Showing papers in "Semiotica in 1988"

Interface design: A semiotic paradigm

Abstract: Design principles are semiotic by nature. To design means to structure systems of signs in such a way as to make possible the achievement of human goals: communication (as a form of social interaction), engineering (as a form of applied technical rationality), business (as a form of shared efficiency), architecture, art, education, etcetera. Design comes about in an environment traditionally called culture, currently identified as artificial (through a rather romantic distinction between natural and artificial), and acts as a bridge between scientific and humanistic praxes. A long this line of thinking, Simon (1982) stated, ‘Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent not with how things are but how things might be in short, with design’. The object of semiotics is sign systems and their functioning within culture. For a long time (and for reasons whose presentation is beyond the scope of this article), one type of sign the symbol has been considered representative of all signs in human culture: ‘for most of us . . . the significant part of the environment consists mostly of strings of artifacts called “symbols” that we receive through eyes and ears in the form of written and spoken language and that we pour out into the environment as I am now doing by mouth or hand’ (Simon 1982). Actually, we perceive signs through all our senses, and we generate signs that address the same. The fact that some of these signs (visual, auditory) are more important should not prevent us from considering any other sign that can be used for representation, communication, and communication functions. But before dealing with these basic functions, we have to settle upon one of the many definitions of sign that have been advanced in the field of semiotics, and then apply it as consistently as possible. The definitions fall into two basic categories: 1. Adoption of one kind of sign usually pertaining to verbal language as a paradigm, with the understanding that every other sign is structurally equivalent. Artificial intelligence researchers are quite comfortable with this model. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure advanced

Towards a Semiotics of Mathematics

Abstract: As the sign system whose grammar has determined the shape of Western culture’s techno-scientific discourse since its inception, mathematics is implicated, at a deeply linguistic level, in any form of distinctively intellectual activity; indeed, the norms and guidelines of the ‘rational’ valid argument, definitional clarity, coherent thought, lucid explication, unambiguous expression, logical transparency, objective reasoning are located in their most extreme, focused, and highly cultivated form in mathematics. The question this essay addresses what is the nature of mathematical language? should therefore be of interest to semioticians and philosophers as well as mathematicians. There are, however, certain difficulties. inherent in trying to address such disparate types of readers at the same time which it would he disingenuous not to acknowledge at the outset. Consider the mathematical reader. On the one hand it is no accident that Peirce, whose writings created the possibility of the present essay, was a mathematician: nor one that I have practiced as a mathematician; nor that Hilbert, Brouwer, and Frcge the authors of the accounts of mathematics I shall dispute were mathematicians. Mathematics is cognitively difficult, technical, abstract, and (for many) defeatingly impersonal: one needs, it seems, to have been inside the dressing room in order to make much sense of the play. On the other hand, one cannot stay too long there if the play is not to disappear inside its own performance. In this respect mathematicians confronted with the nature of their subject arc no different from anybody else. The language that textual critics, for example, use to talk about criticism will be permeatcd by precisely those features figures of ambiguity, polysemy, compression of meaning, subtlety and plurality of interpretation, rhetorical tropes, and so on which these critics value in the texts they study; likewise mathematicians will create and respond to just those discussions of mathematics that ape what attracts them to their subject matter. Where textual critics literize their rnetalanguage. mathematicians mathcmatize theirs. And since for mathematicians the principal activity is proving new theorems, what they will ask of

