Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1981"
TL;DR: Different sign language teaching methods need to be investigated more fully, including emphasis on training sign language within the children's total environment and with greater staff and parental participation.
Abstract: Research findings and issues in teaching sign language to nonspeaking autistic children are reviewed. Data on over 100 children indicate that nearly all autistic children learn receptive and expressive signs, and many learn to combine signs. These children also exhibit marked improvement in adaptive behaviors. Speech skills are acquired by fewer children and may be developed through simultaneous speech and sign training. Possible explanations for these results are given, together with suggestions for future research and data collection. Recommended innovations include exposure to fluent signers and training in discourse and code-switching. Different sign language teaching methods need to be investigated more fully, including emphasis on training sign language within the children's total environment and with greater staff and parental participation.
67 citations
TL;DR: It is concluded that the sign of disorder in this context has no single interpretant and there exist a variety of interpretants from which the therapist and patient may select.
25 citations
01 Jan 1981
TL;DR: Advertisements, as myths, naturalize symbols by removing from them all historical context, thus making these arbitrary signs appear to be eternal essences rather than constructed social devices, or artifacts as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: More than 20 years have passed since Roland Barthes first argued that advertisements should be studied as forms of mythical discourse. He noted that like all myths, advertisements, profoundly political yet, it seems, intentionally “depoliti-cized,” take the sign vehicles of everyday life, such as gestures, clothing, facial expressions, utterances, postures, objects, and settings, and quietly replace the simple validity of these fragments of openly conventional semiotic systems with a pseudotruth that predisposes the viewer/reader to accept bits of cultural ideology—concepts of motherhood, love, marriage, sex, family, age, social class, and the like—as immutable aspects of the real world (Barthes, 1973). Advertisements, as myths, “naturalize” symbols by removing from them all historical context, thus making these arbitrary signs appear to be eternal essences rather than constructed social devices, or artifacts. In so doing, they “sell” the prevailing ideology of the dominant segments of American society.
18 citations
9 citations
TL;DR: Signs for 150 terms from the manual language used by the deaf inhabitants of a Maya Indian village in Yucatan, Mexico, and were gathered by the author in 1977.
9 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a theory that distinguishes interpretation (an act by which we go from observation of a sign to its interpretation by means of relevant beliefs) from reaction (any of our consequent acts, states, etc.).
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors analyzes Morris' claim that the traditional role of rhetoric falls within the province of pragmatics, where attempts are made to understand the relationship of sign to interprete, and the role of sign-to-interpretation.
Abstract: This study analyzes Charles Morris' claim that the traditional role of rhetoric falls within the province of pragmatics, where attempts are made to understand the relationship of sign to interprete...
7 citations
TL;DR: The fact that the authors easily understand signs, some of which are extremely cryptic apart from the contexts in which they are encountered, is used to illustrate the importance of situation-specific knowledge in language processing.
Abstract: The fact that we easily understand signs, some of which are extremely cryptic apart from the contexts in which they are encountered, is used to illustrate the importance of situation-specific knowledge in language processing.
6 citations
TL;DR: This paper will consider the possible utilization of modifications of the American Sign Language for use in three general areas: instruction of deaf students in the classroom, communication between hearing parents and young deaf children, and communication with individuals with handicaps other than deafness.
Abstract: The use of manual communication and sign languages for language education of autistic, deaf retarded, and mentally retarded individuals is receiving increasing attention by educators. Modifications of sign systems for this purpose emphasize simplicity, redundancy, and English word order. Effective utilization of manual communication for these populations requires a better understanding of the physical and linguistic bases of sign languages than now exists. Preliminary evidence from studies of oralonly, manualonly, and oralmanual modes of communication suggests that flexibility in utilizing all modes is the most effective teaching method. The present paper will consider the possible utilization of modifications of the American Sign Language for use in three general areas: (1) instruction of deaf students in the classroom, (2) communication between hearing parents and young deaf children, and (3) communication with individuals with handicaps other than deafness.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on one type of signs, namely objects, because, owing to their visual nature, they tend, more than other signs, to seem pre-codified in extra-theatrical contexts.
