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

Iconicity: East Meets West presents an intersection of East-West scholarship on Iconicity. Several of its chapters thus deal with Asian languages and cultures, or a comparison of world languages. Divided into four categories: general issues; sound symbolism and mimetics; iconicity in literary texts; and iconic motivation in grammar, the chapters show the diversity and dynamics of iconicity research, ranging from iconicity as a driving force in language structure and change, to the various uses of images, diagrams and metaphors at all levels of the literary text, in both narrative and poetic forms, as well as on all varieties of discourse, including the visual and the oral.

Music is a widely enjoyed human experience. It is, therefore, natural that we have wanted to describe, document, analyse and, somehow, grasp it in language. This book surveys a representative selection of musical concepts in Chinese language, i.e. words that describe, or refer to, aspects of Chinese music. Important as these musical concepts are in the language, they have been in wide circulation since ancient times without being subjected to any serious semantic analysis. The current study is the first known attempt at analysing these Chinese musical concepts linguistically, adopting the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to formulate semantically and cognitively rigorous explications. Readers will be able to better understand not only these musical concepts but also significant aspects of the Chinese culture which many of these musical concepts represent. This volume contributes to the fields of cognitive linguistics, semantics, music, musicology and Chinese studies, offering readers a fresh account of Chinese ways of thinking, not least Chinese ways of viewing or appreciating music. Ultimately, this study represents trailblazing research on the relationship between language, culture and cognition.

How 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.

When a reader picks up a book, the essence of the text has been translated into the visual space of the cover. Using Umberto Eco’s bestseller The Name of the Rose as a case study, this is the first study of book cover design as a form of intersemiotic translation based on the purposeful selection of visual signs to represent verbal signs. As an act of translation, the cover of a book ought to be an ‘equivalent representation’ of the text. But in the absence of any established interpretive criteria, how can equivalence between the visual and the verbal be determined and interpreted? Re-Covered Rose tackles this question in an original and creative way, laying the foundation for a new research trend in Translation Studies.

Marco Sonzogni is Senior Lecturer in Italian, School of Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. A widely published academic and an award-winning editor, poet and literary translator, he is the Director of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation/Te Tumu Whakawhiti Tuhinga.

News coverage of EU negotiations, children’s war memories or TV series glamourising political processes – images pervade both private and public discourse, and visual communication plays a key role in our social negotiation of values. Conceptualising images as “images in use”, this volume considers the agencies behind visual communication and its impact on society.

Images in Use engages critically with traditional approaches to visual analysis, offers suggestions for alternative, socially situated analyses of images and demonstrates the explanatory force of thinking through “images in use” in a series of case studies. The conceptual contributions consider broader issues of critical theory, representation, as well as the mediatisation of politics. The case studies offer a survey of current visual communication including news coverage, political cartoons, political rhetoric, memory culture, celebrity humanitarianism, reality TV, as well as the narratives of blockbuster cinema and comics.

This volume proposes a new approach to visual communication, situating images in their social contexts and identifying the real, rhetorical and political impact of their use.

Karl Bühler (1879–1963) was one of the leading theoreticians of language of the twentieth century. Although primarily a psychologist, Bühler devoted much of his attention to the study of language and language theory. His masterwork Sprachtheorie (1934) quickly gained recognition in the fields of linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language and the psychology of language. This new edition of the English translation of Bühler’s theory begins with a survey on ‘Bühler’s legacy’ for modern linguistics (Werner Abraham), followed by the Theory of Language, and finally with a special ‘Postscript: Twenty-five Years Later …’ (Achim Eschbach). Bühler’s theory is divided into four parts. Part I discusses the four axioms or principles of language research, the most famous of which is the first, the organon model, the base of Bühler's instrumental view of language. Part II treats the role of indexicality in language and discusses deixis as one determinant of speech. Part III examines the symbolic field, dealing with context, onomatopoeia and the function of case. Part IV deals with the elements of language and their organization (syllabification, the definition of the word, metaphor, anaphora, etc).The text is accompanied by an Introduction (Achim Eschbach); Translator's preface (Donald Fraser Goodwin); Glossary of terms; and a Bibliography of cited works.

The title of this volume strives to capture the dynamic scope and range of the essays it contains, applying insights into the workings of iconicity to texts as far removed from each other in time as the Medieval tale of a bishop-fish and the war-poems of 20^th century Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, and as thematically diverse as the Pilgrim’s Progress and the poetry of e.e. cummings. Applications reference both language and linguistics as well as literature and literary theory – and related fields such as sign language and translation; the former approached from the point of view of Japan Sign Language, the latter with reference to translations of the Koran and the Sesotho Bible, as well as modern German and English Bible translations. On the language side, the intricate relationships between sound symbolism and etymology, and between analogy and grammaticalization are examined in depth. On the literary side, the iconic effects of techniques such as enjambment and metrical inversion are considered, but also the ways in which an understanding of iconicity can open up meanings in complex poetry, like that of the Afrikaans poet T.T. Cloete – in this particular instance three poems inspired by figures as diverse as Dante, Paul Klee and the pop icon Marilyn Monroe. In view of the fact that form is able to mime meaning and meaning itself can be mimed by meaning, the theoretical question is asked – on the basis of a wide range of examples from literature, language, music and other sign-systems – whether meaning can also mime form. An introduction to the work of H.C.T. Müller, an early scholar in the field of iconicity, highlights a regrettably little known South African contribution to the development of iconicity theory.

Iconicity has become a popular notion in contemporary linguistic research. This book is the first to present a synthesis of the vast amount of scholarship on linguistic iconicity which has been produced in the previous decades, ranging from iconicity in phonology and morpho-syntax to the role of iconicity in language change. An extensive analysis is provided of some basic but nonetheless fundamental questions relating to iconicity in language, including: what is a linguistic sign and how are linguistic signs different from signs in general? What is an iconic sign and how may iconicity be involved in language? How does iconicity pertain to the relation between language and cognition? This book offers a new and comprehensive theoretical framework for iconicity in language. It is argued that the linguistic sign is fundamentally arbitrary, but that iconicity may be involved on a secondary level, adding extra meaning to an utterance.

The field of color categorization has always been intrinsically multi- and inter-disciplinary, since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The main contribution of this book is to foster a new level of integration among different approaches to the anthropological study of color. The editors have put great effort into bringing together research from anthropology, linguistics, psychology, semiotics, and a variety of other fields, by promoting the exploration of the different but interacting and complementary ways in which these various perspectives model the domain of color experience. By so doing, they significantly promote the emergence of a coherent field of the anthropology of color.

Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.

How to speak of colors and odors? In many cases, we have to think about an adequate description of a perceived odor or shade of color. Words are not fluently available.The contributions discuss color and odor perception and its linguistic representation from different disciplinary angles: from neurobiology, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics and philosophy. They show that linguistic representation of colors and odors depends highly on cultures of communication. Experts are skilled in discerning finer differences between their sense impressions and have at their disposal a special language which non-experts do not master. The color and odor vocabulary is rare, if there is no cultural habit to communicate the very sense impression. In cases where individuals have to speak of their sensory experiences more precisely they often turn to metaphors. The contributions discuss the lack of inter-individual conventions of naming and describing odors – compared to the more expanded linguistic representation of colors.

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.

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”.