Toward a socio-logic of the film text

Abstract: I would like in this paper to propose a set of methods and resources for the analysis of filmic texts, and to put forth some initial analytic observations. In doing so, I hope to elucidate some aspects of the intimate ties between the organization of various features of culture and social life on the one hand, and the organization of filmic texts as cultural forms on the other. For over a decade, work within film structuralism and cine-semiotics has addressed itself to the analysis of film texts. The main body of such work, however, has been concerned with advancing a formal program or a taxonomic system for film-textual studies (Metz 1974a and b; Eco 1976a and b), or with excavating a 'semantic deep structure' for specific films or film genres (for example, Wright 1977). My concern will not lie there, nor will it lie with treating the film text as a document of substantive social or cultural values — although both sorts of enterprise have their legitimate interest. Rather, my concern will be with the analysis of the particulars and properties of filmic organization and intelligibility. Central to this concern is the treatment of the film text as a produced account — a narrative that consists in an artful organization of cultural practices and resources, and in turn reveals some of the formal properties of our culture and our methods of sense production and assembly. The filmic narrative, whether fictional or documentary, is a form of communicative practice, as are the narratives and accounts produced within the social corpus of written texts; it must therefore be amenable to the same kind of analytic investigation, albeit one that must attend to its own specificities of form and structure. This article will be organized in three general sections. Specifically, I will attempt to (1) discuss some of the properties of cultural and social organization that are deeply and particularly relevant to filmic practice and the filmic enterprise; (2) develop some initial analytic observations on the organization of the film text that will reveal both its deep embeddedness in cultural forms and practices and some aspects of its own specific narrative and communicative character; and (3) draw some conclusions from this for the general area of 'visual' studies and cine-semiotics.

Material bases of signification

Abstract: The central issue of knowledge is the relationship between categories and facts, between criteria and things. This is a thorny philosophical problem, but one which semiotics can go a long way toward resolving. The basic criterion is that of allowing the horizon of semiotics to coincide completely with the horizon of knowledge, and the semiotic enquiry itself with the mechanisms of knowledge. This means that the world (real or possible) in which semiosis occurs is not an area detachable from reality and confined to the human world. It is, rather, the world — open before us (indefinitely extended beyond what we see) — that can be talked about. The process of semiosis is throughout subjected to the state of affairs of which we are a part, and to our position within the network of exchanges in which we are involved. So we accept the initial hypothesis of a use, and a physiology, of communication inevitably translated in terms of the derivation and evolution of its very function in the natural world, beginning from elementary conditions.

Discourse of blame. Courtroom construction of social reality from the perspective of the defendant.

Abstract: Discourse of blame. Courtroom construction of social reality from the perspective of the defendant.

Politeness strategies in verbal interaction: An analysis of directness and indirectness in speech acts

Abstract: While it is generally accepted that politeness represents a form of human behavior which is controlled by certain principles of rationality, these principles do regulate interactional activities with the ultimate purpose of getting things accomplished. As a basic strategy for carrying out the corresponding means-end operations, politeness manifests itself in both communicative and noncommunicative actions. In the latter case, the polite actor performs purely instrumental acts, such as opening a door for someone or helping a blind person cross the street. Normative descriptions of these forms of politeness are found in etiquette manuals. The study of politeness in communicative interaction calls for an approach that takes different levels of analysis into account. The first distinction to be made is that of metalinguistic and linguistic categories of politeness.

How to kill jokes cognitively? The meaning structure of jokes

Abstract: 'Yet each man kills the thing he loves/... Some do it with a bitter look,/ Some with a flattering word,/ The coward does it with a kiss,/ The brave man with a sword!' Undoubtedly, there are many ways to kill a thing one loves. These famous lines by Oscar Wilde were meant to refer to human objects of love — women or men. In this study we devised several cognitive ways to kill another thing we love —jokes. We did it, of course, only experimentally, in order to explore the structure and functioning of jokes. Using Wilde's phrase to refer to jokes instead of people exemplifies the process of shifting, which is of central importance in cognition in general and plays a focal role in this study. In cognition, shifting denotes essentially a transfer from one sphere of contents to another; for example, in conversation one may shift from discussing politics to discussing restaurants, or in problem-solving one may shift from one strategy to another. By definition, shifting produces an incongruity or discrepancy between the previous sphere of contents, still retained in memory, and the newly introduced sphere which has become central. Thus, for the listener or observer shifting involves mainly either the frustration of an expectation or the production of a new expectation, or both. The frustrated expectation concerns the previous sphere of contents, which was expected to continue being dominant but which was replaced by another sphere. The new expectation concerns the newly introduced sphere of contents, whose potentialities are still unclear. However it may be, shifting constitutes a source of tension, and tension calls for some resolution. Essentially there are two ways of resolving this kind of tension: (1) reshifting back to the first sphere of contents while completely ignoring the second sphere, or (2) reshifting back to the first sphere of contents while combining it with the second sphere. The first way is boring, past-oriented, conservative, counterproductive, and not very effective for tension resolution

