-
Norm and trope in social indexicality Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Asif Agha
The concurrent lamination of distinct categorial principles in speech allows language users to interpret and create a vast range of social-interpersonal realities. Any conceivable dimension of social life – from the mental states of persons to the forms of belonging they exhibit within sociohistorical orders of caste, class, age-set, gender, commerce, or profession – can indexically be linked to features
-
Toward the total semiotic fact Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Alastair Pennycook
This paper explores the quest for an account of the total linguistic or semiotic fact. Speech act theory, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and social semiotics have all attempted, in various ways and at various times, to find a way to describe as much as possible what is going on around any speech event. While this search for the total linguistic fact will always be a chimerical goal, this
-
Semiotic interpretation of photos in Leslie Silko’s Storyteller Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Wei Song
Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American female writer, includes many photos about family and land in her autobiography Storyteller. The relations of images and words in her book are analyzed from the perspective of semiotics, particularly from Roland Barthes’s image rhetoric. The linguistic message and the coded and non-coded iconic message of the photos help in understanding the Laguna Pueblo concept
-
Understanding artworks from Danto’s philosophy of art: a Peircean semiotic approach Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Qiaojuan Luo
Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art contributes significantly to diverse perspectives that seek to understand the nature and significance of artistic creations, offering unique insights into the interpretation and meaning of artworks. This paper aims to examine Danto’s philosophy of art by employing the semiotic framework developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and applying it to the analysis of three famous
-
Unveiling the past: the multidimensional theatrical space in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Chunmei Lyu, Yu Zhang
With acute historical awareness, African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks uses abundant signs in the form of words, movements, sights, and sounds in her plays to create an imagined world, helping readers and audiences to revisit forgotten and neglected history and contemplate on how to read Africana history. In Venus, she wields rapid transformation of space, inserts a play-within-the-play, and
-
Cultural translation in the context of Lotman’s cultural semiotics: a case study of the German translation of Six Records of a Floating Life Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Tianhai Fu, Xuan Zhao
Six Records of a Floating Life is a collection of autobiographical essays written by Shen Fu, a scholar in the Qing Dynasty. Its writing is ancient and elegant, and it is rich and profound in connotation. The German translation of Six Records of a Floating Life by German sinologist Rainer Schwarz presents the spirit of the original in detail and is of high cultural value and research significance.
-
Linguistic modality acts in existential semiotics: the epistemological turn from “being-in-the-world” awareness to “lived-through-world” experience Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Zdzisław Wąsik
Against the background of deliberations about the conception of worldhood as developed in existential semiotics on the basis of linguistic modality acts, this paper proposes merging mundane and transcendentalist phenomenology with epistemology as a theory of knowledge, in general, that alludes to pragmatic sources of human knowledge about the world, in particular. From the epistemological perspective
-
Lombroso’s criminal face across physiognomy and semeiotics Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Angelo Di Caterino
The paper examines the origins of physiognomy through analysis of the work of one of its founding fathers, Cesare Lombroso. The most interesting facet of Lombroso’s studies on the criminal face is how it can be considered as a true semeiotics. Although the Italian doctor’s supposed discoveries cannot be defined as scientific, his quantitative approach constitutes an important case study, since he tries
-
Paolo Marzolo and Cesare Lombroso: a semiotic-medical inheritance between word, sounds, and face Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Alice Orrù
Within the interdisciplinary context of the nineteenth century, the paper scrutinizes the relation between Paolo Marzolo’s theory of signs and Cesare Lombroso’s anthropological-criminal approach. Best known for his unfinished work Monumenti storici (1847–1866), Marzolo (of whom Lombroso calls himself a disciple) investigates, in his last Saggio sui segni (1866), the origin and development of languages
-
Concealment of the face and new physiognomies Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Baal Delupi
Facial recognition technology has enabled governments and private companies to have control of millions of faces in different countries around the world. This becomes dangerous since it threatens the privacy of citizens, which is why different activists demonstrate against this form of control and surveillance using different technological and aesthetic resources to prevent said recognition. This work
