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

This book tells the story of how 18th-century European philosophy used Locke's theory of signs to build a natural history of speech and to investigate the semiotic tools with which nature and civil society can be controlled. The story ends at the point where this approach to language sciences was called into question. Its epilogue is the description of the birth of an alternative between empiricism and idealism in late 18th- and early 19th-century theories of language. This alternative has given rise to such irreducible dichotomies as empirical linguistics vs. speculative linguistics, philosophies of linguistics vs. philosophy of language. Since then philosophers have largely given up reflecting on linguistic practice and have left the burden of unifying and interpreting empirical research data to professional linguists, limiting themselves to the study of foundations and to purely self-contemplative undertakings. The theoretical and institutional relevance to the present of the problems arising from this situation is in itself a sufficient reason for casting our minds back over a period in which, as in no other, linguistic research was an integral part of the encyclopaedia of knowledge, and in which philosophers reflected, and encouraged reflection, upon the semiotic instruments of science and politics.

This is the first interdisciplinary book-length treatment of paralanguage, briefly defined as: nonverbal vocal or narial communication. After sensitizing the reader to our sound-generating movements and to all human external and environmental sounds for their unquestionable communicative qualities, it realistically combines an anatomical-physiological auditory approach to voice production (identifying many neglected articulations) with the analysis of its visual manifestations as the triple reality of speech: language-paralanguage-kinesics. The primary qualities of speech (loudness, pitch etc.) are extensively discussed, as are the many voice qualities. The longest chapter in the book deals with paralinguistic differentiators: laughter, crying, sighing, yawning, coughing, sneezing etc. Finally the author presents a model for analyzing paralinguistic alternants, word-like independent constructs (such as Pooh, Aah and Brrr). Throughout the discussion of these paralinguistic phenomena, extensive attention is given to cultural, social and psychological aspects. This first, ground-breaking interdisciplinary work on paralanguage will serve as a source of data and a theoretical/methodological model for phoneticians, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, speech therapists etc.

Cet 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.

Drawing largely on Propp's and Greimas' work on the narrative, this book is aimed at consolidating and extending their views through a series of concrete applications. The volume offers a critical examination of narrative structure in terms of its two basic syntactic units or sets of operations, namely the “eventual or dynamic configurations corresponding to communication or to contract or, more general, to the structure of exchange.” Because of the emphasis it lays on the logical frame underlying the syntagmatic dimension of the story, the book contributes to an integrated descriptive model deliberately centered on “narrative semiotics as a branch of descriptive poetics.” The discussion of value in its social and legal context brings to light the links between the theory of narrative and its anthropological sources. This book shows that a strict concern with story logic requires a reevaluation of the basic premises of semiotic theory and raises important epistemological questions about its evolution.

If you read or reread Freud, it is difficult not to find on a single page references to language: from speech to text, from slip of the tongue to word play, from letter to meaning-passing inevitably through the strange notion of literal meaning, that fascinated Freud. In short, the unconscious is linked to language. How could it be otherwise, if psychoanalysis is a cure through speech as indicated as early as 1881, by Fraülein Anna O.? The problem of the relationship between linguistic and psychoanalytic concepts necessarily arises. Until now this question has been examined mainly by psychoanalysts, from their own perspective, but here it is investigated by a linguist, who systematically explores two domains. The first is related to the sign and symbol, where the meeting of Freud, Saussure and Hjelmselv ocurred; whereas in the second, that of the signifier, Saussure reappears escorted by Lacan. But Freud is not far away, sine the Lacanian theory of the signifier is rooted not only in Saussure's Cours, but also in the Metapsychology and in Freud's Correspondence with Fliess. To aspire to unravel this knot, in fact corresponds to attempt a reading of the Lacanian aphorism “the unconscious is structured like a language”.

Reprint of the original Latin text Tentamina semiologica, sive quaedam generalem theoriam signorum spectantia (1789), edited, translated and with an Introduction by Robert E. Innis The 33 sections of this classic text by Hoffbauer have a twofold focus: a descriptive inventory of signs, and a comparison of the expressive and cognitive powers of different sign systems. Using his sign typology as a point of departure, Hoffbauer inquires into the elements of matter and form both necessary and adequate to arrive at a definition of the sign. His purpose in doing so is to present his own version of a general sign theory after pointing out significant errors and weaknesses in the characteristicae universalis of Leibniz, Becher, Toennis, Kalmar, etc. Against the background of criticism of the contemporary deductive sign theories of Lambert, Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Daries, Wilkins, Kircher and others, Hoffbauer's general semiology gives shape to an outline of a deductive-hypothetical theory of signs. In this historical perspective, Hoffbauer's semiology is of outstanding importance and provides the opportunity to think through once again central and permanent problems of the general science of signs.

Like Roland Barthes' well-known book, L’Empire des signes, from which the title of the present collection is taken, this volume contains essays dealing with certain aspects of Japanese culture.

Fruit d’une décade tenue au Centre culturel de Cerisy en 1983, l’ouvrage réunit une quinzaine de contributions qui sont autant de signes d’ouverture de la part d’une discipline en cours d’évolution. La mise en question porte á la fois sur les postulats (philosophiques et épistémologiques) de la sémiotique, sur ses méthodes (notamment face à de nouveaux domaines d’investigation comme la musique ou l’architecture) et sur ses enjeux (en particulier quant au statut du ‘sujet’ – sujet d’énonciation, sujet ‘analytique’, sujet de l’interaction sociale). Avec une importante intervention d’A.J. Greimas, qui répond ice, sure un ton quasi improvisé, aux questions de l’assistance. Débat avec Paul Ricœur (résumé).

This book presents a semiotic analysis of the linguistic and extralinguistic elements of fortune-telling as part of a larger pragmatic-oriented theory of human communication. The material was collected in Israel, in Hebrew, and parallels are made with other languages and cultures. The analysis is based on dynamic relativism of the multidimensional, transcendental, holistic process of human communication.

This volume contains selected contributions from the colloquium From Sign to Text' (Ben Gurion University, 1985) and combines the diverse interdisciplinary interests and approaches of the contributors in a fundamentally shared definition of language seen as a flexible and open-ended system of systems' revolving around the notion of signs used by human beings to communicate. The special interrelationship between signs and texts is discussed both theoretically and methodologically. The collection consists of an English and a French section.