Marcel Danesi
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Marcel Danesi
Abstract:
Semiotics is a complex terminological enterprise. There
are various frameworks consisting of diverse proposals. This has
always been a problematic area in getting semiotics into the
academic mainstream. This paper proposes a simplified
terminological solution based on biosemiotic research and,
particularly, modeling systems theory.
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Frank Nuessel
Abstract: Thomas
A. Sebeok (1920–2001), one of the best known and most highly
regarded semioticians of the twentieth century, contributed much
to this interdiscipline. This essay examines Sebeok’s major
contributions to semiotics, including his contributions to the
subdiscipline of zoosemiotics, semiosis as the internal biological
process that underlies external representation, modeling systems,
Sebeok’s typology of signs, and the educational implications of
semiotics.
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Paul Perron
Abstract: This article examines the role of the
enunciator-enunciatee in Aragon’s long poem and focuses on the
first chapter that serves as an introduction or preface to Le Fou
d’Elsa. The preface writer does not identify himself but tells a
story in which he is both writer and actor. We analyze a number of
poems and prose sections from the perspective of É. Benveniste’s
theory of enunciation, highlighting temporal dislocations and the
polyphony of voices that generate the production of meaning in
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William Pencak
Abstract: Does semiotics matter? In this paper, I argue
that the semiotically aware tradition of late-medieval scholastic
philosophy, culminating in John Poinsot’s Treatise on Signs,
provided the basis for treating conquered societies in North
America as part of the Hispanic world order. The Amerindians
exhibited signs of humanity that could be interpreted analogously
with European civilization. First-hand observations of Native
Americans by Las Casas and Quiroga provided evidence for the
natural law and just war theories of Suarez and Vitoria. On the
other hand, the dualistic philosophy of Hobbes and Locke ignored
first-hand British accounts of Indians, and hardly ever mentioned
them except to emphasize their radical differences with Europeans.
Indians did not even possess the lands they lived on because they
failed to improve them in accordance with British expectations.
Thus, to this day, Indians and indigenous people of mixed races
are integrated into the mainstream of Latin American society and
thought, while in the United States they, like African Americans,
retain an "otherness" based upon color. In short, the
different fates of Amerindians in British and Latin America
demonstrate the very real consequences of a semiotic versus
dualistic approach to human nature and society, and how
pre-existent systems of communication can shape history.
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Mariel O’Neill-Karch
Abstract: This
article attempts to show, through semiotic analysis, how three major
works of art, Leonardo’s "Mona Lisa," Paul Delaroche’s
"Napoleon at Fontainebleau," and Ingres’s allegorical
painting, "The Source," have been used by advertisers in
various ways to transmit their messages to the consumer. The
disconnect between the paintings and the products distorts the
original purpose of the works of art, thus setting up a dialectical
relationship between fine art and advertising, which produces a type
of postmodern discourse on the value of art itself.
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Lorenzo Cantoni and Peter Schulz
Abstract: This article presents a semiotic
analysis of an online visual chat. In particular, it studies how
space, deictic elements, and time operate in user interactions to
help exchange meanings. A reflection on what is meant by
"persistent communication" is further conducted on the
basis of the selected corpus.
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Jesper Hoffmeyer
Abstract: The Peircean idea of nature’s
inherent tendency to generalization or "habit taking" is
illustrated in the Earth’s organic evolution. The essence of a
habit of course is that—to some extent at least—you can count
on it, that is, predict what will happen next, and living systems
par excellence are systems that nourish themselves through a
capacity for anticipation. Living systems take advantage of their
capacity for interpreting the habits of other living systems or
even abiotic systems by relating such habits to the internal
dynamics of their own survival. Thus, over billions of years arose
a tightly knit semiosphere, a sphere that is coextensive with the
biosphere and that consists in organismic communication and
signification where the habits of one organism serve as a scaffold
for the release of habits and behaviors of many kinds in other
organisms of the same or of other species. The term semiogenic
scaffolding refers to this evolutionary build-up of an open-ended
global patchwork of ever new habits scaffolding internal
organismic functionality as well as ecosemiotic integration of the
biosphere. Science has had a tendency to deny the reality of
indeterminacy, which is most often seen as an epistemological
anomaly, that is, uncertainty. In a semiotic understanding of
nature, indeterminacy is the rule rather than determinacy and,
accordingly, the hard problem is to explain the widespread
occurrence of determinacy in the life sphere. This paper discusses
and explains the role of semiotic scaffolding in this stabilizing
process with genomes and brains as outstanding examples of
powerful semiotic scaffolding devices.
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Shannon Foskett
Abstract: Can
we speak of a posthumanist cinema? What would it look like? This
article considers the possible representational strategies and
themes that might define such a cinema, and in doing so, suggests
the possibility of an already existing "subterranean
history" of posthumanist film. The increasing prominence of
the category of the posthuman as an object of knowledge and
subject or site of reference prompts the need for thinking the
posthuman anew, apart from, and through both anti-humanist and
humanist traditions. This article makes a small step in that
direction by investigating points of technological subjectivity in
cinema, the privileged plane of (im)personal forces and
compositions. This article assumes that semiotic analysis exceeds
psychoanalytic or Marxist images of the knowing subject; that it
can and should redirect itself to a more Deleuzian topology of new
expressions of acategorical encounters and productions of
extra-being. To this end, this article examines two films that
seem to gesture toward such encounters and productions, ultimately
suggesting that any "posthumanist cinema" would
critically experiment with materialist production strategies.
