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The face of health in the West and the East: A semio-cultural analysis Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Simona Stano
Magazines, leaflets, weblogs, and a variety of other media incessantly spread messages advising us on how to achieve or maintain our health or well-being. In such messages, the iconic representation of the face is predominant, and reveals an interesting phenomenon: the “face of health” seems to be unattainable as such, and is generally represented in a differential way, that is to say, by making reference
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Notes on the semiotics of face recognition Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Remo Gramigna,Cristina Voto
Perceiving and recognizing others via their faces is of pivotal importance. The ability to perceive others in the environment – to discern between friends and foes, selves and others – as well as to detect and seek to predict their possible moves, plans, and intentions, is a set of skills that has proved to be essential in the evolutionary history of humankind. The aim of this study is to explore the
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The transcendence of the face: A semiotic-linguistic path Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Ugo Volli
This paper starts with an examination of the terms used to designate the face in different languages, in particular in Italian, comparing these with the definitions provided by some authoritative dictionaries as well as with their etymology. This exploration yields some remarkable results: firstly, it appears that the face is indeed a term that has a material meaning, but at the same time it is a social
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Cultures of the (masked) face Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Gabriele Marino
What we generally regard as ‘the face’ should be semiotically understood not as something given and monolithic, but rather stratified – it is at least threefold: biological (face), physiognomic (expression), perceivable (visage) – and relational as it has to be put within a narrative in order to make sense. The face lies at the centre of a whole semiotic system, the form of life, revolving around the
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Art, face and breathscape: From air to cultural texts Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Silvia Barbotto
We consider breath as a vast prospect that includes actions and traces of them, that builds images and texts, that involves the human being and the extra-human context; we call this great scenery ‘breathscape’. We then study how breathscape interacts with the human apparatus of the face, both giving rise to signs, but also giving rise to a liminal zone of extremely intriguing interpretative processes
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Faces in the pre-Hispanic rock art of Colombia: Semiotic strategies, visual semiospheres, and gestures Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Martín Cuitzeo Domínguez Núñez
This article analyses the sign systems or semiotic models that make up the meaning of a double face or mask drawing in the pre-Columbian rock art of Colombia, also discussing two human figures with depicted faces associated with the main picture. The sample of rock art was detected on the walls of the Chicamocha Canyon at the Mirador de Bárcenas site in the Santander Department in Northeast Colombia
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Face off – a semiotic technology study of software for making deepfakes Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Søren Vigild Poulsen
Deepfakes, an algorithm that transposes the face of one person onto the face of another person in images and film, is a digital technology that may fundamentally alter our belief in visual modality and thus presents alarming consequences for an image-centric culture. Not only are these face-translations now so advanced that it is virtually impossible for people to tell that they are fake – this technology
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Face and trust: A semiotic inquiry into influencers, money, and amygdala Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Kristian Bankov
After the cultural explosion of Web 2.0, digital culture reveals an apparently semiotic paradox associated with the incredibly widespread use of images of faces, while at the same time the reason to trust in the authenticity of these faces is constantly declining. This is because graphic technology has made the sophisticated manipulation of images both possible and easy. After a review of the existing
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Urban-human faces and the semiotic right to the city: From the USSR propaganda machinery to the participatory city Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Elsa Soro
Now that the usage and meaning of urban spaces have been dramatically challenged by the global pandemic, several debates and reflections are going on around the manner in which cities – both as concerns the public and the private spaces – have been designed. The article observes how “urban-human face” representations have served different models of urbanity across times and cultures. Using a framework
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Jaan Kaplinski and his contacts with the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Ekaterina Velmezova,Kalevi Kull,Ene-Reet Soovik
Jaan Kaplinski (1941–2021), Estonian poet, essayist and public intellectual, sadly passed away earlier this year. To commemorate him, we publish some excerpts from a conversation with him that was recorded in 2018 and in which, among other topics, we also talked about Kaplinski’s relationship with semiotics and his personal contacts with eminent scholars of the Tartu-Moscow School.