-
The visage and the mask: semiotic considerations around representations of visages in Japanese Nō Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Ludovic Chatenet
This paper aims at confronting a semio-anthropology of the face, based on the principles of Lévi-Strauss and Greimas, with the representation of the visage in Japanese Nō theater. As a theory, semiotics permits an explanation of the signification of faces, reduced at first to a series of masks, and their representations in different cultures. Within this framework, we will show that representations
-
Introduction to “The visage as text” Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Remo Gramigna, Massimo Leone
This brief text introduces the main themes and topics of this collection of articles on “The visage as text: physiognomy, semiotics, and face reading from antiquity to artificial intelligence,” emphasizing the historical continuity of interest in the face as a surface to be scrutinized, investigated, and studied in order to know the individual’s intimacy or future. It points out the intertwining of
-
Embodying genre: from Galton’s generic faces to Peirce’s embodied ideas Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Julia Ponzio
In the late 1870s, Galton implements and describes the technique of “composite photography.” This technique consists in overlapping several images of faces on the same photographic plate to obtain what Galton calls a “generic face.” The idea of composite photography appears in some of the crucial junctures of Peirce’s semiotic theory. Peirce uses the composite photograph as the image of the percept
-
Reading and writing in n-dimensional face space Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Silvia Barbotto Forzano
This manuscript begins with a brief introduction that establishes the theoretical background, followed by a tripartite unfolding that explains the following contents: 1) the path from point zero as a plurimorphic space of semiotic tranquility; 2) the historical trajectory of physiognomy and pathognomy suggestions; and 3) new biometric readings and the digital face. We postulate the neutral state of
-
Face in the mirror, what do you see? Catoptric autoexperimentation and the physiognomic gaze Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Devon Schiller
To critically explicate the visual epistemology for catoptric autoexperimentation in the contemporary science of facial behavior, by way of its historical progenitors, I draw upon the pragmatic semiotics of the catoptric phenomenon. This problematization of catoptrics is fundamentally about two different but related concepts: the semiotic threshold and the iconicity debate. Based on primary sources
-
Physiognomic theories between equation and inference Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Michele Cerutti
Physiognomy finds itself in a strange position. On the one hand, it is considered false and even dangerous by common sense as a pseudo-scientific theory; on the other hand, it is implicitly practiced by everyone every day (Brandt 1980. Face reading. The persistence of physiognomy. Psychology Today 14(7). 90–96). This situation calls for an explanation. After a brief discussion of the problems of classical
-
Constructing East Asians in a European comic book series Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Arezoo Adibeik
This study focuses on the British English version of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin, a series of adventure comics created from 1929 to 1976. The series became increasingly popular throughout the mid-twentieth century and remains so even to the present day. However, it is still a subject of intrigue and controversy for many scholars due to the alleged racist/ethnic stereotypes in this series in terms
-
Pre-objective reality and the end of the world Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Baranna Baker
In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, Haruki Murakami plays with the quantum idea of the Many Worlds theory, creating two universes that exist in a state of parallelism – one consisting of the main character’s objective/subjective reality, the other being a pre-objective reality that resides within the character’s inaccessible subconscious mind. These universes are linked within the purely
-
Transmedia strategies in school literary education: deconstructing kitsch and the semiotics of readerly creativity Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Alexander Arkhangelsky, Anna Novikova
We consider the substitution of living classical texts with their simulacra, kitschy interpretations, to be one of the most important issues in literary education in schools. Traditional teaching methods and textbooks reproduce a set of pedagogical clichés. This leads to a loss of the skill of reading. As a result, the student gains a set of simple narratives about canonical texts, not the knowledge
-
Two different semiotic frameworks for viewing Japan Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-11 John A. F. Hopkins
In this paper, I would like to examine, within a semiotic framework, two contrasting views of the contemporary culture of Japan – which is still relatively little-known outside its own shores. First, there is the outsider’s view, according to which Japan is firmly situated in the “Far East”. This is the usual interpretant of subject-sign Japan, which is taken to refer – as its object-sign – to all
