Subject collection: Semiotics (98 titles, 1967–2015)

Insistent Images presents a number of new departures dealing with iconicity on the conceptual and the structural levels. On the level of structure, the interface between different aspects of iconicity, lexical meaning and grammar is discussed in reference to both spoken and signed languages. Novel approaches to aural iconicity investigate a wide range of phenomena from phonological iconicity to the role of iconic features in discourse, in the nineteenth century practice of reading aloud, in the almost magic incantations of fin de siècle poetry and in Tolkien’s invented languages. Several papers examine the function of iconicity in visual and avant-garde poetry, where iconic features allow a reduction of means, which, paradoxically, generates textual diversification and complexity. A discussion of iconic text strategies shows how texts are comprehended through iconic holistic transfer from complex natural and action patterns. ‘Liberature’, which integrates text, image and physical space, is another novel area of study, as are the investigations into the iconic properties of film and of multimedia performance. Film is intrinsically iconic, while at the same time being, like photography, indexical; in multimedia performance, on the other hand, iconicity functions intermedially by both integrating and reflecting processes of perception and conceptualization. These last two new fields of inquiry further enhance this truly interdisciplinary volume’s explorations of icons as ‘insistent images’.

While ideology has been treated widely in CDA-literature, the role played by the interaction of text and image in multiplying meaning and furthering ideological stances has not so far received a lot of attention. Mediating Ideology in Text and Image offers a number of approaches to such analysis, offering students and academics valuable tools for identifying possible discrepancies between the world and the way it is represented through various mediational means. The authors’ common aim is one of assisting the audience in reading between the lines, thus offering a variety of approaches that may contribute to a better understanding of how ideologies possibly work and how they may be denaturalised from text and image. The articles in part I look at rhetorical strategies used in meaning construction processes unfolding in various kinds of mass media. Part II focuses on the re-semiotization of meaning and looks at how analysing the combination of text and image may contribute to a better understanding of ideological processes brought about by multimodal resources. Foreword by Ruth Wodak.

This volume sign posts several paths of multimodality research and theory-building today. The chapters represent a cross-section of current perspectives on multimodal discourse with a special focus on theoretical and methodological issues (mode hierarchies, modelling semiotic resources as multiple semiotic systems, multimodal corpus annotation). In addition, it discusses a wide range of applications for multimodal description in fields like mathematics, entertainment, education, museum design, medicine and translation.

This volume, a sequel to Form Miming Meaning (1999) and The Motivated Sign (2001), offers a selection of papers given at the Third International Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (Jena 2001). The studies collected here present a number of new departures. Special consideration is given to the way non-linguistic visual and auditory signs (such as gestures and bird sounds) are represented in language, and more specifically in ‘signed’ language, and how such signs influence semantic conceptualization. Other studies examine more closely how visual signs and representations of time and space are incorporated or reflected in literary language, in fiction as well as (experimental) poetry. A further new approach concerns intermedial iconicity, which emerges in art when its medium is changed or another medium is imitated. A more abstract, diagrammatic type of iconicity is again investigated, with reference to both language and literature: some essays focus on the device of reduplication, isomorphic tendencies in word formation and on creative iconic patterns in syntax, while others explore numerical design in Dante and geometrical patterning in Dylan Thomas. A number of theoretically-oriented papers pursue post-Peircean approaches, such as the application of reader-response theory and of systems theory to iconicity.

There is little hope of reconstructing by means of comparative or typological studies a lingua adamica essentially different from present-day languages. The distant preverbal past is however still present in live speech. Phonetic, syntactic and semantic rule transgressions, far from being products of a deficient output, are governed by a universal iconic apparatus, a sort of ‘anti-grammar’ or ‘proto-grammar’ which enables the speaker and the poet to express preconscious and subconscious mental contents that could not be conveyed by means of the grammar of any language. Secondary messages, generated by the proto-grammar are integrated into the primary grammatical message. The two messages whose structural and semantic divergence represents a chronological distance of hundreds of thousands of years, constitute a dialectic unity which characterize natural languages. The evolutive approach offers a different, perhaps better understanding of questions related to dynamic synchrony, vocal and verbal style, poetic language, language change.Chapters on: Diversity of the lexicon; Dual encoding: vocal style; Syntactic gesturing; Syntactic regressions; Prosodic expression of emotions; Poetry and vocal art; Situation and meaning; A hidden presence: verbal magic; Playing with language: joke and metaphor; Metaphor: a research instrument; Dynamics of poetic language; Semantic structure of possessive constructions; Semantic structure of punctuation marks; Why gestures?; Between acts and words; Language within language: dynamics, change and evolution.

Significant new developments in brain activity research have revived the debate on the universality of language and its neural basis. Within this debate, the question of language diversity and its implications for cognition remains central and controversial. It is here investigated in an original multimodal approach, covering various aspects of cross-linguistic variation, differences between spoken, signed and drum languages, between normal speech and pathological speech, and also between language and music, as revealed in electric brain activity associated with language processing. The various contributions (linguistic, anthropological, psychological and neurophysical) on the nature and status of variation and invariants in language provides evidence for complex interactions between language-specific processes and general cognitive faculties. This overview of some recent trends in cognitive linguistics opens up a promising new research area in the humanities as well as in the cognitive sciences.

Why 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.

The 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.

Several current linguistic approaches converge in rejecting the wide-spread idea that language is an autonomous system, i.e. that it is structured independently from the outside world and the natural equipment of language users. Around the world, semiotically biased linguistics (functionalism, naturalism, etc.) takes this position, which differentiates it very clearly from generative linguistics. One of the basic assumptions of such approaches is that language structure includes some non-arbitrary aspects, from the phonological through the textual level, and a great amount of research has occurred in the last decade regarding the “iconic aspects” of language(s). This volume focuses on generally neglected dimensions of language and semiotic activity, featuring contributions by philosophers, linguists, semioticians, and psychologists. After tracing the tradition of iconicity in the history of linguistic thought, the central section is devoted to specific analyses emphasizing the role of non-arbitrary phenomena in language foundation and linguistic structure. Specifically discussed are numeration systems, the gestural systems of communication among deaf people, the genesis of writing in children, and inter-ethnic communication.

Most of the essays collected in this book were presented at the Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial Congress (Harvard University, September 1989). The volume is devoted to themes within Peirce's value theory and offers a comprehensive view of less known aspects of his influential philosophy, in particular Peirce's work on ethics and aesthetics.The book is divided in four sections. Section I discusses the status of ethics as a normative science and its relation with logic; some applications are presented, e.g. in the field of bioethics. Section II investigates the specific position of Peircean aesthetics with regard to classical American philosophy, especially Buchler, to Husserlian phenomenology, and to European structuralism (Saussure, Jakobson). Section III contains papers on internal aspects of Peirce's aesthetics and its place in his thought. The final section presents applications of Peirce's aesthetic theory: analyses of visual art (mainly paintings), of literary texts and of musical meaning.