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The face and the faceness: Iconicity in the early faciasemiotics of Paul Ekman, 1957–1978 Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Devon Schiller
Paul Ekman is an American psychologist who pioneered the study of facial behaviour. Bringing together disciplinary history, life study, and history of science, this paper focuses on Ekman’s early research during the twenty-year period between 1957 and 1978. I explicate the historical development of Ekman’s semiotic model of facial behaviour, tracing the thread of iconicity through his life and works:
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Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall and the post-nuclear culture of the face Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Emanuela Ferragamo
The intertwining of landscape and face belongs to human spatial epistemology: as suggested by Matteo Meschiari, primitive humans used to orientate themselves in landscape through recognition of facial patterns. By reflecting upon Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall (Die Wand), the article aims to question the semantic of the “face of the landscape” in the wake of an imagined nuclear apocalypse that leaves
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Semiotics of the pornographic face: From traditional porno to Beautiful Agony Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Bruno Surace
Today’s pornography constitutes a semiotic laboratory capable of meticulously describing some characteristics of the cultures from which it comes and for which it is intended. In it, the role of the face is preeminent and assumes relevance both from a diegetic and a formal point of view. A face which makes itself a sign and is articulated in a dialectic between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic
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Culturally significant symbolic faces: For a sociosemiotics of faces in films Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Antonio Santangelo
Every now and then when watching a movie, we come across faces in which we recognize a significant value, because they represent some important cultural models we use to assign meaning to our experience of the world. By way of example, I will discuss the faces of the protagonists of two recent films, Abdellatif Kechiche’s La vie d’Adèle. Chapitres 1 & 2 (2013; English title Blue Is the Warmest Colour)
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Augmented facets: A semiotics analysis of augmented reality facial effects Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Federico Biggio
Augmented reality facial effects represent a new trend in social media communication based on ‘short forms’. The article proposes a tripartite analysis: a semiotic analysis of digital facial effects used to empower the natural users’ faces; a deconstructionist analysis of Spark by Meta, one of the major software applications to create such effects and, finally, a critical reflection on the practices
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Gotta face ‘em all: Pokémon, Japanese animated characters, and the emergence of playful visual animism Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Vincenzo Idone Cassone
As a result of technological innovations and new cultural practices, the contemporary mediasphere is increasingly populated by digital(ized) faces. The phenomenon is not limited to human faces, but includes a vast universe of fictional animated faces, variously called ‘characters’, ‘mascots’ or ‘kyara’. In Japan, while certainly not new, kyara have been spreading thanks to globalization, digitalization
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Fatal portraits: The selfie as agent of radicalization Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-31 Peter Mantello
For the modern-day jihadist, the digital self-portrait or, more specifically, battlefield selfie is a popular tool for identity building. Similarly to the selfies taken by non-violent practitioners of self-capture culture, the jihadist selfie represents an alternative to the Cartesian formulation of a unitary and indivisible self. Rather, it is a product of social relations and performative actions
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Perspectives, dimensions, and references that shape the notion of nature: A semiotic model based on socioecological relations Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-12-28 Raquel Aparicio Cid
If the significance of nature is a crucial phenomenon in understanding the forms of relations societies establish with the environment, in what way is this significance built? This paper presents the results of a case study focused on exploring how the meanings of nature and socioecological relationships relate to each other in an indigenous population. The first part of the article explains the theoretical
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Towards the semiotics of the future: From anticipation to premediation Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Katre Pärn
The paper aims to make a contribution to semiotic research on the future by bringing together various approaches that deal with the relationship humans have with the future. More specifically, the paper concentrates on anticipation viewed as an activity that is based on modelling the (un)desired future as suggested by Nikolai Bernstein. The model-based approach to anticipation allows drawing connections
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Towards an integration of two aspects of semiosis – A cognitive semiotic perspective Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Piotr Konderak
Meaning-making processes, understood hierarchically, in line with the Semiotic Hierarchy framework, change on various timescales. To account for and predict these changes, one can take a cognitive view on semiosis. I adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining semiotic studies and cognitive studies in an attempt to account for meaning-making activity and to predict the course of semiosis. In this
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Metaphor, induction and innovation: Getting outside the box Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Inesa Sahakyan
Today more than ever innovation seems vital for us to anticipate the future and adapt to our rapidly changing world. But what is innovation and how is it accomplished? How can the mind generate innovative ideas? To gain a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the human capacity to innovate, the present study aims at answering two basic questions: first, ‘what makes innovation possible?’