Abstract: The status of any sign in theatrical discourse is problematic because a theatrical performance is an amalgam of signs already codified in other systems. We have chosen to approach this problem by focusing on one type of signs, namely objects because, owing to their visual nature, they tend, more than other signs, to seem pre-codified in extra-theatrical contexts. Their "mimetic" nature is thus "more transparent" and "directly iconic" (Elam, 1978: 143). Nevertheless, the adaptation of objects (as well as other pre-codified signs) to the specifically theatrical context of signifying involves a process of recodification and emphasizes the problematics of the status of the sign in the theater. Using the over-quoted example of the chair on stage signifying a chair, Elam comments: "Yet the chair on stage retains, firmly, a sign-function [. .] This is a curious factor the chair both is and is not an 'object' " (1978: 143-44). T. Bogatyrev, in an article which has since become a classic, describes this phenomenon as an inter-sign relationship: "sign of a sign and not sign of an object" (1971: 517). The status of visual signs, mainly objects, is particularly complex in contemporary theater, where the verbal signs tend to lose their predominance. Because this theater, especially since Brecht, is concerned not only with signifying but also with a reflexive discourse about the very process by which it signifies, objects function in it both at the level of discourse and at that of meta-discourse. This is why a semiotic study of language in the theater and of the theater as a superposition of sign-systems (cf. Greimas' term "syncretisme"; 1979: 374-75) may benefit from an analysis of the functioning of objects in theatrical discourse, particularly in contemporary plays. Our study will be divided into theoretical assumptions, an outline of a tentative methodology, and an application to a single performance, Peter Brook's Ubu aux Bouffes (Paris, 1978).
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider several serious charges that have been leveled against semiotics and offer a model of the sign that they hope will rectify the insufficiencies of previous models.
Abstract: rT _HE SITUATION of semiotics today is paradoxical. Emerging in recent years from relative obscurity, semiotics is beginning to gain the scholarly respectability envisioned by its early pioneers. A veritable avalanche of publications in some dozen languages presents semiotics as the intellectual panacea of our age-a general matrix for all human knowledge. At the same time, however, critics have attempted to discredit it. By exposing the metaphysical presuppositions underlying current theories of the sign, they have succeeded in deflating much of the semiotician's grand design. From their perspective, semiotics is a mere episode in intellectual history, of interest only to those who wish not to repeat the mistakes of the past. I would like to consider several of the serious charges that have been leveled against semiotics and to offer a model of the sign that I hope will rectify the insufficiencies of previous models. My ultimate goal is to defend the project of semiotics, to show its viability, to demonstrate that the problems threatening the imminent demise of sign theory are merely passing and not essential. Any account of semiotics' detractors must confront the work of Jacques Derrida. According to him, the price that semiotics has paid for its acceptance among the established disciplines is substantial: it has yielded to the "Western metaphysics of presence." This tag is Derrida's term for the privileged position accorded by our culture to whatever presents itself directly to our consciousness. Western metaphysics would seem to be antisemiotic: the sign by definition violates the immediacy of self-presence. The essence of the sign is its otherness, for the sign is an entity that stands for another entity, that represents this other inevitably through spatial and temporal displacement. Suspicious of the sign, Western scholars have conceived of it in such a way as to obliterate its mediating quality. Western philosophy, Derrida argues, "eliminates signs by making them derivative; it annuls reproduction and representation by making signs a modification of a simple
TL;DR: The following study resulted from a 2¼-year record of one child's utterances which showed a growth in language skills and concepts that argues favorably for the use of Total Communication and Signed English in the home and school.
Abstract: In a classroom of preschool deaf children, language development proceeds slowly and is based on clear communication, frequent repetitions, basic sentences, and an environment which stimulates and rewards communication attempts. The majority of children go home after school to a situation devoid of true symbolic communication, no matter how loving and well-intentioned the family is. Children whose parents sign to them demonstrate an obvious superiority in lanugage skills, as shown in records kept in the classroom. The records are kept primarily to provide reinforcement and guidance for the teacher, however, distinctions are clear concerning the home communication environment. The following study resulted from a 2¼-year record of one child's utterances which showed a growth in language skills and concepts that argues favorably for the use of Total Communication and Signed English in the home and school.
