Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1976"

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

Two faces of sign: iconic and abstract*

Abstract: In this paper, we show that the total range of the communication system of the deaf is considerably enriched but at the same time rendered more difficult to analyze, because pantomime and other spontaneous nonsign representations occur in the same mode as regular ASL signs in deaf discourse. We note that the rarification of what was originally nonsign depiction is clearly an important source of regular ASL signs. We show that criteria can be established that would distinguish the clear cases of pantomime from the regular ASL signs. Nonetheless, there remain a sizable number of regular ASL signs which, although they are neither pantomimic nor otherwise freely mimetic, still appear to retain an iconic cast. We show that very few ASL signs are actually transparent; that is, a nonsigner cannot guess the meaning of a sign in the absence of further information. On the other hand, many signs are iconic in the sence that nonsigners, when given the sign and its meaning, show considerable agreement in how the two are related. More important in terms of language and its users is the significance of iconicity for deaf signers themselves. This paper shows that while in special circumstances the deaf do play on iconic elements of certain signs for special effects, iconicity plays no observable role in the coding of signs in short-term memory. The abstract formational parameters definitely dominate. We further note that it is the abstract system and not purely iconic aspects that have determined observed historical changes in the form of ASL signs. We interpret this as indicating the deeper structural significance of the abstract formational level. Finally, we show that very widespread and productive grammatical processes, especially suited for a visual-gestural language, override the iconic aspects of signs also at the synchronic structural level.

Semiotics of art: Prague School contributions

Abstract: A vital force in European linguistics and literary scholarship in the 1930s, the Prague School opened up the rich field of semiotics and art. The study of art as the creative use of the sign became one of its principal areas of critical examination, and in this collection of 21 essays this concept of semiotics is brought to bear on a wide range of the arts, including theater, film, poetry, folk art, and painting.

A Referential Communication Experiment with Foreign Sign Languages

Abstract: A great deal of research has been done by psychologist and psycholinguists in the area of communication accuracy or intelligibility (cf Mehrabian & Reed 1968). Simply, intelligibility is a measure of how well a receiver can understand the communication of a sender. In order to arrive at a precise measure of intelligibility, communication researchers have made extensive use of what is known as a referential communication design. First used by Carroll (cf Osgood & Sebeok 1965: 200) and used most notably in the work of Krauss and Glucksberg and their associates (Krauss 1968, Krauss & Glucksberg 1969, Glucksberg & Krauss 1967), a referential communication setting is a situation in which one person (S, the sender) describes a specified referent to another person (R, the receiver). Because the referent is known to the experimenter, a measure of intelligibility is very simple and straightforward. If, after attending to a sender's communication, a receiver can identify the correct referent from among others, the communication is said to be intelligible. Referential communication experiments have been used successfully by researchers studying the sign language communication of deaf individuals, from young school-age children (Hoemann 1972) to linguistically mature adults (Jordan 1975). Most frequently, the referents that have been used with deaf subjects were either photographs or drawings. These kinds of stimuli allow for a great deal of control, while at the same time they give the communication task a lifelike aspect. Previous work (Jordan 1973) has shown that the less artificial the stimuli and task are, the more willing subjects are to \"play the game\" and the more confident the researcher can be that the subjects are really trying to communicate to one another. The investigation reported here was designed to compare

Sign It Successful: Manual English Encourages Expressive Communication.

Abstract: • A system of total communication, which involves signing a word with the hands while saying it simultaneously, has been used successfully with mentally handicapped students, ages 3 to 21, in the Seattle public schools. Two speech pathologists, in cooperation with a classroom language pathologist, have used a combination of manual English and specific verbalization activities to teach language skills. Students are not only learning and retaining the correct manual English signs, but many are also initiating a sign as well as verbalizing the corresponding word. These innovative teaching techniques have increased the language success rate for the majority of the children involved in the program.

Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

Abstract: Just as the critique of political economy set for itself the task of analyzing the commodity-form, the Critique of the political economy of the sign intends to do so of the sign-form. As the commodity is both exchange value and use value-requiring that a total analysis of this form consider both slopes of the system-so too is the sign both signifier (Sr) and signified (Sd); the analysis of the sign-form must therefore proceed at both levels. Of course, this simultaneously requires a logical and strategic analysis of the relationship between the two terms, namely; 1) Between the EV system and the UV system (or between commodity-form and object-form), which we endeavored to do in the preceding article*: 2) Between the system of the Sr and that of the Sd (or between the respective codes which define the articulation of the sign-value and of the sign-form). This relationship sets itself up in both cases as an hierarchical function between a dominant form and an alibi form, or satellite form, the latter being both the logical crowning and ideological fulfillment of the former.

Female Status and Cultural Evolution: A Study in Ethnographer Bias

Abstract: The theory that female status will increase with societal complexity is tested. Two independent measures of female status are compared with a measure of societal complexity. Both tests produce sign...

Androcentrism in Religious Studies

Abstract: Is scholarship in religious studies androcentric? That the question is being asked is a sign of a profound paradigm shift now underway in Western culture-a shift so basic, so manifold in its ramifications, and so fundamental to human survival that it dwarfs all previous paradigm changes, with a single exception. That exception was the revolution in human thinking, feeling, and acting at the very beginning of civilization in the Near East. We are witnesses, I think, to the final playing out, the final elucidation of the old paradigm which has governed our lives for some five millennia.

On The Reduction and Unfolding of Sign Systems (The Problem of "Freudianism and Semiotic Culturology")

Abstract: The Freudian psychoanalytical model is constructed as a chain at one end of which are subconscious libidinal notions and at the other the verbal testimony of the patient. Between these extreme points lies a sequence of symbolic equivalents, transformations, and sign substitutes. Both criticism and isolation of the most interesting aspects of this model from the standpoint of semiotic theory have frequently been undertaken. (1) Without touching on the entire complex of varied problems that arise in connection with the discussion of this theme, we will attempt to shed light on but a single aspect: to what degree the complex of initial sexual motifs underlying the entire construct is in fact primary, reaching into the depths of child psycho-physiology, and to what degree it arises as a secondary fact — the result of translation of complex texts, received by the child from the world of adults, into the considerably simpler language of specifically child ideas.

Style, Character and Language

Abstract: This volume contains 14 previously published essays on a wide variety of subjects written by the talented author Victor H. Rosen before his tragic death in 1973. They have been carefully and skillfully edited for posthumous publication. We who value studies in language as one key avenue to understanding the behavior patterns of our patients and their families and our interaction with them in therapeutic endeavors are greatly indebted to the editors. Dr. Rosen was a brave explorer whose writings deserve close study. He opened up many avenues in conventional psychoanalytic thinking to studies by professionals in other disciplines, particularly linguistics, semiotics, linguistic philosophy, cybernetics, thinking, imagination, creativity, and the adaptive functions of language. The 14 essays are divided into two sections. The first, Language and Psychoanalytic Technique, has 10 chapters with clinical examples of the mutual illumination of basic psychoanalytic assumptions and psycholinguistic theories on such subjects as ‘ ‘ Mathematical Thought Process and Abstract Thinking,” “Strephosymbolia,” “Abstract Thinking and Object Relations,” “Schizophrenic Language Disturbance,’ ‘ ‘ ‘Sign Phenomena and Unconscious Meaning,’ ‘ and “Language and Psychoanalysis.” It is noteworthy that in the chapter on schizophrenic thinking Dr. Rosen revises considerably Freud’s formulation that patients with this psychosis use words as though they were the equivalent of things. Dr.

Black Dialect in Children's Books

Abstract: Black non-Standard English is different in grammar (syntax) from Standard English. The advent of the 60’s produced authors who explored the full possibilities of language to deal with their themes. The increased use of dialect by black authors, particularly children’s authors, was a sign that the nature of the black experience as they wanted to convey it did not have to rely on traditional forms, and literary devices; that they could treat familiar, realistic ideas and situations using a familiar dialect and relate that idea more effectively.

