Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1984"

Semiotics and the philosophy of language

Abstract: Introduction 1. Signs 1.1. Crisis of a concept 1.2. The signs of an obstinacy 1.3. Intension and extension 1.4. Elusive solutions 1.5. The deconstruction of the linguistic sign 1.6. Signs vs. words 1.7. The stoics 1.8. Unification of the theories and the predominance of linguistics 1.9. The 'instructional' model 1.10. Strong codes and weak codes 1.11. Abduction and inferential nature of signs 1.12. The criterion of interpretability 1.13. Sign and subject 2. Dictionary vs. Encyclopedia 2.1. Porphyry strikes back 2.2 Critique of the Porphyrian tree 2.3. Encyclopedias 3. Metaphor 3.1. The metaphoric nexus 3.2. Traditional definitions 3.3. Aristotle: synecdoche and Porphyrian tree 3.4. Aristotle: metaphors of three terms 3.5. Aristotle: the proportional scheme 3.6. Proportion and condensation 3.7. Dictionary and encyclopedia 3.8. The cognitive function 3.9. The semiosic background: the system of content 3.10. The limits of formalization 3.11. Componential representation and the pragmatics of the text 3.12. Conclusions 4. Symbol 4.1. Genus and species 4.2. Expressions by ratio facilis 4.3. Expressions produced by ratio difficilis 4.4. The symbolic mode 4.5. Semiotics of the symbolic mode 4.6. Conclusions 5. Code 5.1. The rise of new category 5.2. The landslide effect 5.3. Codes and communication 5.4. Codes as s-codes 5.5. Cryptography and natural languages 5.6. S-codes and signification 5.7 The genetic code 5.8. Toward a provisonal conclusion 6. Isotopy 6.1. Discursive isotopies within sentences with paradigmatic disjunction 6.2. Discursive isotopies within sentences with syntagmatic disjunction 6.3. Discursive isotopies between sentences with paradigmatic disjunction 6.4. Discursive isotopies between sentences with syntagmatic disjunction 6.5. Narrative isotopies connected with isotopic discursive disjunctions generating mutually exlusive stories 6.6 Narrative isotopies connected with isotopic discursive disjunctions that generate complementary stories 6.7. Narrative isotopies connected with discursive isotopic disjunctions that generate complementary stoies in each case 6.8. Extensional isotopies 6.9. Provisional conclusions 7. Mirrors 7.1. Is the mirror image a sign? 7.2. The imaginary and the symbolic 7.3. Getting in through the Mirror 7.4. A phenomenology of the mirror: the mirror does not invert 7.5. A pragmatics of the mirror 7.6. The mirror as a prosthesis and a channel 7.7. Absolute icons 7.8. Mirrors as rigid designators 7.9. On signs 7.10. Why mirrors do not produce signs 7.11. Freaks: distorting mirrors 7.12. Procatoptric staging 7.13. Rainbows and Fata Morganas 7.14. Catoptric theaters 7.15. Mirrors that 'freeze' images 7.16. The experimentum crucis References Index of authors Index of subjects

A Deaf Child's Natural Development of Literacy

Abstract: This case study reports the first investigation of a young deaf child’s experiences with books. It describes six steps in a developmental sequence of seven stages, from simply labeling pictures and signs to reading independently. One of the most interesting aspects of development was the child’s spontaneous analysis of sign drawings in storybooks that illustrate each word with a sign. These sign drawings provided a bridge between signed and spoken discourse and print. Concepts she discovered about books include: stories are to be enjoyed and repeated; they are means both of social interaction and of private satisfaction; characters have styles of speaking and books have narration and dialogue; stories have plots. Concepts about print relate to directionality, letter patterns, and that print, signs, and speech interrelate.