-
On Andrei Bely’s poetic philosophy and art of fiction Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Haiying Guan, Yuhua Li
As a unique literary theory, Andrei Bely’s symbolism is a religious world view, and his “symbols” are deeply rooted in the symbolist’s cognition of world structure. This distinct world view exerts a special effect on Bely’s exploration of the poetic mechanism of symbolism. In the practice of completing the creation of symbolic image, the construction of symbolic text, and the achievement of artistic
-
Revisiting the nature and function of transliteration through a semiotic lens, exemplified by the English translations of Shan Hai Jing Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Xinyu Huang
As a common translation practice, transliteration has been a constant topic in translation studies. In contrast to related fruitful practice, there is a lack of interest in it at the theoretical level. Most studies take transliteration as a ruled-based sound transferring process, neglecting its complexity and multi-functions. This paper affords a Peircean semiotic analysis of the inner workings of
-
A semiotic approach to grammatical gender in Mandarin Chinese Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Juan Carlos Moreno-Arrones Delgado
The present article addresses the typical linguistic forms of Mandarin Chinese with regard to the grammatical gender of the language, for which the whole text is articulated in different segments that explain the nature of “feminine” and “masculine” in Chinese and their historical implications, taking into account how distant it may be for speakers of Indo-European languages. The study then discusses
-
Introducing Paul Cobley: a graphic guide Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-13 E. Israel Chávez Barreto, Donald Favareau
Within the discipline of semiotics, written text remains the primary mode of communication and analysis, despite the fact that, as all good semioticians know, signs occur in all modalities – which is why we think of artists and musicians, no less than novelists and poets, as applied semioticians par excellence. In 1997, Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz combined the semiotic tools of words and drawings to
-
Narrative modeling and its implications for cultural practices Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Yunhee Lee
Paul Cobley stated that the semiotics of narrative should not be conflated with narratology. This statement becomes a starting point for an inquiry into the semiotics of narrative by looking at the concept of narrative signs and its future as a new theory of narrative. Narrative signs embedding semiotic processes convey the meaning of narrative in the areas of the prelinguistic, the linguistic, and
-
Paul Cobley’s impact on biosemiotics: Thomas Sebeok’s next century Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Kalevi Kull
We briefly review the impact of Paul Cobley (born 1963) on biosemiotics and list his works on the topic. These have links to communication studies and integrationism. After Thomas Sebeok, John Deely, and several others, Cobley has been a leader of the general semiotics movement, according to which “semiotics’ project is most fully realized on a biosemiotic basis.”
-
Biosemiotics for postdigital living: the implications of the implications Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Alin Olteanu, Cary Campbell
The postdigital condition is discussed from the perspective of Paul Cobley’s biosemiotic approach to culture. While semiotics is often concerned with cultural criticism, there has been no explicit biosemiotic approach to culture, until only recently with Cobley unfurling such a research program. The key to this is the biosemiotic notion of modeling, which accounts for co-evolutionary processes encompassing
-
Semioethics and global communication Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Susan Petrilli, Augusto Ponzio
In the sign of homaging Paul Cobley as part of this Festschrift for him, we will consider two of his edited volumes: the first The Routledge companion to semiotics, 2010, to which we contributed a text titled “Semioethics,” and the second (co-edited with Kristian Bankov), Semiotics and its masters, 2017, to which we contributed the text “Semioethics as a vocation of semiotics.” Particular reference
-
Transcending the mid-most target: Paul Cobley and the cultural implications of biosemiotics Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Donald Favareau
Having been intimately aligned with the research agenda of biosemiotics since his colleague Thomas Sebeok first started using the term in 1992, Paul Cobley has consistently argued against the idea that the primary aim of biosemiotics is to make an intervention in the discourse and epistemology of the life sciences. Instead, he argues for the potential of a biosemiotically informed humanities for refashioning
-
Living the duty of care: languaging in semiotic fields Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Stephen J. Cowley
New hope can draw on anti-humanist duty of care. Turning from debate about how one ought to act in discursively produced “realities,” Paul Cobley advocates a bioethics of living in semiotic fields. Thanks to observership, humans can make good use of both the known and how things appear as signs. For Cobley, the latter are “mind independent.” Once deemed real, semiosis can unite the lawful, the perceivable