Toward an anthropology of sight: Ritual performance and the photographic process

Abstract: This paper will explore a number of questions concerning a cultural model for photography. It will present a model for a photographic ritual based on a correspondence between the process of producing photographs and a social and cultural process known as the 'rites of passage'. In this context, it will specifically address the means by which a ritual of photography would serve to mediate the individual and collective domains of cultural experience — in particular, for whom and in what terms this type of process may be understood to operate. The paper will begin with a general discussion of reflexivity, performance, and ritual. It will then briefly outline Durkheim's notion of 'collective representation'. This will be followed by an outline of the structural and processual functions of the rites of passage. After this overview of the general theoretical context, a synopsis will be given of photography's position within a progressive rationalization of sight; this will be followed by a sketch of the formal relationship between the photographic camera and the human eye. A ritual model of the 'photographic process', and^a more specific discussion of the classification system in terms of which it operates, will then be given. This will serve as a context for a discussion of the relationship between it, the camera, the human eye, and the role of the photographer. The paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the relationship between this type of ritual, an education of the eye, and an anthropology of sight.

Incommunicables and poetic documentation in the Alzheimer’s disease experience

Abstract: The publication of Thomas and Znaniecki's (1918-1929) monumental study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, established the personal account äs an important source of social scientific data. The use of letters to document the social and personal sides of experience was followed by the analysis of other forms: autobiographies, diaries, guerrilla journalism, oral history, photographs, film (see Plummer 1983). It seemed that personal documents lent themselves to detailed description of the flowing complexities of everyday life — the rationalities and rationalizations, the retrospections, visions and revisions, reconsiderations, contradictions, the fitful shifts in meaning and intention. While personal documents serve sociological depiction, respondents occasionally suggest that they are, äs text or testimony, too prosaic to convey the greatest depths of experience. The common opinion that certain experiences cannot be put into words or cannot be described informs us that other communicative means are needed and that, if found and applied, such means convey what plain words cannot. At the same Urne, we have long thought that certain forms of communication — music, the visual arts, poetry — are able to penetrate the depths. Yet there has been an understandable reluctance in the social sciences to entertain these forms äs personal documents — in part because they are associated with the arts, not science, and in part because what they document is believed to be incomprehensible. This paper attempts to bridge the gap by taking folk poetry äs a native means of documenting that which, by its presumed nature, cannot be conveyed discursively. In and about the world of those dealing with Alzheimer's disease (senile dementia), many poems have been written and/or distributed. Their usage provides a vivid case study of evidence for a non-substantive communicative function. Following a brief medical description of the disease and its communicative bürden, three aspects of poetic documentation in folk application are considered here: (1) usage äs

Pain assessment: Model construction and analysis of words used to describe pain-like experiences

Abstract: This study was designed to identify and analyse conceptual dimensions underlying the concepts pain, ache and hurt in order to provide a theoretical basis for further development of a methodology for the assessment of pain in clinical practice. The three words, pain, ache and hurt were studied in 1.814 contexts found in a computer based concordance of 7.8 million texts from Swedish newspapers and novels. Separately from the above procedure the words were also located and analysed in a thesaurus of Swedish Bring. In addition to the two above linguistic methods, a questionnaire was given to 106 subjects comprising students, nurses and patients where they were asked to explain the meaning of the words pain, ache and hurt.

Social meaning in the observation of goal directed action

Abstract: Films of alert human beings in their everyday life are for the most part films of human goal directed actions. The filming of physiological or biological processes often requires some additional techniques for monitoring these processes. Processes of larger social systems, on the other hand, could be easily represented on film, but would not often be completely depicted. This is a very simple but certainly plausible reason to start with some theoretical and methodical considerations about human action if we intend to deal with the analysis of film and video material.