Drawing, Design and Semiotics

Abstract: Few design practitioners, theorists or educators would challenge the central importance drawing has in their professional discipline; equally few would deny that at the same time drawing is extraordinarily difficult to talk about. Of course, a great deal can be said that is true and relevant about the nature and practice of drawing including providing facts about its materials, history and usage; but most of the concepts and issues that are central and seminal to the essential nature of drawing remain strangely elusive and inexpressible in terms other than those of drawing itself. A partial explanation of this problem is that it is precisely this inexpressible element that makes drawing valuable and irreplaceable: if everything could be converted into other forms of expression there would be no point in drawing. However, there are historical and cultural reasons why verbal discourse about drawing has remained in an unnecessarily primitive and undeveloped state compared with other fields such as law or medicine. In Britain, as in many other countries, art and design continue to occupy a relatively marginal place in advanced education. They are rarely represented in the universities except as history of art (not, usually, history of design) and one or two cognate areas such as architecture. We continue to suffer from the cultural legacy of the Romantic Movement which often represented the plastic arts, including drawing, as a matter of intuition and inspiration somehow above and beyond the access of rational inquiry and understanding. This state of affairs has, in my view, seriously impeded the development of drawing. The most rudimentary concepts surrounding issues such as style, content, meaning and expression defy articulation to such an extent that terms and concepts have been devised or borrowed from other disciplines in order to forge a means of appropriately discussing a theory of drawing. This article reviews semiotics, the science of signs, as a possible intellectual groundwork for developing a theory of drawing. Drawing as a system of signs has importnt cultural origins that are reflected in etymology. The German Zeichen, meaning sign, gives us zeichnen for the verb to draw, that is to make signs. Similar connections can be seen in the Italian segno (sign), disegno (drawing, design) and disegnatore (designer). The English draw-

Contrastive linguistics : prospects and problems

Abstract: The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. The series considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language.

Knowledge of Sign Language in an Australian Aboriginal Community

Abstract: A sample of Warlpiri women from fifteen to over sixty years of age living at Yuendumu, central Australia, were interviewed for their knowledge of Warlpiri sign language. The youngest in the sample commanded some sign language vocabulary, but only those over thirty showed extensive knowledge. Although women who had been widowed showed more knowledge of sign language than those who had not, the main correlate of sign language knowledge was found to be age. It is suggested that sign language is acquired as part of the process of integration into the social and ritual life of older women and not only in connection with mourning. Sign vocabulary was found to be acquired at markedly different rates in different semantic domains.

Metaphor Reexamined: A Non-Aristotelian Perspective

Abstract: Breaking away from the traditional "neo-Aristotelian" view of metaphor, Liselotte Gumpel's ambitious study offers a new, "non-Aristotelian" approach based on the phenomenological semantics of Roman Ingarden and the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce. The author seeks to grasp the meaning of metaphor through an exhaustive exploration of meaning in language, from its acquisition by young speakers to its repeated origination in sound when spoken and in the visual sign when written. She identifies the fundamental semantic operations that differentiate literal from literary use of language. Next, metaphor is examined in all of its semantic idiosyncrasies. Gumpel's theory culminates in the development of a functional or structural metaphor that can neither disappear nor "die." Applying the theory, Gumpel presents several textual analyses, relating the categories of argument, dicent and rheme to the use of metaphor by Brecht, Dickinson, and Celan. A final section provides an incisive critique of theories of metaphor from Aristotle to the present.

