Subject collection: Semiotics (98 titles, 1967–2015)
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Subject collection: Semiotics (98 titles, 1967–2015)
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Collection Contents
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Creative Dynamics
More LessHow do readers make sense of a picture, a photograph, or a map in literary narratives in which visual signs play a critical role? How do authors accomplish their various objectives in constructing such complex texts? What strategies and techniques do they use to project fictional worlds and to provide their readers with the means for orienting themselves there? This book investigates the dynamics of the imaginary diagrams created by cartographers, photographers, and writers of narratives, giving ample evidence of how mapping practices have inspired the imagination of a vast number of authors from Thomas More up to contemporary writers. A special focus is on the effects created by the projection of photographs into the narrative space, and how our seemingly effortless interpretation of photographs and even maps masks complex cognitive processes. The theoretical horizon of this study encompasses the fields of cartography, mental maps, iconicity research, and the spatial turn in cultural studies.
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Contrastive Functional Analysis
More LessWhy is a raven like a writing-desk? The concept of similarity lies at the heart of this new book on contrastive analysis. Similarity judgements depend partly on properties of the objects being compared, and partly on what the person judging considers to be relevant to the assessment; similarity thus has both objective and subjective aspects. The author shows how contrastive analysis and translation theory make use of the concept in different ways, and explains how it relates to the problematic notions of equivalence and tertium comparationis. The book then develops a meaning-based contrastive methodology, and outlines one theory of semantic structure which can be used in this methodology. The approach is illustrated with four sample studies covering different kinds of phenomena in some European languages. The final part of the book proposes an extension of the theoretical framework to cover contrastive rhetoric: the aim is to suggest a unified approach linking aspects of semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric.
Keywords: similarity, contrastive analysis, functional grammar, semantics, rhetoric, translation.
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Cognition and Representation in Linguistic Theory
More LessThe objective of this book is to better acquaint English-speaking linguistics with a corpus of texts hitherto untranslated, containing the cognitive-based research in formal linguistics of one of the most important theoreticians in the field: Antoine Culioli (b. 1924). Culioli's viewpoint is grounded in Emile Benveniste's (1902-1976) revolutionary answer to Saussure's opposition between competence (langue) and performance (parole) captured in the idea of énonciation, in which the relationship between an individual and a language is one of appropriation. The translation has been prepared to provide the reader with as obstacle-free a path as one can clear to a theory that requires, and indeed commands, a very close, attentive reading. As an additional aid to understand Culioli's argument, footnotes throughout the work show similarities and differences with the work of the cognitive linguist Ronald W. Langacker.
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La Charpente modale du sens
More LessCet ouvrage est consacré à l'analyse des modalités — épistémiques, aléthiques, déontiques et ontiques — et propose une réécriture de la théorie de Greimas à partir d'une nouvelle conception dynamique du phénomène modal. L'introduction et l'interrogation sémiotique de la théorie des catastrophes de R. Thom et de J. Petitot permettent de redéfinir l'actant, le faire, l'échange, le parcours narratif, et de repenser l'organisation discursive: l'aspectualité, la quantification, la véridiction, la condition, et la constitution des morphologies sémiques. A travers la mise en phrases des scénarios dynamiques, les effets modaux sont étudiés dans le domaine du mode grammatical, et finalement dans le champ de l'énonciation. Une conception morphogénétique du sens est proposée qui le suit à travers les strates de sa constitution modale. On aboutit à une sémiotique expliquant la relation entre iconicité dynamique et symbolisation, et s'ouvrant au dialogue actuel avec les sciences cognitives et au débat sur la répresentation des connaissances. En cours de route, une nouvelle théorie de la narrativité est développée.
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Charles S. Peirce, 1839–1914
More LessThis work is the intellectual biography of the greatest of American philosophers. Peirce was not only a pioneer in logic and the creator of a philosophical movement pragmatism he also proposed a phenomenological theory, quite different from that of Husserl, but equal in profundity; and long before Saussure, and in a totally different spirit, a semiotic theory whose present interest owes nothing to passing fashion and everything to its fecundity. Throughout his life Peirce wrote continually about sign and phenomenon (or phaneron). Consequently his writings must be studied chronologically if they are not to appear incomprehensible or contradictory. One of the merits of this book is to clarify Peirce's thought by analysing its development chronologically. We follow the evolution of Peirce's thought from his critique of Kantian logic and Cartesianism (Chap. I, “Leaving the Cave”: 1851-1870) to his discovery of modern logic and pragmatism (Chap. II, “The Eclipse of the Sun”: 1870-1887) and finally to a semiotic founded on a phenomenology the base of which is the logic of relations and the crowning-point scientific metaphysics (Chap. III, “The Sun Set Free”: 1887-1914). The book includes a detailed chronology, a general bibliography, and an index.
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Charles S. Peirce's Method of Methods
More LessIn all disciplines there are specifiable basic concepts, our universes of discourse, which define special areas of inquiry. Semiotics is that ‘science of sciences’ which inquires into all processes of inquiry, and which seeks to discover methods of inquiry. Peirce held that semiotics was to be the method of methods. An account of semiotic method should distinguish between the way the term ‘sign’ is used in semiotics and the various ways this term was meant in nearly all the traditional disciplines. In this monograph Roberta Kevelson minutely explores Charles S. Peirce’s method of methods.
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Charles S. Peirce, phénoménologue et sémioticien
More LessLe présent ouvrage est la première introduction française à une lecture systématique de Peirce.
Par une reconstruction chronologique qui tente à supprimer quelques-uns des pseudo-problèmes que l’édition thématique des écrits de Peirce ont soulevés, cet ouvrage tente à donner une idée aussi exacte et complète que possible de la pensée de l’un des philosophes le plus original et universel de l’Amérique.
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Charles S. Peirce and the Linguistic Sign
More LessThis monograph is about the semiotics of lexical signs, and is of particular interest for historical linguists, in particular those interested in etymology. Specialists in linguistic change have long noticed that certain classes of words seem to be in part exempt from regular patterns of sound change, or perhaps more likely to undergo unusual analogical shifts. The problem is far worse for the etymologist, since the lexicon of every language contains some hundreds of semiotically problematic vocables which must, if the etymological dictionaries are ever to be completed, be explained somehow. Always been struck by the sheer capriciousness of etymologies in which some sort of unusual form-meaning relations are involved, the author, with the help of C.S. Peirce, provides answers to crucial questions in his search to make sense of those capricious etymologies.
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