Object as memory: The material foundations of human semiosis

Abstract: Human communication can never be completely abstracted from the material context within which it occurs. Speech is never uttered into empty space, and every human action is located in a particular setting composed of natural, physical objects and man-made material artifacts. Human semiosis depends in large part on the instrumental use of objects to define situational contexts for communication. Although investigations of nonverbal expression and the use of symbolic objects continue to suggest that verbal action is interwoven with other modes of human communication, theories of human communication based on the work of Peirce and Saussure have come to view these relationships as a matter of pragmatics. They often implicitly remove verbal communication from situational context during analysis. The division of communication into distinct systems of meaning, each subject to different theories, does not adequately mirror the complex interrelationships among these modes of action. As Rossi-Landi has observed:

The semiotic of John Poinsot: Yesterday and tomorrow

Abstract: The being proper to signs, whereby the whole of experience and belief is nurtured, has finally come to focal consideration in philosophy and contemporary understanding generally. It is timely and fitting that the work of John Poinsot, who first reduced this subject to a formal unity, is also being addressed in contemporary semiotic discussion, both in relation to the future of the enterprise today called 'semiotics', and in relation to his predecessors in the Latin philosophical traditions of Renaissance times. Three centuries of silence have until now shrouded Poinsot's work in ignorance, save for the smallest of circles — mainly theological and sectarian — dealing with texts and issues usually far removed from those wherein Poinsot lays foundations for the doctrine of signs. Now Poinsot appears at the center of intense discussion as an unexpected landmark figure whose foundational work on the sign must be accounted for in its own right when it comes to charting the unexplored reaches of newly discovered semiotica. That such a parvenu to mainstream considerations be resented by some

Peirce and Turing: Comparisons and conjectures

Abstract: A few years ago I became interested in the question of who had been the designer of a particular unsigned diagram for an electrical 'logical machine'. The diagram had been found by Alonzo Church, about 1950, among the Allan Marquand papers at the Firestone Library of Princeton University. Because Marquand had studied logic at the Johns Hopkins University, I wondered if his teacher there, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), had any connection with this design. Pursuit of the matter soon began to produce a defensible case that Peirce actually made the design at Marquand's request. Further background, plus evidence and argumentation for that thesis, is given in Ketner (1984a). In the course of my earlier study I encountered additional material which showed that Peirce's interest in logical machines was not limited to this single episode, but perhaps was intimately connected with his careful lifelong study of the nature of mathematical reasoning. That in turn is part of the basis for his study of semeiosis or sign action (Ketner 1984b). From a very young age, principally through his well-informed father, Benjamin Peirce, with whom he was very close both personally and intellectually, he had been aware of the study of machine reasoning in the work of figures such as Babbage (see Hyman 1982) and Jevons (see Ketner 1984a). That some logical machines then existed, either as designs or as working models, and that they apparently could perform some logical operations 'at the turn of a crank', was, in the eyes of Charles (see Peirce 1877), a new step in the development of science; and he regarded each such step as a lesson that should be learned well by the historically sensitive logician, of which genus he was a fine specimen. The ruling passion in his life was the study of logic, understood broadly as the science of the nature of scientific method (Ketner 1983a), so it is not surprising that he quickly sought to extract the lesson of this particular 'new step' involving logical machines. In short, on the occasion of my