The Textual Space: On the Notion of Text

Abstract: One of the most important problems faced by theorists who deal with the analysis of "signifying practices" is the ambiguity of the key term upon which, in one way or another, their discussions hinge: the notion of "text." Ever since the early activities of OPOYAZ and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, literary theory has functioned with three models of semiotics. The first two are based on the work of Saussure as well as on the mathematical theory of information presented by Shannon and Weaver (1949); for both models, the text has an autonomous system of signification, whether in terms of "structure," as in the first case, or in terms of "message," as in the second case. The third model derives from the work of Peirce and does not define the "sign" on the basis of entities or relationships. Rather, it confronts the semiotic problem from a different perspective, namely, the analysis and description of the conditions that are necessary for actions, facts, or objects to function as signs. The first two models belong to a semiotics of communication and are dedicated to the study of the means and processes used by sign producers, not only to affect others in various ways, but also to gain recognition and acceptance from them. In a broader sense, the third model belongs to the semiotics of signification and includes all uses and behaviors that become significant only because they take place in a social context. In this essay, we wish to address ourselves to the productive manifestations of the work of "signification." It is perhaps after May 1968 in France that semiotics ceases to be understood as a "science of signs" and starts to function as a critical discipline. Because its critical objects come to be defined as (a) communication, (b) the structures of communication, and (c) the languages that are implied within communication, semiotics appears no longer as a study of the signified, but rather, as a study of the operations of signifying. Yet there is no human science (and semiotics is no exception) that does not compromise those who practice it, since a scientific practice necessarily situates its practitioners in a fixed zone of knowledge ("saber") and obliges them to select among cultural options that in turn act upon the very process of investigation. So it is that the dominant ideologies in capitalist modes of production not only determine the models of communication but also the instruments used to analyze the structure and function of those models. There are no neutral sciences: the myth of scientific neutrality is an ideological illusion that arises with the "scientific man" of the Renaissance. There is implicit in any process of the production of meaning ("sentido")

Sign and Commodity: Aspects of the Cultural Dynamic of Advanced Capitalism

Abstract: It is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works ofhis mature period, he set outto portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature . For at this stage in the history ofmankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question andthere is no solution that could notbefound in the solution to the riddle of the commodity-structure .

What Does the Private Language Argument Prove

Abstract: What is the conclusion of the "private language argument"? What, in particular, are we to conclude about the sign 'S' that Wittgenstein introduces in ?258 of the Philosophical Investigations? A conclusion drawn by Wittgenstein is: "Here we can't talk about 'right' ". But many commentators have found a stronger conclusion in, or implied by, his remarks, namely that the person who uses this sign is "not saying anything"; that such a use is "empty", "meaningless" or "impossible"; that there is "no ground whatever" for regarding 'S' as a sign for a sensation; or that the whole example is unintelligible.I Is it obvious that these conclusions follow from what Wittgenstein says? "So you deny that 'S' has any meaning; you are saying that the whole thing is unintelligible". We could imagine these words put to Wittgenstein by his

The Waste Land and the Fantasy of Interpretation

Abstract: IT H A S C 0 MM O N LY been suggested that the metaphor of bankruptcy which has carried the reputation of The Waste Land through the critical stock market of the last sixty years should be read as an index of the cultural infirmity of Europe after the Great War. Indeed, the title of Eliot's long poem has long since earned its own currency inasmuch as it has become a byword for a set of historically impoverished circumstances. It therefore functions both as a general eponym and, more specifically, as a sign of those post-War times. In effect, there are two distinct terms to be considered. The Waste Land, as a proper name, has in some part given up its denotative office, forsaking it for the connotative role of the metaphor of the "Waste Land." Within this shift from one to the other, two epistemological stages can be isolated: first, a recognition that the metaphor is apposite, and second, an acceptance of the metaphor to the very letter among the allusive topoi available to everyday cultured speech, an acceptance to such a degree that the metaphor, now petrified, no longer functions as such. Somewhere between these two levels of attention, between the initial recognition and the general acceptance, this metaphor is still useful as a vital and representative element of the poem itself. Any attempt, then, to take a fresh look at the relation of the metaphor to the textual conditions under which it was and still is produced will be posed within that gap where the metaphor is still "possible," where it still "means" what it says. Is this gap, however, itself a given space? For it could be suggested that any critical interpretation is bordered, likewise, by these two epistemological provinces-its initial recognition as a plausible reading, and its subsequent acceptance as a standard (or classical) exposition. Any such interpretation would therefore be helplessly stranded between the two stages of approval. In reconsidering some of the conditions for this metaphor of The Waste Land I want to suggest a number of ways in which this helplessness is necessarily inscribed in, or provoked by, the conventional procedures of interpretation. In the specific instance of Eliot's poem, I want to argue that this position or experience of helplessness can be linked up symptomatically with a more chronic "impossibility" of articulating history itself. This latter problem is generally taken to be the definitive experience of high modernist writing, but it is equally a problem posed for any critical exposition