-
On the role of time, re-presentation, and self-conscious narrators in postmodern narrative Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Baranna Baker
In the past, I have published papers on the use of language within the realm of fictional narratives, how the structure of postmodern films and novels operates to affect the reader or viewer, and on the purely objective worlds constructed within the confines of literature. Most recently, I submitted a newly written paper to my friend Paul Cobley for his casual feedback. He got back promptly, saying
-
A semiotic-discursive insight into short videos on memory and peace Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Neyla Graciela Pardo Abril
This paper explores how short web videos uploaded to the Truth Commission’s TikTok official profile are formulated. The Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad) is a Colombian state entity created to clarify patterns and causes of Colombia’s internal armed conflict and recognize victims’ and society’s right to the truth. The Commission’s aim is to avoid repetition of violence through an ample and plural
-
A strophe, a chorus, and a bridge walk into a bar… Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Dario Martinelli
Building up on Paul Cobley’s work on narrativity in film and literature, the present article aims at exploring how pop songs convey narrative elements via their own structure (or “format,” as it shall be called here), and their single components (intro, outro, bridge, refrain, etc.). Some of the most recurrent formats (particularly Strophe–Refrain and Chorus–Bridge) as well as some of the most unusual
-
Umwelt, enchantment, and McDonaldization Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Andrew Mark Creighton
The enchantment and re-enchantment of formal rationalized systems has been an important study in sociology and the social sciences since its first discussion by Max Weber. However, it has received relatively little attention in animal studies, ecology, or environmental studies. This article attempts to fill this gap in the research by focusing on a multiscale perspective that considers the relationship
-
Metonymy as a semiotic resource in fictional narrative Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Zongxin Feng
This article argues that metonymy provides “cognitive roundabouts” that semiotically create more meaning in fictional narrative against the popular views that metonymy provides “referential shorthand” and “communicative shortcuts.” In the light of Lakoff and Johnson’s observation on the relationship between symbolic metonymy and the comprehension of religious and cultural concepts, it explores the
-
Narratorial frame–person duality: an analysis in general narratology Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Yiheng Zhao
There can be no narrative text without a narrator. Locating the source of narration is the starting point for an understanding of any narrative. There is no agreement among narratologists, nevertheless, on how the narrator could be located in a narrative text, in a so-called “third-person” fictional narrative, for instance, or in dramatic or cinematic narratives. The narrator should be ubiquitous in
-
Narratives as cultural embedment Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Svend Erik Larsen
All cultures produce stories; all humans are storytellers. Hence, by implication, narratives must serve a fundamental cultural and existential function in human life. This article suggests the term “cultural embedment” to characterize this function. This article points out that, for narratives to play the role as a tool for cultural embedment, the double structure of narratives always switches back
-
Laws of imitation and intermedia narrative – on imitation of word narrative by image narrative Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Diyong Long
Image narrative was long regarded as imitation of a story already told in word narrative rather than as direct imitation of real life. In the connection between imitation and medium, there are the phenomena of the medium’s own position and “Anders-streben.” The former emphasizes the medium following its own nature, and the latter means not only following its own nature but transcending itself to pursue
-
Meaning-making in the European semiosphere Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Mieke Bal
The aim of the paper is to examine how to bring together the general, large area of “semiosphere” (Lotman), the detailed (“close”) analysis of cultural objects, and the point of the flexible methodology we call interdisciplinary. The semiosphere I address is the (uncertain) one we call “Europe”. The starting point is the semiotic status of the exclamation mark as I have used it to connect two preoccupations
-
Confucius the untouchable: on the semiotics of historization Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Hongbing Yu
The present paper focuses on the semiotics of historization, that is, of “narration as history” and provides a meta-analysis of the semiotic modeling of Confucius as a case in point. I argue that the personage who has come to be known as Confucius has existed and can only exist, without exception, in multiple forms of sociocultural representation and interpretation that are natural results of distinct