Sapir and the two tasks of language

Abstract: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is neither hypothesis — it can not be tested — nor the fruit of collaboration; it is the invention of John B. Carroll, who introduced it in his edition of the papers of Benjamin Lee Whorf (Whorf 1956: 23). Carroll's contention is that Whorfs 'linguistic relativity' derived from the theories of Edward Sapir, whose classes Whorf attended at Yale. With the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Carroll institutionalized Whorfs misconception of Sapir's argument about the role of language in thought and culture. The misnomer is emblematic of the equivocation and confusion which the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has engendered. It is, nevertheless, of some practical interest to consider these difficulties, since the doctrine of linguistic relativity is often called upon to validate certain politically suspect attitudes in literacy theory and to support highly questionable pedagogies. Its interest is also theoretical, since this hypothesis has encouraged some to support spurious interpretations of 'indeterminacy'. The paradox of a theory of determinism which can undergird a theory of indeterminacy should be resolved, but the terms in which the SapirWhorf hypothesis is generally cast are so vague, the formulations so unclear, that it makes such resolution difficult. Depending on this hypothesis for direction in discussions of language is hazardous — worse, such dependence actively forestalls a more careful articulation of the issues it presumably addresses. Because the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the attendant controversies exemplify some of the chief problems in thinking about language and culture, language and thought, and because it is representative of the doomed enterprise of trying to found a theory of meaning on positivist conceptions of the sign, I propose here to examine its claims. My chief purpose is, however, to differentiate WhorPs 'linguistic relativity' from Sapir's philosophy of language, to show that WhorPs views are expres-

The organization of repair in the songs of gibbons

Abstract: Gibbons (Hylobates spp.) are small arboreal apes, inhabiting the tropical rain forests of southeastern Asia (Groves 1972; Chivers 1977). They are unusual among Old World primates in being monogamous, strictly territorial, and lacking in any sexual dimorphism (see Kleiman 1977; Rutberg 1983). By far the most conspicuous and elaborate social behavior of gibbons is their singing of duets — a feature characteristic of monogamous animals (Wilson 1975), but loudest and perhaps most musical in gibbons among all land mammals (Marshall and Marshall 1976). Traditionally, this behavior in gibbons has been proposed to function as a means of advertisement of a pair in a given territory and of that pair's willingness to defend the territory (that is, as a spacing mechanism) (Chivers 1974; Marshall and Marshall 1976; Gittins 1979; Haimoff 1983a, 1984a and b, forthcoming a, b, and c). This proposed function has recently been tested and demonstrated in field playback experiments (Mitani forthcoming; Raemaekers and Raemaekers forthcoming). These duets have also been proposed to serve as a means by which the adult pairs maintain and reinforce the cohesion of the pairbond through social interaction (Chivers 1974,1976; Gittins 1979; Haimoff 1983a, forthcoming). The organizational features of duet-singing in the different gibbon species vary greatly, from the complex and interactively organized duet bouts by the siamang (//. syndactylus) (Haimoff 1981, 1983a and b, forthcoming a) to the female-dominated bouts with minimal male interaction in the Kloss gibbon (//. klossii) (Tenaza 1976; Whitten 1980; Haimoff 1983a, forthcoming a). In some of the gibbon species where the male's vocal contribution to the duet is minimal, the mated adult males produce long and elaborate solo song bouts, presumably to advertise their presence in a territory (Gittins 1979; Whitten 1980; Haimoff 1983a). The acoustical features of these duets are equally diverse between the species. In some species, the most conspicuous sounds made are frequency

What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? Part 4: Union

Abstract: The letters of the ordinary English alphabet, some of which date back to Egyptian forms of five millennia ago (Driver 1976: 136-144), belong to a coherent set of signifying elements that have mostly been shaped gradually through changes introduced inadvertently as part of their casual transmission from generation to generation. In short, they have been shaped, in large degree, by processes comparable to those which shape language itself; if for that reason alone, then, the letters of the ordinary alphabet would seem to offer themselves as fit objects of semiotic curiosity. On the other hand, their manifest differences from the elements of natural language are as striking as their similarities: their modes of realization, for instance (visual for reception, manual for production), or their tendency over time to become more symmetrical — an evolutionary trend not only altogether absent from the history of languages (save for the odd palindrome deliberately constructed), but foreign to their very nature. Thus the alphabetic letters promise, even from the outset, to be enough like their corresponding linguistic entities to profit from the comparison, while differing from them enough to profit from the contrast. Lest it mislead, we should lay particular stress at this point on the fact that our use of natural language as a basis of comparison is for its utility as a conceptual springboard only: the extent to which the letters resemble elements of language has nothing whatever to do with the happenstance that the letters are primarily used to represent language. The source of the resemblance, rather, lies in their constant use, in their 'natural' transmission, and in the fact that they are semiotic elements, hence convey something other than themselves, and must be kept discriminable. With this in mind it should come as no surprise that, while the letters are