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The dialogic nature of double consciousness and double stimulation: Implications from Peirce and Vygotsky Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Donna E. West
The objective in this paper is to demonstrate the indispensability of Peirce’s double consciousness to foster abductive reasoning, so that internal/external dialogue inform the worthiness of hunches. These forms of dialogue establish a mental give-and-take forum in which novel meanings/effects are particularly highlighted and noticed. Such attentional shifts are compelled by surprising states of affairs
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Music as a non-arbitrary avenue for exploration of the social Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Juha Ojala
The article examines how music affords exploration of social aspects of semiosis: how music signifies the social, beyond the fact that music is an inherently participatory social process. Pentti Määttänen extends Peirce’s notion of ‘hard fact’ to ‘soft facts’ to which we accommodate our behaviour in order to get along in society. As mutual beliefs, soft facts are continuously tested and updated in
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Narratives and the semiotic freedom of children Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Sara Lenninger
Both adults’ habits-of-thought and their understanding of children’s stories shape how adults interpret children’s participation in conversations. In the light of the requests on children’s rights that follow from the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) this paper stresses the relevance of authorities having semiotically informed knowledge on children’s meaning-making within conversations with
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Anticipating the societal transformation required to solve the environmental crisis in the 21st century Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Morten Tønnessen
This article introduces an ecosemiotic approach to the two great challenges facing humanity in the 21st century: solving an escalating environmental crisis, while also safeguarding and further improving human living conditions. An ecosemiotic framework for the study of societal transformations is presented and political and other normative aspects of what I call transformative semiotics are discussed
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Solar energy discourse in the Sunshine State Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Prisca Augustyn
This case study of a 2016 Florida constitutional amendment analyses the semiotic devices and mechanisms of shaping public opinion on solar energy and beliefs about energy distribution. After a nationwide rise in rooftop solar installations between 2014 and 2015, utilities in several US states were faced with challenges to their business models. Anticipating similar problems in Florida, utilities and
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Trajectories of anticipation: Preconceptuality and the task of reading habit Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-04 Sebastian Feil
The article characterizes Peirce’s concept of habit as a major contribution to a Peircean concept of preconceptuality, first, in relation to its function in the sign process, and second, in relation to other concepts of preconceptuality in cultural studies. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of prejudice, Michel Foucault’s notions of the preconceptual and the dispositif, and Hans Blumenberg’s conception of
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Prisons as total institution semiospheres Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Erik Kõvamees
The main objective of this article is to combine Juri Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere – including its concepts of boundary, core, and periphery – with Erving Goffman’s theory of the total institution. The purpose is to develop a framework conducive to examining the prison as an object of study, equally emphasizing both its internal as well as external relations. This work positions itself within
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Записки из подполья Ф. М. Достоевского в свете литературной традиции: Семиотическая постановка вопроса Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Katalin Kroó
В настоящей статье повесть Ф. М. Достоевского Записки из подполья рассматривается через концептуализацию литературной традиции в семиотическом контексте, в трех взаимосвязанных аспектах: (1) дискурсивные формы отрицания и его смысловые перспективы (апофатизм); (2) семантизация идеи полноты и (3) ориентированность художественного текста на осмысление семиотической природы изображаемого мира и изображающего
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Body ground red – integrating Peirce, Kristeva and Greimas Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Herman Tamminen
Ground (Charles Peirce’s concept) – regardless whether it be taken as motivation or abstractness – affords the proposition that some abstract categories of meaning have acquired their qualities via bodily experience. In order to show this to be the case, the concept of ground will be drawn together with the division (according to Julia Kristeva) between the symbolic and the semiotic, the semiotic chora
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Trajectory: A model of the sign and of semiosis Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Winfried Nöth