-
Acoustic space in narration from the perspective of production Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Xiuyan Fu, Fang Cai
A major mark of the progress of human society is its transition from the production of things in space to the production of space itself. Oral narrative covers a certain range of space with sound, and physical spaces such as theaters, cinemas, and concert halls accommodate various forms of narrative communication. Drama was the most popular form of mass communication in the pre-industrial age, and
-
Translation semiotics and semiosic translation: clarification of disciplinary intension and concept Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-05-11 Min Niu, Saengchan Hemchua
The paper aims to clarify the distinction of intension and concept between translation semiotics and semiosic translation to determine their disciplinary classification as well as the theoretical framework of translation semiotics. Translation semiotics is a relatively young interdisciplinary field connecting specifically semiotics and translation studies. In essence, it is a branch of semiotics where
-
Patched quilt: the thematic pattern in Alice Walker’s womanist writings Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-05-11 Xiaoying Wang, Yiran Shen
The womanist thinking initiated by Alice Walker not only represents her philosophical stance, but also imbues her literary writings with womanist characteristics. The pursuit of “the survival and wholeness of entire people” is the essence of Walker’s womanism, which permeates all of her writings so that her literary production demonstrates a unique artistic style with aesthetic implications. The patched
-
The thing most important Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-05-11 Scott P. Bradley
The Zhuangzi is a book that opens to a virtual wilderness of interpretive possibilities begging for exploration by scholars and laypersons alike. What follows here is an adventuresome foray by one of the latter. As such, it is essentially an exercise in creative writing. Since it is our interpretive conclusion that this was precisely what Zhuangzi himself was about, we believe he would smile broadly
-
Power politics in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-05-11 Xia Yuan, Yiran Wei
The issue of power politics is a crucial topic in Margaret Atwood’s works. According to Atwood, power is pervasive and diffused throughout all social relations. This essay examines how power becomes a part of human life, and how different levels of power interact in Atwood’s third novel Lady Oracle (1976). I investigate Atwood’s treatment of family upbringing in reinforcing gender roles. I show how
-
Introduction to the special section “Communication and meaning-making” Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Deping Lu
In the post-modern era, the knotty issue of “meaning” is more often examined from the perspective of practice, differing from the previous conceptual analysis. Meaning potential and meaning-making are preferred to meaning itself as terms in philosophy and linguistics. This special section aims to investigate the meaning of the change in “meaning” through an understanding and interpretation of “meaning-making”
-
Crossing in linguistic communication Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Deping Lu
Although “crossing” as a new concept comes from Rampton’s seminal work, this article argues that crossing defines linguistic communication in a perspective of process, act, and especially change. As a controlling principle for linguistic communication, it might be in a different way complementary to Husserl’s shared sense, Habermas’s reaching understanding, and Searle’s shared intentionality. Crossing
-
Peircean semiosis as the process for the making of meaning Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Tony Jappy
One domain in which one would expect to find enlightenment concerning the nature of meaning is the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and, in particular, the various versions of the pragmatic maxim that he refined over the years. For the maxim was, he claimed in a late text, really nothing more than a sort of protocol for determining the meaning of “hard words.” However, at the same time, Peirce saw the communication
-
The meaning-making and semiotic value of Chinese words: a contextual perspective Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Jiapan Li, Kai Meng
From the contextual perspective of functional linguistics, this paper emphasizes the role of two types of extra-word context – situational context and structural context – in the meaning-making process of Chinese words. We found that if a word is embedded with situational context, such as the X+lǐng (领) category, the meaning-making process of the word needs to force the word-forming components to be
-
Memes and emojis in Chinese compliments on Weibo Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Qianqian Zhu, Wei Ren
Noted for the ability to generate meanings across linguistic boundaries, nonverbal communication in computer-mediated communication has attracted increasing research attention. This study examines the prevalent but under-investigated phenomenon of memes and emojis employed in Chinese compliments on the social platform Weibo. Data were collected in a follower-based community on Weibo, the Topic. The
-