Gender and culture as determinants of the ’ideal voice’

Abstract: It is generally believed that gender and culture tend to affect our notions of the 'ideal voice'. However, these variables are relatively insignificant in comparison to three characteristics of ideal voice typically associated with 'good speech': that it be (1) easily understood, (2) unobtrusive, and (3) appropriate (Fisher 1975). This study explores the universality of widely accepted descriptors of the ideal voice in cross-gender and cross-cultural perspective. The study probed the intersubjective typification of the ideal speaker's voice, the ideal male voice, and the ideal female voice, in Mexico and the United States. The purpose was to construct and contrast the ideal voice types within and across these two cultures. The research questions which guided the study were: What are the collectively perceived Ideal voice types' in Mexico and the United States? And to what degree do the ideal male and ideal female voice types correspond to the ideal voice type within each culture?

A critique of the ’post-structuralist’ conception of language

Abstract: Post-structuralism is a way of thinking which originated in French intellectual circles, but which has become something of a fashion in English-speaking countries as well. The post-structuralist point of view applies to nearly all areas of human activity. Among other things, it generates quite definite views about the nature of art, history, and the human individual, views which — it is said — agree perfectly with the socalled 'post-modern' sensibility: the past is dead; the future is closed; the present is fragmented into an indefinite number of monadic languagegames; science, politics, and religion qua collective norms have lost their meaning; people deal with things as external appearances to which they are free to attach any meanings they please. At bottom, however, the post-structuralist ideology derives its justification from a certain conception of language. It is this conception which is first taken to be valid and is then generalized — teile quelle — to art, history, etcetera. In what follows I shall show that this conception is thoroughly incorrect, which means that the post-structuralist edifice has no foundations. One may still wish to cling to post-structuralist views, but one should at least be aware that there is no rational justification for doing so. Rather, it is simply a matter of emotional attachment. Derrida is commonly regarded as the main figure of post-structuralism. Yet his conception of language was anticipated by other French thinkers — notably Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Foucault. Therefore I must consider these three before tackling Derrida. First of all, however, I wish to explain why I think the emphasis on language is misplaced in the present context.

Deconstructing Austin’s pragmatics: ‘An idle tea-table amusement’ (Russell) or an epistemological solution to the crisis of representation?

Abstract: Pragmatics, however, was still futuristic at the time of Morris' monograph. It was suggested in Bar-Hillel ... that pragmatics concern itself with what C. S. Peirce had in the last century called indexical expressions that is, words and sentences of which the reference cannot be determined without knowledge of the context of use; examples are the words T and 'here', as well as sentences involving tenses. Pragmatics did not, however, exhibit any precise technical structure until 1959, when the present author later joined by others, initiated considerations that for the most part have remained unpublished until now. It seemed to me desirable that pragmatics should at least initially follow the lead of semantics, which is primarily concerned with the notion of truth (in a model, or under an interpretation), and hence concern itself also with truth — but with respect not only to an interpretation but also to a context of use. (Montague 1968: 103)

The semiotic square as a ’catastrophe’

Abstract: In two articles which appeared in 1979 and 1982 in Semiotica, I tried to define the concept of mestastability as applied to the linguistic and visual sign. The present article represents a sequel to these two studies. It is an attempt to develop further — in the direction of the semiotic of Greimas — the model of the metastable sign. But first, I shall sum up the thesis I developed in the earlier articles. The term metastability is culled from the Gestaltpsychology school (as a matter of fact, I might well have entitled this study 'Semiology and Gestalt'), and means the constant reversibility of certain visual signs under our gaze. This reversibility can be either spatial (in the orthogonal direction in relation to the plane containing the drawing), as in the case of the Necker cube (see Figure 1) or 'directional' (inside the picture-plane and not orthogonally to it), as in the case of the 'duck-rabbit' discovered by Jastrow and later borrowed by Wittgenstein (1953) (Figure 2), or even of the 'figure/background' type (interchangeability between a 'figure' which comes to the fore over a 'background', or of a background which comes to the fore over a 'figure'), as in the case of the 'Rubin cup' (Figure 3). Let us observe further that the metastability of the three signs described