This paper examines how far the model of the trajectory as a path that a moving object follows from a source to a goal is an adequate model of the sign and of semiotic processes. Just like intentions, meanings, and messages, also signs have sources and goals. A study of the terms by which the Ancient Greeks referred to signs (sêma, semeîon, and tekmérion) reveals that the idea of goal-directedness
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What we can learn from semiotics, systems theory, and theoretical biology to understand religious communication Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Volkhard Krech
If religion is a socio-cultural meaning system as part of the socio-cultural sphere, then how does it relate to mental, organic, and physical processes that belong to the environment of religion? The article contributes to answering this question by referring to semiotics, systems theory, and theoretical biology. The starting point is understanding religious evolution as a co-evolution to societal
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Semiocide: An introduction to semiotics of destruction of the meaningful Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Mehmet Emir Uslu
The aim of this article is to expand on the concept of semiocide which, in broad terms, is the destruction of signs and semiosis. Taking its point of departure from Ivar Puura’s article on the concept, this essay attempts to find conceptual parallels and historical examples of the term, expanding its range through a critique of its original conception. Departing from the initial conservatism of Puura’s
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A semiotic approach to language ideologies: Modelling the changing Icelandic languagescape Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Stephen Pax Leonard
Attempts have been made to examine how speakers frame linguistic varieties by employing social semiotic models. Using ethnographic data collected over many years, this article applies such a model to Iceland, once described as the ‘e-coli of linguistics’ – its size, historical isolation and relative linguistic homogeneity create conditions akin to a sociolinguistic laboratory. This semiotic model of
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Platfospheres and sociocultural explosion of Web 2.0: The commercial centre of the digital semiosphere Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Kristian Bankov
This paper explores digital culture with the tools of cultural semiotics in general, and then employing the semiosphere model in particular. Web 2.0 platforms are taken as the major cultural dispositive of our time, as the most representative way in which the internet shapes digital culture. Most of the global population is currently immersed in digital culture. In the first part of the paper the striking
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Juri Lotman, Gilles Deleuze and their approaches to cinema: Points of intersection Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Mihael Konstantinov
Engaging with the methods of studying contemporary digital audiovisual art is a dominant topic in contemporary theories of art. Against this background, the article offers a view onto some aspects of Juri Lotman’s and Gilles Deleuze’s studies on the cinema. As a rule, contemporary studies of digital audiovisual art take place in the context of interdisciplinary studies. One of the methodological principles
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Uexküll and Whitehead on meaning, process and life Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Arthur Araújo
The paper approximates Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of meaning and the process-thought in Alfred Whitehead’s philosophy. As the main idea, the paper points at the compatibility of meaning and process according to the perspectives of Uexküll and Whitehead. It suggests that Uexküll’s common meaning rule can describe the processes of novelty in the world as does Whitehead’s principle of creativity. It is
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Propositions for a biocultural semiotics Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Kathryn Staiano-Ross
The author has used the term ‘biocultural semiotics’ in her previous work, but has never defined this field. She presents twelve propositions that describe and motivate a biocultural semiotics. The author draws on thirty years of field work in Belize and her previous research in cultural and bio-semiotics in support of each of the propositions. Propositions include: biology and culture are so bound
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Observing wildlife through the eyes of Nils Lindahl Elliot Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Nelly Mäekivi,Silver Rattasepp
Review of Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests. 1: A Geosemeiotic Approach by Nils Lindahl Elliot. Bristol: Delome Publications, 2019, 480 pp.
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“Who goes there?” Reflections on signs and personhood in Christopher Hutton’s Integrationism and the Self Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-30 Paul Cobley
Review of Integrationism and the Self: Reflections on the Legal Personhood of Animals [Series Routledge Advances in Communication and Linguistic Theory] by Christopher Hutton. London: Routledge, 2019, 190 pp.
