Sign (semiotics)

About: Sign (semiotics) is a(n) research topic. Over the lifetime, 4080 publication(s) have been published within this topic receiving 70333 citation(s). The topic is also known as: semiotic sign.

A Theory of Semiotics

Abstract: Foreword Note on graphic conventions 0 Introduction-Toward a Logic of Culture 01 Design for a semiotic theory 02 'Semiotics': field or discipline? 03 Communication and/or signification 04 Political boundaries: the field 05 Natural boundaries: two definitions of semiotics 06 Natural boundaries: inference and signification 07 Natural boundaries the lower threshold 08 Natural boundaries: the upper threshold 09 Epistemological boundaries 1 Signification and Communication 11 An elementary communicational model 12 Systems and codes 13 The s-code as structure 14 Information, communication, signification 2 Theory of Codes 21 The sign-function 22 Expression and content 23 Denotation and connotation 24 Message and text 25 Content and referent 26 Meaning as cultural unit 27 The interpretant 28 The semantic system 29 The semantic markers and the sememe 210 The KF model 211 A revised semantic model 212 The model "Q" 213 The format of the semantic space 214 Overcoding and undercoding 215 The interplay of codes and the message as an open form 3 Theory of Sign Production 31 A general survey 32 Semiotic and factual statements 33 Mentioning 34 The prolem of a typology of signs 35 Critique of iconism 36 A typology of modes of production 37 The aesthetic text as invention 38 The rhetorical labor 39 Ideological code switching 4 The Subject of Semiotics References Index of authors Index of subjects

Action and embodiment within situated human interaction

Abstract: A theory of action must come to terms with both the details of language use and the way in which the social, cultural, material and sequential structure of the environment where action occurs figure into its organization. In this paper it will be suggested that a primordial site for the analysis of human language, cognition, and action consists of a situation in which multiple participants are attempting to carry out courses of action in concert with each other through talk while attending to both the larger activities that their current actions are ambedded within, and relevant phenomena in their surround. Using as data video recordings of young girls playing hopscotch and archaeologists classifying color, it will be argued that human action is built throught the simultaneous deployment of a range of quite different kinds of semiotic resources. Talk itself contains multiple sign systems with alternative properties. Strips of talk gain their power as social action via their placement within larger sequential structures, encompassing activities, and participation frameworks constituted through displays of mutual orientation made by the actors' bodies. The body is used in a quite different way to perform gesture, again a class of phenomena that encompasses structurally different types of sign systems. Both talk and gesture can index, construe or treat as irrelevant, entities in the participants' surround. Moreover, material structure in the surround, such as graphic fields of various types, can provide semiotic structure without which the constitution of particular kinds of action being invoked through talk would be impossible. In brief it will be argued that the construction of action through talk within situated interaction is accomplished through the temporally unfolding juxtaposition of quite different kinds of semiotic resources, and that moreover through this process the human body is made publicly visible as the site for a range of structurally different kinds of displays implicated in the constitution of the actions of the moment.

Semiotics: The Basics

Abstract: List of illustrations Prcface Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Models of the sign 2 Signs and things 3 Analysing structures 4 Challenging the literal 5 Codes 6 Tcxtual interactions 7 Limitations and strengths Glossary References Index Author biography = Dr Daniel Chandler is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Other data = 'This is the best introduction to semiotics I have read. The author combines a scholarly command of the subject with the ability to organise and present it in an enticing and informative way. The result is a textbook which is comprehensive, but also accessible and interesting: an invaluable resource, not only for beginners, but for more advanced students too.' (Guy Cook, University of Reading)

On What There Is

Abstract: In this paper I begin by considering some remarks of Professor W. V. Quine’s on what he calls ‘the ontological problem’.1 Professor Quine holds that from the fact that a sign has meaning it does not, in general, follow either that there is anything that it stands for, or that there is anything that it denotes. This applies, in his view, not only to words like ‘red’ which are sometimes thought to stand for properties, but also to words like ‘Pegasus’ which are commonly regarded as names; for he argues that it is always possible to convert such names into descriptions, and then analyse out the descriptions in the way that Russell has suggested. Moreover, even in the case where an expression does denote something, it does not follow that what it means is identical with what it denotes; for, as the example of ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ shows, two expressions may denote the same object without having the same meaning. Whether in such cases, or indeed in any others, Professor Quine would wish to say that an expression named, or stood for, what it denoted, is not clear to me; nor is it clear to me whether he thinks that there are any signs, such as demonstratives or pronouns, which are meaningful only if there is something which they denote.