The communicative status of human audible movements: Before and beyond paralanguage

Abstract: In the course of an investigation of paralanguage (Poyatos 1988) as one of the cosystems of the basic triple structure language-paralanguage-kinesics — a topic that has constituted the basis of most of my previous studies of communication (Poyatos 1983) — I have once more pondered the fundamental yet neglected fact that paralinguistic utterances can be, and often are, activities co-ocurring with other sign-conveying bodily activities by which they can be conditioned throughout the stream of message-conveying events, just as they can in turn determine some specific characteristics of those activities. For instance, a gesture conveying a pleasurable sensation or thought (such as /closed eyes + inward tightening of the lips/) will condition an equally pleasurable paralinguistic independent (from a phonetic point of view) utterance anatomically possible with that gesture (in this case, a closed-lip, high-pitched and drawled 'Mmmmmmm!'), or a paralinguistic voice modifier while speaking (such as Oh, it feels so good!', drawled, with initial and final slight glottalization and an overriding creaky quality); whispery, breathy voice may increase intimate contactual kinesics; clicks and pauses may occur with or precede blushing; a drawled closed-lip ingressive narial friction may coincide with the act of smelling a rose; the Japanese (mostly feminine) paralinguistic expression of delight referred to food, [iJi], conditions the congruent facial expression. This obvious intrapersonal, intersystem costructuration is thus an essential fact in discourse (and yet, again, so neglected in so many otherwise worthy studies of language and communication) and the main characteristic of the triple structure of language-paralanguage-kinesics. In my earlier research I have emphasized the fact that, despite the preponderance of sound and movement, one must not overlook the six different ways of perceiving directly the behavioral and nonbehavioral activities and static characteristics of others (vision, audition, olfaction,

Species of writing: The semiographics of music and language

Abstract: Interdisciplinary studies are today in a state of tremendous growth. Cross-disciplinary approaches which have long flourished in the natural sciences are now regularly employed in the social sciences and humanities. This synthesis (although some perhaps view it as an erosion) of disciplines can be attributed to a number of social and cultural factors, but certainly one strong influence has been the impact of semiotic and structuralist criticism. Barthes (1979) observes that modern reevaluations of language have been promoted by recent critical theory because definitions of what constitutes a text can no longer be provided by individual disciplines. 'Interdisciplinary work is not a peaceful operation; it begins effectively when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down' (Barthes 1979: 73). Both semiotic and deconstructive theories propose alternative definitions of textuality which initially appear to offer tantalizing new approaches for examining the relationship between music and literature. However, interdisciplinary criticism, and musico-literary criticism in particular, is currently at an impasse, caught between methodologies which contradict each other. On the one hand, Derrida repeatedly gives precedence to linguistic writing over other species of writing, effectively eliminating extended analysis of music writing. On the other hand, semioticians examining music have tended to emphasize musical performance over

Ee ja nai ka on the eve of the Meiji Restoration in Japan

Abstract: Historians cite the Meiji Restoration of 1868 as the critical event that launched Japan on a course of deliberate political, economic, and social change leading to the creation of the Japanese Empire. Lost in the calculus of elite behavior during this so-called 'imperial restoration' is the question of popular participation. To what extent did the general public respond to the extraordinary political crisis that gripped Japan in the mid1860s? Given the absence of revolutionary mobs or an articulate set of papers advocating reform on the part of the common people, it has been problematical to develop a rationale of popular involvement in the Meiji Restoration. But evidence exists to suggest that public agitation did set the stage for this great episode. In this article I will survey the problem of the dancing demonstrations known by the catch phrase ee ja nai ka and suggest how we might understand the significance of this phenomenon in the history of the Restoration.