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Hegel and the Peircean ‘object’ Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-30 Chris Barnham
Peirce’s semiotics is well known for advocating a triadic, rather than a dyadic, sign structure, but interpretations of how such a structure works in practice have varied considerably. This paper argues that the Peircean ‘object’ is central to understanding Peirce’s philosophical intent and that this element should be construed as a mediating element within the sign rather than as an originating source
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Chatting with chatbots: Sign making in text-based human–computer interaction Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-30 Dorthe Duncker
This paper investigates the kind of sign making that goes on in text-based human–computer interaction, between human users and chatbots, from the point of view of integrational linguistics. A chatbot serves as a “conversational” user interface, allowing users to control computer programs in “natural language”. From the user’s perspective, the interaction is a case of semiologically integrated activity
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Integrating biosemiotics: From a semiological point of view Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-30 Adrian Pablé
This paper is a study in the ‘philosophy of semiotics’. It is centred on a critical approach to the Peircean sign conception, which underlies biosemiotics and the global perspective on signs. The present discussion tackles questions of ontological and epistemological interest, which it does by taking a distinctly semiological point of reference. The semiology which the present critique draws inspiration
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Even a two-year-old can do it! The early stages of learning to understand moving-image media Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-30 Cary Bazalgette
Film scholarship has consistently avoided discussing how we learn to understand the complex, multimodal systems of communication that moving-image media (referred to here as ‘movies’) have evolved into over the last 125 years. This article offers some reasons for this neglect: in particular, the popular assumption that movies are extremely easy to understand, and the relative lack of research on two-year-olds
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Modelling the reciprocal dynamics of dialogical communication: On the communication-philosophical undercurrent of radical constructivism and second-order cybernetics Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-30 Peter Kastberg
Even though both Ernst von Glasersfeld, the founding father of radical constructivism, and his epistemological alter ego, Heinz von Foerster, one of the principal architects of second-order cybernetics, would both repeatedly stress the formative importance of communication, neither would ever model communication as a phenomenon per se. I will propose a first modelling of communication as seen through
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Creating reality as a locally tailored interface – an integrational, pragmatic account of semiosis Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-30 Charlotte Conrad
Linguistics and semiotics traditionally assert the view that communication presupposes signs. Integrational linguistics challenges this notion by refuting the first-order ontological status of signs and semiological codes. Yet if communication does not depend on pre-established signs, then how does semiosis proceed? And what is the basis for the intuitively acceptable notion that codes do exist as
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Everything seems so settled here: The conceivability of post-Peircean biosemiotics Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Claudio J. Rodríguez Higuera
Theory change is a slow, tortuous process. Problems associated with how we communicate ideas and how these ideas are received by our peers become catalysts for change in how we ourselves perceive and sanction what the discipline is capable of doing. Some parts of semiotics, and particularly biosemiotics, have come under critical scrutiny because of their heavy commitment to Peircean philosophy, but
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General sociolinguistics, social semiotics and semiotics of culture – ex pluribus unum? Forty years after Language as Social Semiotic Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Suren Zolyan
The birth of social semiotics is usually associated with the publication of Michael Halliday’s book Language as Social Semiotic (1978). We try to draw attention to possible new developments in social semiotics, which still remain a potential transdisciplinary project for social sciences. In order to do this, we address the interrelation between sociolinguistics, social semiotics and the semiotics of
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The case for a semiotic method in Earth system science: Semantic networks of environmental research Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Alin Olteanu, Florian Rabitz, Jurgita Jurkevičienė, Agnė Budžytė
This paper sets a framework for using semiotics as an analytical method for Earth system science. It illustrates the use of such a method by analysing a dataset consisting of 32,383 abstracts of research articles pertaining to Earth system science, modelled as semantic networks. The analysis allows us to explain the epistemological advantages of this method as originating in the systems thinking common
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Fairy tales between transformation and repetition: How audiences rethink the big romantic myth through Disney princess stories Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Tatjana Menise
One of the ways in which culture becomes enriched is through reconsideration and reinterpretation of well-known stories, and classic fairy tales provide promising material for investigation of the nature of this complex process. The Walt Disney Company is among the most powerful tellers of classic tales, its line of princess animations being an example of simultaneous development and preservation of