TL;DR: The post-Structuralist critique of this methodology, and of its resultant ontology, falls broadly into two styles of thought: deconstructionist theory (Derrida); and libido theory (Lyotard, Deleuze) as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: complex metaphorical implications of the term "flesh," which is the central ontological term of Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible; and (2) in doing so I wish to show how the theory of the "flesh" served as a nascent libido theory, thus providing one of the roots of post-Structuralist thought. To set the conceptual scene of this analysis, I will begin with a working definition of "libido theory," a definition which will become more pointed and I hope more clear and "fleshed out" as this essay progresses. Contemporary French thought, commonly referred to as "post-Structuralist,"' may be summarily described in terms of its role as a critique of Structuralist hermeneutics and ontology. Structuralist thinkers (Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan), provided an analysis of the origins of meaning in terms of the oppositional relations between signs within sign systems (i.e. in terms of metaphoric and metonymic, equivalent and differential, structures). The post-Structuralist critique of this methodology, and of its resultant ontology, falls broadly into two styles of thought: (1) deconstructionist theory (Derrida); and (2) libido theory (Lyotard, Deleuze).
TL;DR: The concrete poetry as mentioned in this paper is a kind of poetry that refers to things, rather than a "thing-poetry" as defined by the object poets of the early 20th century.
Abstract: WENTIETH-CENTURY poetic manifestos-both avant-garde and mainstream-have shown a remarkable similarity in proposing an "object poetry." T. E. Hulme called for a poetry of "hard, dry things";' Archibald MacLeish claimed that "a poem should not mean/ But be";2 Pound demanded a visual poetry modeled on Chinese ideographic writing in which "we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their fate."3 But the poetry resulting from these notions, divergent as it was from the sententiousness of Victorian literature, is a poetry that refers to things, rather than a "thing-poetry." The only literal interpretation of "physical poetry," as John Crowe Ransom disparagingly termed it, had to wait for a much more recent trend, concrete poetry.4 And it is the awareness among concrete poets of linguistic and semiotic theory that has helped them to discover what a concrete art, rather than mere concrete reference, entails. As one of its founders, Augusto de Campos, wrote after a discussion of Sapir, Cassirer, Langer, and von Humboldt, the "concrete poem is an object in and by itself, not an interpreter of exterior objects and/or more or less subjective feelings. its material: word (sound, visual form, semantic charge). its problem: a problem of functions-relations of this material."5 Semiotically, of course, concrete art is a contradiction in terms. Paintings and poems by definition are signs rather than things, except in the sense that ultimately a sign is a thing; a poem that is literally a
TL;DR: In this article, a strategy used to teach sign communication to severely handicapped students in the classroom is described, and the speech-language pathologist adopts a role as a consultant role.
Abstract: This article describes a strategy used to teach sign communication to severely handicapped students in the classroom. It recommends that the speech-language pathologist adopt a consultant role in s...
01 Oct 1981
TL;DR: Signs are the most concrete objects that surround us in our homes: we can point to them, look at them, touch them, sit on some of them, sometimes we even bump into them and thus are forceably reminded of their materiality.
Abstract: To say that meaning is a process of communication involving signs raises the question: What is meant by “signs”? Apparently, material artifacts are the most concrete things that surround us in our homes: We can point to them, look at them, touch them, sit on some of them, sometimes we even bump into them and thus are forceably reminded of their materiality. One might wonder if signs or symbols refer only to things such as crucifixes, trophies, diplomas, or wedding rings, whose main function – if they, indeed, have any – is to represent something like religion, achievements, or relationships. A wedding ring on someone's hand, for example, is a sign of attachment, just as a trophy tells of its winner's prowess and the family's pride in displaying it. But what about other types of objects that seem to have a more clear-cut function, such as television sets or furniture? Do these things also qualify as “signs”? From our perspective they can provide just as many meanings as a crucifix or trophy. Television sets certainly have a utilitarian significance, although a person could live without them. However, the utility of a television set derives from its status as a means for entertainment and information and from the fact that in our culture about one-quarter of a person's waking day is spent watching television. Thus television sets both represent one of the most important beliefs in American culture as to how people should spend their time (and money) and are signs of the way Americans invest a significant portion of their daily attention.