Ritual or ritual? Dinnertime and Christmas among some ordinary American families

Abstract: Anthropologists have long paid special attention to ritual, both as a subject in its own right and as a particularly useful guide to overall societal organization. Radcliffe-Brown (1952), for example, stressed the utility of ritual as an approach to understanding any given society, noting that ritual was likely to be more useful in that regard than were people's beliefs. Turner's subsequent and uniquely influential work on ritual (1967, 1969) comes very directly out of this early social anthropological tradition. However, anthropologists and others have been somewhat slow in applying this perspective on society through ritual to the American scene. Much of the reason lies in the difficulty of determining the theoretical validity of the concept of 'secular' rituals (see Moore and Kessler 1975; Moore and Meyerhoff 1977; Gusfield and Michalowicz 1984). The problem is directly related to Turner's classic definition of ritual:

A semiotic analysis of the newspaper coverage of Chernobyl in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Finland

Abstract: As a disaster, Chernobyl invaded the minds of the world's citizens unlike any other. More than a volcano, a stock market crash, or a student riot, Chernobyl received news coverage second only to that received by out and out war. As the co-Director of the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media adduced: Ά nuclear accident is ... a unique news event. Nothing else, short of a nuclear war, resembles it' (Rubin 1986: 7). The American, Soviet, and Finnish press approached the uniqueness of the Chernobyl disaster in very different ways. While the American and Soviet news coverage lost perspective of what was truly at issue — a tragic nuclear accident — the Finnish news coverage threw few stones and tried to report the facts. The language surrounding the Chernobyl event provides an ideal opportunity in which to analyze the signifying practices of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Finland. Newspapers, in particular, expose a society's culture — simultaneously presenting foreign policy attitudes and domestic ones; simultaneously looking out while looking in. As Smith (1980: 151) summarizes, 'the ways in which information passes through a society are the key to that society's culture'. Newspapers represent one kind of public literature in which to look at a country's collective unconscious and uncover some of the public myths — myths which structure and are structured by a country's dominant signifying practice. In the field of semiotics, several people have ventured to write a grammar of the mythical level and signifying practices. One such grammar was designed by A. J. Greimas, who divided every human action into parts of speech utilizing classical grammatical terminology (Broms and Gahmberg 1982: 21).

For a classification of visual signs

Abstract: My contention, on the basis of C. S. Peirce's three categories of thought and experience, is that there are three matrices of signs and thought which give rise to all the sign processes and systems human beings have been able to create and generate throughout history. Thus, the classification of these processes is rooted in three major sign-thought matrices, which correspond to the three Peircean phenomenological categories as follows: 1. Virtual signs: question of the icon (here I am considering nonrepresentative forms and structures, whose fundamental paradigm is music). 2. Visual signs: question of the index (here I am considering the spaces and forms of representation). 3. Verbal signs: question of the symbol (here I am considering the modalities of representation). The idea behind this project as a whole is highly complex, and presupposes research on the human senses and their extensions in vehicles and media of language production. My aim is to discuss why human beings have historically created powerful extensions for sight and hearing, but not for the other senses. The main argument, in summarized form, is that the apparently enormous variety of systems of signs, supports, media, and channels are in fact only extensions whose foundations are nothing more than the three grand logical matrices of signs: the verbal, the visual, and the musical. This study seeks to develop a kind of schematic classification theory

The functional architecture of adaptive cognitive systems with limited capacity

Abstract: ion (like 'regular polyhedral' or 'fractal'), a theoretical construct (like 'gravitational field' or 'quark'), an idealization (like 'point-mass' or 'ideal gas'), an aggregate (like 'biological species' or 'social group'), or a process (like 'beta-decay' or 'modernization'). Allocation of internal representations onto sensory inputs is achieved in the course of a sequence of computational processes involving procedures of pattern matching between 'transducer' outputs flowing 'bottom-up' and meaningful information flowing 'top-down', thereby being transformed, not necessarily in a single step, into a physical symbol system fit to be matched with the upflowing physical input. Whereas the process of transduction might be governed entirely by physical (and of course chemical and biological) laws, the informational downflow is to some (possibly large) extent molded by conscious cognitive processes like expectational, attentional, and intentional activities — although lower levels certainly are cognitively penetrable to a lesser degree the more 'physical' they become. The