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A strawberry, an animal cry and a human subject: Where existential semiotics, biosemiotics and relational metaphysics seem to meet one another Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Katarzyna Machtyl
The article discus ses some semiotic approaches to the relation between nature and culture. Starting with outlining the structuralistic approach to this issue, especially the ideas of Juri Lotman and Algirdas Julien Greimas, the author finds parallels between different views on the relation between the natural world and human beings. First, the juxtaposition of Eero Tarasti’s existential semiotics
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Keepers as social companions: Tactile communication and social enrichment for captive apes Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Mirko Cerrone
The article addresses the topic of great ape–keeper tactile communication. The aim of this paper is to understand whether direct physical contact can be considered a source of enrichment for captive apes and whether it could be used to enhance animal welfare in zoos. We make use of a multispecies perspective provided by umwelt theory in an attempt to determine the role of touch in zoological gardens
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Translating from monosemiotic to polysemiotic narratives: A study of Finnish speech and gestures Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Karoliina Louhema, Jordan Zlatev, Maria Graziano, Joost Van de Weijer
Human communication can be either monosemiotic or polysemiotic, depending on whether it combines ensembles of representations from one or more semiotic systems such as language, gesture and depiction. Each semiotic system has its unique storytelling potentials, which makes intersemiotic translation from one system to another challenging. We investigated the influence of the source semiotic system,
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Report on the 19th annual Gathering in Biosemiotics in Moscow Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Arran Gare
The 19th annual Biosemiotics Gathering that took place on 1–5 July 2019, was hosted by the Philosophy Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University. That it was hosted by a philosophy faculty rather than a science faculty, and that it was hosted in Russia, are both significant. Biosemiotics is a challenge to mainstream biology, still struggling to gain acceptance despite the work of a great many researchers
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Multiculturalism, biosemiotics, and cross-cultural friendship: An essay review of Olteanu’s multimodal semiotics of culture Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Claus Emmeche
“Democracy also means voluntary choice, based on an intelligence that is the outcome of free association and communication with others. It means a way of living together in which mutual and free consultation rule instead of force, and in which cooperation instead of brutal competition is the law of life; a social order in which all the forces that make for friendship, beauty, and knowledge are cherished
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Learning and knowing as semiosis: Extending the conceptual apparatus of semiotics Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-12 Cary Campbell, Alin Olteanu, Kalevi Kull
If all knowing comes from semiosis, more concepts should be added to the semiotic toolbox. However, semiotic concepts must be defined via other semiotic concepts. We observe an opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in semiotics by defining concepts of cognitive processes and phenomena via semiotic terms. In particular, we focus on concepts of relevance for theory of knowledge, such as learning
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Cartographies of the mind: Generalization and relevance in cognitive landscapes Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-12 Sergio Rodríguez Gómez
The problem of relevance, at individual agent scale – or how we decide what is adequate for our interpretation of the signs we encounter in the world – is a question that keeps reappearing in semiotics and other disciplines concerned with meaning. In this article I propose an approximation on relevance that conceives meaning as a trajectory across a cognitive landscape. Unlike conventional accounts
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Semiotics of threats: Discourse on the vulnerability of the Estonian identity card Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-08-08 Andreas Ventsel, Mari-Liis Madisson
This article analyses various e-threats that were expressed in media texts that focused on e-threat discourses concerning the Estonian identity card’s security risk in 2017. The discourse of cyberthreats contains strong and controversial meanings because the peculiarities of cyberspace remain intangible for average readers who do not possess expert knowledge regarding ICT. The wider aim of the paper
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Steps towards the natural meronomy and taxonomy of semiosis: Emotin between index and symbol? Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-08-08 Kalevi Kull
The main aim of this brief and purposely radical essay is to investigate further possibilities for empirical research in natural classification of semiosis (signs as wholes). Before introducing emon – a missing term in the taxonomy of signs – we make a distinction between the natural and artificial, and between the taxonomic and meronomic classifications of signs. Natural classifications or typologies
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Vygotsky’s natural history of signs Sign Systems Studies (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-08-08 Lauri Linask
The paper organizes the topic of signs in Lev Vygotsky’s various writings into a coherent whole in order to study signs’ role in child development. Vygotsky related conventional signs that have their origin in interpersonal communication, and are subject to cultural history taking place over generations during historical time, to psychological functioning of individual human beings. Vygotsky’s “natural