01 Jan 1981
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyse how that dependence is hidden in the condition of instrument, in view of the definite metaphysical characteristics which it poserses, and the result is that the sacramental signification is found to be ''objectivised by its dependence on the causality''.
Abstract: In present-day sacramental theology one can detect a need for a unified approach which, taking the notion of sacrament as base, would give coherence to the multiple aspects which can be considered under the umbrella of sacramentality. What could be called theologies «of the sacramental sign» arrive with difficulty to centred approach; they rather lead to a subjective diversification of the sacramental concept. Study of texts of St Thomas Aquinas has brought the authar to a notion of sacramentality which, from a basic standpoint, enriches all aspects of the sacramental reality while maintaining their unity.
The essence of sacramentality, as deduced from the theology of the Common Doctor, is rooted in the «relation to» human sanctification when this latter is understood as that form which sanctifies man actually, truly and intimately: in other words, grace. lt is a relation which can be established in different ways and which, therelore, gives rise to the term sacrament being capable of being predicated analogically of different objects. From whence comes it semantic richness and, also, the necessity of determining its meaning.
The two principal relations of the sacramental reality with human sanctification are those of sign and cause. Both constitute sacrament, but the fulness of the relation and the sacramental notion belongs to that which produces, instrumentally, sanctification.
Nevertheless, there is a deeper reason for giving priority to the causal relationship. lt is veiledly expressed by St Thomas and is the key to that coherence which the author seeks. Although, at first sight, to signify and to cause appear to be independent and even opposed concepts, in the case of the sacraments, one can establish a clear dependence: a sacrament is sign of santifying grace because, previously, it is the cause of it. This ontological, and not chronological, priority characterises everything that has the name of sacrament with the full meaning of the word. The article analyses how that dependence is hidden in the condition of instrument, in view of the definite metaphysical characteristics which it poserses.
The result it that the sacramental signification is found to be «objectivised» by its dependence on the causality. Thus one avoids that the varied and rich subjective attention paid to the person who receives the sacrament, which in general is dependent on the signification, becomes a danger to the unity and coherence of the notion of sacrament. The importance of this latter notion is strengthened by the transcendence of the real sanctification which it produces.
TL;DR: The authors summarize some of the principal techniques which may be used in deciding certain problems of polysemy, such as the problem of meaning and reference, in terms of distinctive semantic features which make possible the use of the sign in referring to a particular set of referents.
01 Jan 1981
TL;DR: This paper examines the practical problem of developing a front-end processor to make interactive computers accessible to users with different sign systems and Ideographic languages are selected for study because they show precisely how existing interactive systems depend on an alphabetic code.
Abstract: The relationship between signs that are used to communicate with an interactive computer system and the entities that are signified (like files, operating system interrupts, text-formatting commands) has grown in a chaotic and haphazard manner. This paper examines the practical problem of developing a front-end processor to make interactive computers accessible to users with different sign systems. Ideographic languages are selected for study because they show precisely how existing interactive systems depend on an alphabetic code, as well as having considerable commercial importance.
01 Jan 1981
TL;DR: Sign Language in its Social Context as discussed by the authors explores the impact of social life on the sign languages of the deaf and explores the manner in which our intellectualized knowledge of sign languages has been influenced by our social and noetic context.
Abstract: The title "Sign Language in its Social Context" is intended to be systematically ambiguous. On the one hand, I will report here on the impact of social life on the sign languages of the deaf. On the other hand, I want to explore the manner in which our intellectualized knowledge of sign languages of the deaf has been influenced by our social and noetic context. In other words, I will be exploring the impact of society on deaf signers and also the impact of a larger social tradition on us, the describers of deaf signers. The first is a sociolinguistic enterprise; the second is better classified as metasociolinguistic. Such a double intent, objective on the one hand and self-critical on the other, is made necessary by the history of deaf studies.