Semiotics of Art

Abstract: "A vital force in European linguistics and literary scholarship in the 1930s, the Prague School opened up the rich field of semiotics and art. The study of art as the creative use of the sign became one of its principal areas of critical examination, and in this collection of 21 essays this concept of semiotics is brought to bear on a wide range of the arts, including theater, film, poetry, folk art, and painting." -- p. [4] of cover.

The Ontology of the Literary Sign: Notes toward a Heideggerian Revision of Semiology

Abstract: entities in grammar, Saussure says that "the sum of the conscious and methodical classifications made by the grammarian who studies a language-state without bringing in history must coincide with the associations, conscious or not, that are set up in speaking" (GL, 137-38). The end of the section makes explicit what the phrase "conscious or not" implies, that the "associations" are a transcendental rather than empirical

A Goodman Primer for Art Historians

Abstract: For nearly a generation art historians have been testing their speculative instruments. How to talk about art? What categories are appropriate and useful to contemporary discussion? In his comprehensive survey of trends in methodology, Henri Zerner recently distinguished “today two main models of interpretation and analysis, structural linguistics and Freudian psychoanalysis.”1By naming we explore our garden, and it may be natural that semiotics, a dominion of structural linguistics, is still a jungle of proposed terminologies. But there is a signal omission in this discussion. Like more traditional art historians, students of semiotics have yet to assess the important remapping of symbol systems in Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art.2 This is surprising, since Goodman's emphases are remarkably congruent with basic concepts in the thought of C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure: the arbitrary nature of the sign, the interaction of signs among each other within a field. However, his book is independent of...

Art and Generality

Abstract: In every work of art we find a kind of mnystery; perhaps in some sense it is bound to remain so. Yet we need not make things more mysterious than they are. The philosophers whom I would accuse of that perversity are Mr. Hampshire in his 'Logic and Appreciation' published long ago; and Professor Strawson more recently and bleakly in an article called 'Aesthetic Appraisal'.1 Both belong, though with no very clear sign of appreciating the fact, to a tradition deriving ultimately from Kant-indeed Hampshire does speak expressly of 'disinterestedness' and Strawson disclaims originality -and stretching through Hegel, to Croce and ultimately Collingwood. It is Collingwood who makes the point most explicitly: in art what we see is unique, we know the individual qua individual. Works of art in Speculum Menltis were earlier described as 'monadic'. The Principles of Art spells out, indeed is almost built around, the contrast in question. In craft and technology we generalize, and generality is seen as essential to themi; which contradistinguishes them from art. Already for Kant, of course, it served as a central principle that aesthetic judgements, value judgements, are not arrived at by any ordinary process of argument, specifically not by argument using determinate concepts. (One might also name Bergson, for whom, and for his many 'aesthete' followers, art cut through the network of intellection, to show us reality in itself. But Gombrich's work, one would have thought, has settled that.) Some such theme, broadly speaking, is common to the two writers I have named among our contemporaries. Let me look at their articles in turn (though in fact my main interest is in Strawson's). But to begin with Hampshire: he characterizes the 'aesthete' as follows: 'Precisely his refusal to generalize,' he tells us, 'would be the inark of his aestheticism' and again, 'A copy

Expression and Its Functions

Abstract: To be a sign 1 is to be a sign for something. To be a sign for something is to point it out. But not all signs exercise an additional function of meaning, or giving expression to a meaning. In other words, not all signs are expressions. The concept of sign is wider than the concept of expression, for expressions are also signs inasmuch as the functions of signifying and meaning are interlaced in them. This does not imply, Husserl warns us, that the function of meaning is a species of the function of signifying or pointing out. Though expressions constitute a species of signs, to mean is not a sort of pointing out. The two are totally different functions.