Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1978"

Teaching Spontaneous Sign Language to Nonverbal Children: Theory & Method

Abstract: Nonverbal mentally handicapped children taught sign language often learn to sign spontaneously. The data available on their spontaneous signing is summarized here and possible reasons for the spontaneity discussed. Instructional techniques for promoting spontaneity are outlined, and implications of sign spontaneity for research are considered. Nonverbal children can learn to sign spontaneously to express their desires, to initiate social interaction, and to describe aspects of their world; they also sign egocentrically to guide their own behavior. This spontaneous signing, it is argued here, develops as an adaptation and extension of the behavior of goal-directed grasping to the tasks of social communication. To promote this spontaneity it is important to begin sign language instruction with the expression of desires, to de-emphasize imitation, and to use structured waiting. The developmental aspects of nonverbal children’s acquired spontaneity in signing suggest intriguing research possibilities.

All in the Family: Kinship Lexicalization across Sign Languages

Abstract: Native signs used as basic kin terms in 20 sign languages from several sign language families are examined. The distribution of the kin terms in these 20 languages shows similarity to that of kin terms in spoken languages and also presents some interesting implications both linguistic and socio-cultural that warrant further exploration.

Strata and Stability: Reputations of American Political Scientists

Abstract: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."2The aptness of Orwell's observation is not confined to the community of Animal Farm, but extends to the "community of scholars" which constitutes the "learned discipline" of political science as well. In fact, as conceptualized by Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus in their seminal study of American Political Science,3 a "gallery of great men" is one of the characteristics of such a discipline,4 serving (inter alia) "... both as a sign of professional kinship and as a means of cementing these bonds."5

Sign Language Interpretation and General Theories of Language, Interpretation and Communication

Abstract: The practice of interpretation of sign languages dates back many, many years, though the practice is just now struggling to achieve the status of a profession — shifting from a more-or-less clinical focus to a more-or-less linguistic one. Research on sign languages, which is itself very recent, has convincingly demonstrated that at least some sign languages are indeed languages in the linguistic sense, thereby forcing us to expand our conceptions of the nature of language and to re-examine our approaches to the study of language. Experiments on the simultaneous interpretation of sign languages are contributing to our knowledge and understanding of language and communication in general as well as to the resolution of problems dealing specifically with sign language interpretation. These are the major points that we have gained from the presentations by Domingue and Ingram, Tweney, and Murphy. The relevance of their discussions of sign language interpretation to the general subject areas of language, interpretation, and communication is largely self-evident. Essentially, we are all saying that the interpretation of sign languages is an integral part of the general study of interpretation and that no description (practical or theoretical) of interpretation which fails to take account of sign language interpretation can be regarded as complete. I have set myself the task of demonstrating this point beyond any doubt. The papers by Domingue and Ingram, Tweney, and Murphy have called attention to a number of problems in interpretation of sign languages. My approach will be to explore some of these problems further in relation to language, interpretation and communication in general.

X—Wittgenstein on Identity

Abstract: In what is perhaps the most famous essay ever written on identity, Uber Sinn und Bedeutung, Frege begins by raising what he describes as the difficult questions the notion of identity gives rise to: specifically the question whether identity is a relation, anrd if so, a relation between signs or what they signify. Now, what is interesting about these questions as Frege poses them in that article, and particularly about the first question-whether identity is a relation-is that not only does he not offer an answer to them, or even really return to them in the subsequent discussion, he doesn't even clarify the sense to be attached to this 'difficult' question. For this question could serve as a paradigm for that wide range of questions that philosophers have asked where the problem lies far more in seeing what is at stake in answering it one way rather than another, than in actually giving an answer to the question. It would almost seem that if one could provide, say, a clear-cut notion of a relation, then the question would answer itself: and in so far as logicians have proposed clear-cut notions of a relation, identity has appeared a very straightforward case of one. Frege, in particular, develops in his logic a clear-cut notion of a relation, and not only does identity fit that notion perfectly, within his symbolic logic the identity sign is never treated as anything other than a relational expression among others-and what is more, in terms of his questions, an expression for a relation between objects and not signs: the only point where the identity sign appears within those of his writings which actually employ the Begriffsschrift where there is an arguable case for the identity sign being used in any other way is its role within definition. And this is true as much in the Begrifjsschrift itself, where he claimed that he construed identity as a relation between signs as in the later writings. In the prose introduction to the BegrifFsschrift, he proposes a theory for identity, whereby, to use his later terminology, proper names have a dual r6le: to stand for objects and to stand for themselves; in an identity proposition they are alleged to have this second role. But the actual body of the