Emma Jo Aiken-Klar
Abstract: In this
paper, I will borrow from Kundera’s theme of heaviness and light
from The Unbearable Lightness of Being* as I explore the
innovation of electronic text. In the first section, I will
examine views held by proponents of electronic text. For these
theorists, the freedom offered by the electronic medium is seen to
be an embodiment of Roland Barthes’s post-structuralist theories
of Work and Text. In part two, I will look at some arguments posed
by those who reject this view of electronic text. For these
thinkers, the emancipatory property of electronic text is based on
an essential confusion between the activity of the reader and the
structure of the medium. I will conclude this exploration with my
own thoughts about the physical embodiment of meaning in print.
Murat Hişmano™lu
Abstract: This
paper aims at emphasizing the importance of semiotic elements and
difficulties in teaching vocabulary items. It summarizes the
background of vocabulary teaching, lists vocabulary teaching
techniques proposed by various researchers, and expounds semiotic
elements and difficulties in teaching color names, idioms,
onomatopoeic words, and compound words. Moreover, because
semiotics is one of the most effective ways of teaching culture,
the role of semiotic elements in vocabulary learning and teaching,
problems caused by being unfamiliar with the cultural semiotics of
the target language, the use of semiotic elements in literature,
and the role of the language teacher in a vocabulary lesson are
taken into account.
Yun-Kin Chang
Abstract: This paper uses
semiotic theory to analyze the queer presentation in everyday
life. To follow this purpose, this paper considers that culture
can be defined as a container for the meaning-making strategies
and forms of behavior that people employ to carry out their daily
routines. Thus, culture itself is one huge code constituting of a
signifying network that unites individual signs into a cohesive
circuitry of intertwined meanings. In advance, this paper also
focuses on the genealogical relationships among different
disciplines, such as semiotics, ethnomethodology, cultural
psychology, and ideology in Marxist tradition. The reason is this
paper insists that semiotic analysis must be in search of outer
and inner codes at all kinds of abstract and concrete levels.
Thus, the disciplines of ethnomethodology, cultural psychology,
and Marxist tradition have an elective affinity with semiotics.
Through the relevant semiotics discussion, this paper points out
that the sacred and the profane comprise a prevalent dichotomy in
current straight and queer cultures. Meanwhile, this paper also
does not think this dichotomy is very stable or fixable and
emphasizes that power and resistance are the double sides of the
same coin. Resistance takes the form of a reverse discourse in the
process of contesting the sacred and the profane.
Timothy N. Atkinson
Abstract: This study used a
mixed methods approach to examine the use of marketing terminology
in higher education news media. The themes that emerged from this
analysis focused on issues of conjuncture or conflict and intertexuality or the use of capitalist terminology in the context
of a nonprofit organization. The themes to emerge dealt with (1)
faculty warning against the shift toward marketing in higher
education, (2) a struggle within enrollment management to use the
tools of marketing while maintaining the higher education ethos,
and finally (3) the word "student" used as a deliberate
target market as would be expected in a capitalist society.
Deborah Biss Keller
Abstract: This study employed
semiotic analysis informed by critical theory to examine how
physical signs in two public elementary schools in a Midwestern city
reflect values necessary for the maintenance of a capitalist
economy. Texts, pictures, artwork, and displays in both schools were
analyzed in an attempt to interpret their meaning as "hidden
curriculum" (Giroux 1983, 339). In addition, physical signs in
both schools were compared and contrasted with those in a private
school, in the same city, that subscribed to a humanistic
philosophy.
Jonathan Matusitz
Abstract: This study aims at
explaining how flags, a powerful form of visual communication,
function to construct and produce meaning, and how vexillology,
the study of flags, is part of the framework of semiotics. By the
same token, the focus of this study is to view flags as a
language. The author provides a semiotic analysis of flags as
symbols and explains how they are worth a thousand words, how they
"speak" as ethnic or racial symbols, cultural symbols,
and political iconography, and why their colors are important.
François Victor Tochon and Nathan Black
Abstract: The video study group provides a
flexible coming together of student teachers involved in semiotic
inquiry on their own actions and professional contexts, with the
goal of professional development. This article conceptualizes
professional development through reflective equilibrium. We
investigate how conflicts emerging in a video study group setting
help preservice teachers both theorize their personal teaching
practice and further refine these theories through response to
differing peer perspectives. A psychosemiotic framework is
employed to analyze the degrees to which resulting reflective
conflicts lead to adopting life-long professional developmental
actions in accordance with students’ learning. Creative
conceptual blending supports reflective equilibrium, which becomes
the basis for further "phronesis," or reflections on
practice based on principles of social justice.
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Reviewed by Michael Ewbank
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Reviewed by Paul Cobley
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