Simplexifying: harnessing the power of enlanguaged cognition Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Stephen J. Cowley, Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen
Looking beyond the internalism–externalism debate, we offer a distributed view of how experience can garner linguistic and mental content. To make the case, first, we challenge the idea that cognition is organism-centered and synchronistic. Instead, we use Berthoz’s principle of “simplexity” to open up the multiscalarity of cognitive ecosystems. In exemplifying wide cognition, we track how the eyeball’s
-
The semiotics of the human individual in Hegel’s The phenomenology of spirit Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Nicolae Râmbu
The concept of experience of consciousness ( Erfahrung des Bewußtseins ) is a central concept to Hegel’s The phenomenology of spirit . At the same time, it is one of the most difficult to understand for the contemporary reader. Despite the numerous specialized works dedicated to this topic, there is no study dedicated to the semiotic experience of consciousness, to which Hegel devotes memorable pages
-
Language as semiosis: a neo-structuralist perspective in the light of pragmaticism Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Michael Shapiro
Presented is an analysis an analysis of language structure in the round incorporating the elements of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticism and his apothegm “My language is the sum total of myself” together with a program for reorienting linguistics in the twenty-first century. Postulated as a fundamental principle is the idea that the locus of linguistic reality is the act , the creative moment of
-
Semiotics, language, and law: the linguistic turn in Western jurisprudence Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Huanhuan He, Xiaobo Dong
In the latter half of the 20th century, with the development of philosophy studies, Western jurisprudence also witnessed a linguistic turn in its field. A series of academic schools appeared consecutively, such as the school of semantic analysis, the school of new rhetoric, the school of legal interpretation, and the school of structural semiotics. Their analytical paradigms, which were skeptical of
-
The Hungarian Sebeok Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Vilmos Voigt
It was never a secret that Thomas A. Sebeok was born in Hungary, and he always referred to his Hungarian background. He emigrated from Hungary (1936) to England and later (1937) to the United States, where he Americanized his family name, Sebők. As a scholar, he started Finno-Ugric studies (not only in Hungarian, but also in Cheremis). Sebeok continued as a general linguist, and then as a communication
-
Signs, forms, and models: Thomas A. Sebeok’s enduring legacy for semiotics Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Marcel Danesi
Thomas A. Sebeok has left semiotics a comprehensive theoretical apparatus for studying semiosis across species and across systems (biological and artificial). Uniting the notions of form , sign , and model into an integrative purview of meaning-making, known as modeling systems theory, Sebeok has provided a conceptual and terminological apparatus for studying all forms of meaning in terms of the fundamental
-
The end of Sebeok’s century meets twenty-first century pandemic: modeling through and beyond Sebeok’s systems, semiotics, science Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Sara Cannizzaro, Myrdene Anderson
Thomas A. Sebeok’s name became all but synonymous with semiotics during the last half of the twentieth century. Sebeok located neglected semioticians in antiquity, and convinced many contemporary scholars that they were semioticians. One of his most fruitful encounters was with Juri Lotman of the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics, who had published in 1967 an ambitious model of human sign systems in
-
Linguïculture: Thomas A. Sebeok as a revolutionary ethnographer Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Dinda L. Gorlée
Sebeok started his career as an ethnographer, focusing on the verbal art of anthropology to describe the cultures associated with then-called “primitive” languages. He followed Bloomfield’s linguistics to study Boas’ anthropology of primitive art to investigate man as a civilized member of a native indigenous community with art-like speech habits. Sebeok’s earliest articles were ethnographic descriptions
-
Natural signs from Plato to Thomas A. Sebeok Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Winfried Nöth
The paper pays tribute to Thomas A. Sebeok with an inquiry into the place of the semiotics of nature within his system of “global semiotics” and of natural signs within his typology of signs, which distinguishes “six species of signs.” It complements Sebeok’s theory of natural signs with a historical study of semiotic definitions of natural signs in four chapters. The first, “Natural signs from Plato
-
Bridging Sebeok and the Tartu circle Chinese Semiotic Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Anti Randviir, Kalevi Kull
We briefly sketch some characteristics of Thomas A. Sebeok’s program to develop semiotics and relate them to the approaches in the Tartu circle. It is not a historical, but effectively a paradigmatic insight into research in contemporary Tartu semiotics, where we can see the inevitability of cooperation between the large branches of semiotics such as bio-, socio-, and cultural semiotics that were,