Parody Without Ridicule: Observations on Modern Literary Parody

Abstract: Modern experimental novelists or metafiction writers as they are now called have many ways of pointing out that their creations are essentially artifices made of words and not stories copying or recording any other form of 'reality.' Perhaps a narrator will explicitly inform the reader of the ontological status of the text he is reading; perhaps an internal mirror or mise en abyme will be the sign." Often, however, the 'literariness' of the work is signalled by the presence of parody: in the background of the author's work will stand another text, against which the new creation will be measured. It is not that one text fares better or worse than the other; it is the fact that they differ that the act of parody dramatizes. John Fowles, for instance, in The French Lieutenant's Woman, juxtaposes the conventions of the Victorian and the modern novel. The cultural and theological assumptions of both ages are compared through the medium of formal literary parody. A similar phenomenon of difference is found in such novels as Grendel, in which John Gardner reworked the backgrounded Beowulf, and The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch's modern rehandling of Hamlet. Thomas Mann, heir to the 'Romantic irony' of the last century, presents, in Doktor Faustus, a kind of parody which informs both the structure and the thematic content of his work as a whole. What is worth notice in all these examples is that while a text (or perhaps, more generally, a set of conventions) is clearly being drawn upon and parodied, it is in some senses a rather new and even strange form of parody. In these works there is irony but little mockery; there is critical distance but little ridicule of the texts backgrounded. In fact there is considerable respect demonstrated for them. This fact perhaps recalls T.S. Eliot's 'fragments shored against his ruins,' the literary and linguistic comparisons of past and present that imply, as well, moral evaluations in 'The Waste Land.' Yet if this is parody, it is somewhat different from the traditional concept of a ridiculing, belittling literary mode. It does, however, recall very precisely the etymological origins of the word. The Greek parodia or means a 'counter-song.' The 'counter' or 'against' suggests a concept of comparison or, better, of contrast inherent

On the Problem of Representation

Abstract: The author first defines the problem of representation and its importance in various areas of intellectual activity embracing empirical and abstract sciences. The need is stressed for extended studies of the relationships between the concept of representation and that of sign (semiosis). Finally, notions of representation are classified into three categories and analysed relative to syntactic, semantic and pragmatic dimensions of sign processes and a unified semiotic interpretation of the representation problem is proposed.

On Trope and Persuasion

Abstract: HETORIC," claimed I. A. Richards in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, "should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies. We struggle all our days with misunderstandings, and no apology is required for any study which can prevent or remove them." The contributors to this issue of New Literary History could doubtless claim that their essays prevent future misunderstandings of the subjects they treat and remove misunderstandings perpetrated by previous discussions, but none, I think, would argue that this makes his essay rhetorical analysis. Students of rhetoric today are not primarily concerned, as Richards proposed, with failures of communication, nor with "weasel words" and the deceits of political discourse. Has rhetoric, then, regained the scope it enjoyed in the Middle Ages, when logic, grammar, and rhetoric were the three subjects of the trivium? For Stanley Meltzoff, who alone among our contributors offers an explicit definition, rhetoric is "the study of languages and sign systems in use," and it thus can cover a host of sins in Strolling Actresses. Later, in a gloss which helps to explain his own usage, Meltzoff adds, "our understanding [of Hogarth's picture] is neither precise nor conventional, that is, neither linguistic nor semiotic, but rhetorical." Theorists of rhetoric who have labored hard at precise codification of conventions might be dismayed at this disjunction, which seems to set aside their elaborate taxonomies and assign them the realm of theje ne sais quoi: everything that lies beyond convention and precise understanding. Indeed, since rhetoric has during the past two centuries often been sneered at as an excessively precise inventory of figures and conventions, this reversal may seem alarming-as if linguistics and semiotics had suddenly usurped the place of rhetoric and rhetoric had displaced the interpretive criticism which previously dealt with the use or combination of linguistic and rhetorical devices. In fact, this movement of substitution and displacement is wholly characteristic of rhetoric, which can be defined by a series of such paradoxes. Rhetoric is the art of using language effectively, yet it is also that which any speech or composition must avoid if it is to be truly effective. Such paradoxes may, of course, be treated simply as curious historical shifts. Thus, one might claim that rhetoric was at one time

Interpretive sociology: The theoretical significance of verstehen in the constitution of social reality

