their objects, objects which may in themselves not exist. This is to say that these examples may only exist as thoughts that point to other thoughts or even ideas that point to objects that may not exist because they are paradoxical.

The name Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) is associated with the science of signs called semiotics, which studies the sign as the carrier of meaning that is placed in the center of his work. Peirce developed a system of concepts that describe how the sign as such is understood by the mind. For the conditions of its interpretations Peirce established various so-called interpretants for the explanation of signs associated with the utterer and interpreter and a shared process that enables the communication between communicators. Further to the renovation of the theory of rhetoric and communication, we show that medium and communication must be understood within the framework of his theory in association to the sign and the object . Throughout his manuscripts the triads of his concepts are realized in the text in rhetorical tricola as terms of his philosophy. In comparison to Aristotle’s Rhetoric , which employed the sign as a means for reasoning, we will show how Peirce developed techniques of reasoning based on Aristotle’s work and his model of mental understanding of the sign while foreshadowing a theory of communication that aims at describing the exchange of information in a model.

Contributing to the debate between referentialist and predicativist accounts of the semantics of proper names, this paper partly endorses a recent trend to reject unitary accounts of their semantics. It does so by restoring a Fregean version of the variety of use account. It criticizes alternative variety of use accounts for not clearly distinguishing pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic issues and argues that, once these are distinguished, the necessity of accepting that names have a variety of uses, and are sometimes logical singular terms and at others logical predicates shows that Frege’s claim, that we should recognize that names have both reference and sense, is vindicated.

The current study investigates classroom interactivity in L2 tertiary literature classrooms in Hong Kong and Taiwan when ESL/EFL students engage with and interpret literary texts in classroom talk as a pedagogic process of text recontextualization. It proposes a more ecological-based approach to language and languaging dynamics that is complementary to current social semiotic approaches to multimodality. It also aims to open up a more embodied analysis of the meaning-making process in tertiary literature classrooms. The multimodal investigation of real-time classroom interactivity based on a multi-scalar approach showcases an embodied coordination of vocalization and gesticulation as integral aspects of the dynamic whole-body sense-making activity that arises in the pedagogic process of text recontextualization. The dynamics vary from students’ solo speech in individual presentation to teacher–student interactions in group discussion and to student–student interactions in role-play. The distributed language view of first-order languaging dynamics demonstrates the embodied and distributed dimensions of the real-time classroom interactivity that couples pedagogic subjects to the affordances of their pedagogic environment. It also provides insights into the impact of pedagogic activities on the multi-scalar dynamics of the meaning-making process with reference to embodied speech–gesture coordination. The paper demonstrates the value of applying an ecologically embodied perspective to multimodal studies in classroom research and stimulates a re-thinking of some of the important aspects of classroom interactivity that have received little attention thus far.

This paper affords a Lotmanian cultural semiotic analysis of the inner workings of ritual embodying the mechanism of cultural memory. In this intersectional study, we propose treating ritual as an integral semiotic system in which the community follows a prescribed collective process to create religious or social meanings and to regulate the mechanism of cultural memory through concrete symbols in the forms of behavior, speech, gestures, objects, spatial structures, and so on. Three semiotic properties of ritual in relation to cultural memory are identified, namely, continuity, concreteness, and integrity, which are jointly responsible for the efficacy of ritual in cultural memory making, or to be specific, in the preservation, retrieval, and even reproduction of cultural memory. With these properties, ritual helps construct and maintain socio-cultural order and group identity in the community, by repeating itself and thus creating a sense of continuity through the preservation and retrieval of cultural memory. The key components in ritual are its diverse and polysemous symbols, which are seldom confined to a specific context, although they are indeed subject to the dominant symbol and the dominant meaning in a ritual when necessary. With an extraordinary degree of autonomy and not bound to any fixed context, ritual symbols can enter a ritual situation as its components but retain the freedom of leaving the ritual context at any time, like an unchained “spectator,” and permeating multiple contexts as self-contained units. It is precisely through these transferrable ritual symbols that the fragments of cultural memory are randomly dispersed in the semiosphere and carried to unexpected socio-cultural contexts, bridging the past, the present, and the future and creating new cultural memory.

In this article, I attempt to set out and discuss the main trajectories of Umberto Eco’s thinking on the media and mass communication, based on a review of the author’s writings on these subjects. What emerges from the study is Eco’s attention to the public and to forms of reception; his attention to the relationship between media communication and reality, which involves investigating the concept of “truth” in an area such as that of mass communication; his cross-media view of information, seen from a pluralistic and polyphonic viewpoint; the ethical tension that is always present in Eco’s work; his unfailing propensity for teaching. What emerges above all is the way in which the theoretical and practical tools used by Eco were developed in the context of reflections on the media and mass communication: an indication that alongside its “philosophical vocation,” Eco’s semiotics was always characterized also by an essential “empirical vocation.”

Résumé Le présent travail de recherche retrace la scène mythique du Coup de l’éventail qui opposa le Dey d’Alger Hussein Pacha et le Consul français Pierre Deval en 1827. Nous examinons dans quelle mesure l’interprétation dudit incident pourrait entraver le recours à la sémiotique dans les études historiographiques en reposant sur les théories sémiotiques de Greimas, de Fontanille et de Zilberberg. L’analyse sémiotique des iconographies représentant l’incident a révélé à quel point ce dernier ne pourrait se désubjectiviser bien que Greimas ait déjà proposé de jumeler les deux étapes l’archivage et l’analyse qui devraient être menés par un actant collectif dans le but d’atteindre une «désubjectivisation totalitaire» des faits. S’ajoutant à cela la problématique du découpage temporel qui persiste, l’historien serait incapable d’étudier les modèles de transformation dans le même temps et dans le même ordre car les transformations jouissent d’un caractère irréversible. Or, les signes historiques sont exempts de virtualité, ce qui remet en cause l’intégrité du signe historique. Greimas espérait aboutir à travers le concept de simulacre à une forme du passé narrativisée et débrayée, l’énonciation va ainsi permettre de doter les éléments hétérogènes abondants du passé d’une valeur énonciative mais cela reste difficile à réaliser. Nous reconnaissons néanmoins que le ne pas pouvoir savoir épistémique est un composant légitime de l’incident historique.

This paper (1) discusses the communicability of musical listening, (2) proposes a semanalytical perspective to approach it in terms of communicational production, and (3) summarizes an analysis of the production of musical listenings in the case of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Instead of assuming that verbal talk on music banalizes listening (Barthes), or that musical arrangers are the privileged authorities when it comes to transmitting a personal listening (Szendy), our suggestion is that communication produces  – in the post-structuralist sense of the word – musical listenings even when it seems to simply try and account for it. In a transmissive, “phenotextual” (Kristeva) comprehension, listening may be understood as a phenomenological, receptive act that pre-exists its communication. Instead, our communicational research on musical listening turns to the listening-accounts in order to grasp the “listenabilities” as they emerge (are permitted or interdicted) within specific listening-territories that “genotextually” produce their regulations and habits (modes of listening). This semiotic production is methodologically investigated, here, in terms of interpretant signs, especially as Normal Interpretants (Peirce), within a particular listening-territory (Brazilian newspapers’ repercussion around the Ninth Symphony’s 1918 debut in Rio). Three remarks are made on the genotextual operations that produce “insufficiency,” “monumentality,” and “ distinção” as listening normalities.