Abstract: ed from experiencing-in-the-world or being-together; they would simply be idealizations whose sense would be a function of their formally designated features or consequences. Their sense would not stand revealed in nor constitute the context of a relationship and there would not be, therefore, a context to provide the common identity which unifies individuals into a community. Being common means the intersubjectively valid and experientially binding quality of the same symbol or sign for the members of a group who communicate with each other in the same language. It does not mean, as the postulate of dualism implies, the similarity of different events or behaviors in virtue of common fea? tures, i.e., elements belonging to the same logical class. The intentional meaning is that which is presented in experiencing as a unified quality; reflection on such meaning can generate a catalog of its features (conse? quences, patterns, etc.) or elements, but these atomistic aspects in no fashion constitute its sense. On the contrary, the noematic quality makes possible their delineation in a catalog of features which, therefore, can serve as a guideline for the production and/or communication of the noematic meaning. Interpretive meanings constitute the sense of interpersonal behaviors prior to a reflection which aims to establish a formal code of their behavioral appearances or expres? sions. The latter type of code regulates the sense of meaning by formalizing the features associated with its constitutive presentation. Gurwitsch contends that the presumption that reflection serves to create, as opposed to disclose, a code of interpretation ex nihilo rests upon a postulate of "object constancy" according to which the world is a res extensa standing sepa? rate from the res cogitans which comprehends it. It is a mistake to universalize or to make this postulate the basis of all consciousness although it is at the heart of the context of meaning of modern science. As Jacques Monod ([1970] 1972, pp. 21, 31, 41, 70, 149) has noted, although the postulate of objectivity is the This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:40:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THEORETICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF VERSTEHEN 123 value premise or interpretive principle of modern science, it cannot be proven by science; on the contrary, the postulate constitutes the scientific field of conscious? ness and, therefore, a particular value rationality or structure of interpretation. Monod rightly insists upon the rationality as well as value foundation of science; he shows that the postulate constitutes a context of social relations sustained by commitment to the "ethic of [scientific] knowledge." More generally, there can be a variety of contexts of meanings or "finite provinces of meaning" (Schutz, [1945] 1967b) which comprise domains of noematic or intentional experiencing, that is, contexts of value-rational activity. In addition, the interpretive structures of highly specialized provinces of meaning, such as science, depend on the inter? pretive structures of the everyday province of meaning for the provision or initial understandings of the objects with which they deal. (See Scheler, [1912] 1954, Chap. IX; Schutz, [1945] 1967b.) Intentionality refers to a structure or code which constitutes the meaning of relationships. (See May, 1969, p. 232.) The intentional organization of a field of consciousness divulges the meaning of relations within the immediacy of experi? encing them, prior to reflection on them. The code according to which relations are constituted in their interpretable sense makes possible the reflection through which the relations are severed into their behavioral features or components and the abstract meanings corresponding to them. This division makes possible another type of code which regulates the correspondence between the formal behaviors and abstract meanings. Hence, it is necessary to consider constitutive codes of interpretation which present and simultaneously communicate the sub? stantive sense of interpersonal relations while they are experienced, not only regulative codes, or, in Schutz's terminology, meta-schemes, which provide one with the guidelines to express methodically the behavioral appearances of specific interpretive senses even when the latter are not concretely presented in relation? ships. (Searle, 1969, pp. 33-^2, has developed the distinction between constitu? tive and regulative codes.) Since regulative codes are methodologically oriented they are senseless without reference to the constitutive codes through which the interpretive structure of substantive meanings is presented. The standards of ex? pression established by regulative codes would be arbitrary and meaningless if they did not find their evidence in the experiencing and relationships organized by constitutive codes. For this reason Gendlin (1962) has argued that reflection, expression, and communication must find their confirmation through a resonance with the meaning presented in relational experience itself. Clearly, the regulative codes provide the forms of expression through which substantive meanings pre? sented in relations can be socially communicated but the utilization of these forms in communication does not guarantee the presentation of substantive meanings; the interpretive sense constitutive of a relation is separate from the forms used to express that sense, although in relations constituted by social values, such as love, understanding and communication must converge in the same activity if the values are to be intersubjectively realized. For instance, in This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:40:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Construction of Meaning

Abstract: WHAT DOES SEMIOTICS HAVE to offer to the study of literature? The question is legitimate from the point o view of literary criticism, but it is quite problematic for the semiotician, who knows full well that, to the critic, semiotics and literature are two distinct entities, opposable to each other, if not structurally at least historically, whereas for him there is no such thing as literature but only texts or signifying practices which, at a given time and for a given community (of readers, publishers, scholars, etc.), have been classed as literary. He may therefore be tempted to reply Socratically with a question of his own: "Tell me what you mean by literature, and I shall tell you what I have to offer." This gesture, though not as empty or gratuitous as may seem at first sight, lacks economy: there are likely to be as many definitions of literature as there are questioners. Any form of discourse upon anything posited as the object of this discourse implies some ontology of that object--even if only to subvert it-and semiotics is no exception. Although semiotics aspires to be a science, i.e., a homogeneous and coherent discourse capable of self-correcting and incremental development, semioticians know that its medium is language, the locus of uncertainty, lies, heterogeneity, and incoherence. It shares this predicament with all other sciences, but it is the only one to recognize it as such and to attempt to devise a modus vivendi with it. In other words, semiotics wants to formulate a unified approach to the problematics of signification and meaning, although it knows at the outset that sign and meaning never coincide. To address itself to the legitimacy of the question posed at the beginning, semiotics must reformulate it: do not ask what does semiotics offer to the study of literature but ask what sort of "literature" does semiotics offer, i.e., what is the model of literature which is implied in semiotic theory and practice? To my knowledge, no semiotician has considered this question, and this should not be surprising given the tentative character of most serious semiotic writing. It must be stressed that the preoccupation of semioticians is with semiotics, and that although literary texts figure prominently among their concerns, they are rarely at the center of them, so that the view of literature which emerges from semiotic practice is very much in the nature of an "offering," a secondary by-product of an

Sign Language Interpretation: The State of the Art

Abstract: The field of sign language interpretation has existed for many years as has the field of spoken language interpretation, but only became a profession as recently as 1964 The profession of sign language interpreters is unique due to the fact that a manual means is used to transmit language Although the term interpreter is used, a clarification of terms is in order Sign languages are genetically and structurally independent of spoken languages even within the same language community There are, however, numerous artificial sign languages which have been developed in various countries to code the spoken language of the community Where a message in a natural sign language is recreated in a spoken language, or vice versa, the process is known as interpretation Where the conversion involves an artificial sign language, the process is called transliteration Therefore, the re-creation of messages between Manual English and English (two forms of the same language) is transliteration The definitions of transliteration and interpretation are after Fant (1972)

The Phylogeny of Sign Language

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the phylogeny of sign language. Language, like every other part of culture, has had an evolutionary career, and the roots of language may be as deeply grounded in our biological constitutions as for instance our predisposition to use our hands. The chapter discusses the sign language used by animals such as chimpanzees, gorilla, pongids, and orangutan. The pongid communication is multimodal, and the hand, arm, and foot gestures by pongids are usually accompanied by significant facial expressions, glances, body positions, and body movements. In modern times, sign languages have occasionally emerged to fulfill the communication needs of one or a few profoundly deaf members in larger hearing communities. While European monastic sign languages, the complex gesture languages of South Indian dance drama, the various sign languages in use around the world in tribal and other societies, and the modern sign languages of the deaf and of the workers in specialized occupations occupy only a tiny fraction of the time span considered in the phylogenetic model, their study should illuminate much of what is now very imperfectly known about the properties and capacities of such communication systems.

Signs and Works in the Fourth Gospel

Abstract: The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the function of the stories about and comments upon "signs" and "works" within the argument and structure of the Fourth Gospel. The chapter tries to show that Lindars' thesis is a useful starting-point for an analysis of the function of "signs" and "works" in the present Gospel. John xx 30-31 shows, in connection with the preceding verses 28 and 29, how the disciples believed because they really saw what was revealed to them, but that generations after them are dependent on the word, i.e. on their apostles' testimony. The real meaning of Jesus' words and Jesus' signs remained hidden for outsiders. The last sign is appropriately again concerned with the giving of life. John xi is a notorious crux for all scholars who want to distinguish between the theology of the source and the redaction of the evangelist. Keywords: evangelist; Fourth Gospel; Jesus' signs; Jesus' words; John xx 30-31; Lindars' thesis

Linking While Writing — Do You or Don't You?

Abstract: Linking while writing technical prose is a predominantly logical activity which creates clearly comprehensible relations of meaning between text elements. Some systematics based on sign theory is brought into the great variety of pathologic links. A few cases histories of what may be called monopodes, squinters, fadeouts, hoodwinkers, posers, and antiposers are described, together with their therapeutics. The tool for diagnostics is strategic text questioning.