Frege, the Proliferation of Force, and Non-cognitivism

Abstract: But these two inferences could not proceed on the same principle if we'... had to recognize a special way of judging for the negative case'. In inference (i), assertoric force attaches to the first premise as a whole and to the second premise as a whole, and the thought expressed in the second premise coincides with the thought expressed in the antecedent of the first premise. 1 If we were to recognize denying as a special kind of judging, in inference (2) assertoric force would still attach to the-,first premise as a whole, while in the second premise the negation sign would be absorbed into the act of denying. Thus the thought expressed in the second premise would no longer coincide with that in the antecedent of the first premise, so that 'the inference ... cannot be performed in the same way'.2 In 'Compound Thoughts' Frege makes several further remarks that lead Michael Dummett to claim that it is Frege's doctrine that force'... cannot significantly occur within a clause which is a constituent of a complex sentence, but can attach only to a complete sentence as a whole', a doctrine which, if true, would provide '... a powerful new method for detecting spurious claims to have identified a new kind of force'.3 Peter Geach in particular has put the doctrine to this use: in 'Assertion', he uses appearance in the antecedent of a conditional as a test to rule out various proposals to construe words or phrases as force signs, including a noncognitivist construal of 'wrong' as expressing condemnation. Geach's argument starts out parallel to Frege's in 'Negation': he claims that 'it's true that . . .' and 'wrong' cannot carry force because modus ponens goes through in the usual way from the premises 'If it's true that p, then q' and 'If gambling is wrong, then inviting people to gamble is wrong', which involve neither asserting that p nor condemning gambling. Geach goes on

The Master Builder and the Failure of Symbolic Success

Abstract: At a time when "difference" is so powerfully in vogue Ibsen's The Master Builder would seem thrust into a defensive posture by virtue of its reliance on symbolism. For its symbolism apparently asserts, not difference, but identity, and thus seems to run counter to the diacritical character of language itself: the arbitrary division between signifier and signified, between sign and referent. As a result of this recent stress on the diacritical, the figural dominance of symbol over allegory and discursive language that has been in force since the Romantics is now threatened with reversal, as Murray Krieger has shown. The supposed fusion of object and meaning wrought by the symbol is regarded in some quarters no longer as a virtue but as a species of linguistic bad faith, a mystifying refusal to acknowledge what Paul de Man calls the fallen world of our facticity and the existential gap between man and nature.

Sign of the Times: The Computer as Character in "Tron, War Games", and "Superman III"

Abstract: Computer characters have come a long way since HAL in 2001: now they can be all-encompassing villains, surrogate sons, and mythic threats to human life.

Signs of the times: Language as sign in these times

Abstract: This essay is a survey of twelve recently published books contributing to the general interdisciplinary movement that, recognizing the immense role of sign systems, and especially language, in human understanding, relationships, and actions, is attempting to find ever more comprehensive and powerful ways of analyzing such systems. All offer insights into language, literature or culture.

Goldstein on quotation

Abstract: AURENCE Goldstein ('Quotation of Types and Other Types of Quotation'. ANALYSIS 44.1, January 1984, p. 1) disputes the commonly held view that the sign formed by placing quotation marks around another sign is a sign for the other sign. He says (p. 4) 'One can think of ... quotation marks as arrows pointing to a sample which could be remote from the sentence'. Davidson ('Quotation', Theory and Decision 11, 1979, pp. 27-40, reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford 1984, pp. 79-92) holds a similar view: a 'demonstrative' account of quotation. The account seems to me quite implausible, since it requires, ultimately, that we cannot read conventionally quoted expressions in the way that we do. Consider:

Utopia of the Map

Abstract: We will confront the parable directly: there is movement from map as analogic model of its object, and which reduces its object according to a predictable measured scale to map as a “double” of the Empire, its “other.” This movement goes from representation to the utopia of representation; at the same time the represented object is converted to its simulacrum, unlocatable because it is the map in its complete correspondence to the Empire, yet different from it. Rather, the Empire is different from the map, because it remains, whereas the map is discarded. This gap is very strictly the place of the neutral. The practice of this difference is utopic. This is so because maps of a city, country, or continent — no matter what the scale, how reduced, or what has been erased or included — always implicitly functions as a double. They are diagramatic repre-sentations and schemata whose syntax (its rules of reduction and selection) is explicit, but forgotten in nature once our gaze settles on it in its multiple circuitry: “As we perceive the thing signified from its sign, it is clear that we do not mean that this sign is really other than what it signifies. We simply mean that it is other as a sign and figure. Thus we say directly and unqualifyingly…of a map of Italy that it is Italy.”2 The expression commented on in 1683 by the logicians of Port-Royal, and the gap between the meaning of the figure and the “expression” of the thing itself, are the themes of the parable “quoted” by J. L. Borges.

Intensional Man Vs Extensional Man: A Difficult Dialogue

Abstract: Any semiotic approach (cf. Eco. 1976)1 should distinguish between a theory of codes and a theory of sign production, that is between a theory of signification and a theory of communication. In other words it is indispensable to distinguish between the criteria of organization of the cultural encyclopedia (a merely intensional system of meaning postulates) and the various phenomena of communicational interaction (among which there is the extensional use of languages, that is, the use of languages in order to designate actual or possible states of the world).

Toward Grounding Peirce's Semiotics in a Homological Architectonic

Abstract: What I believe may be helpful to construct from C. S. Peirce's work is rather simple, perhaps even simple-minded: 1) the triadic nature of the sign is not arbitrary and depends upon a complex of homologous relations represented by Peirce in equally trichotomous manner; 2) this complex tissue of thought is not merely a function of "triadomany" (triadmania), but rather of the innate structure of the universe as Peirce perceived it; 3) this innate structure is represented in a realist-organic architectonic which Peirce never explicitly constructed, but toward which all his thinking tends. Rulon Wells notes that Peirce's work "is not a mere heap of ideas from which one can deftly pick out some [themes] while leaving the others quite behind. His concept of sign involves interpretant . . his concept of interpretant involves mind; his concept of mind is generalized (to include 'quasi-mind') beyond recognition along panpsychistic lines dictated by his synechistic idealism. His pragmatism and his anti-Cartesianism must be mentioned in the same breath."' W. B. Gallie agrees that this organic unity is important, but notices as well that its expression is incomplete: "The greatness of Peirce ... lies rather in the organic unity of his thinking, a unity which has been obscured by his own failure to present his teaching during his lifetime in a unified literary form, but partly also by the fact that he sought to test out his central doctrines on a wide variety of clearly defined issues."2 While Murray Murphey senses organic unity to have been a motivation present from the beginning,3 William Rosensohn points out that the term "architectonic" makes its first appearance in 1891 in the Monist article "Architecture of Theories."4

Psycholinguistics: Application • The Writing System as a Native Language for the Deaf

Abstract: Language can be acquired by means of the writing system, directly, without the medium of either speech or sign. Deaf children can acquire written language through an association of written forms with environ- mental objects and events, just as hearing children acquire language through an association of speech sounds with environmental experiences. This article considers in detail the rationale which underlies using written language as a native or first language for children who are severely or profoundly hearing-impaired. A perspective in terms of historical and current ideas concerning such theory, including the views of Alexander Graham Bell, is provided.

Motion analysis of grammatical processes in a visual-gestural language (abstract only)

Abstract: Movement of the hands and arms through space is an essential element both in the lexical structure of American Sign Language (ASL), and, most strikingly, in the grammatical structure of ASL: it is in patterned changes of the movement of signs that many grammatical attributes are represented. These grammatical attributes occur as an isolable superimposed layer of structure, as demonstrated by the accurate identification by deaf signers of these attributes presented only as dynamic point-light displays. Three-dimensional computer graphic analyses were applied in two domains, to quantify the nature of the 'phonological' (formational) distinctions underlying the structure of grammatical processes in ASL. In the first, we show that for one 'phonological' opposition, evenness/unevenness of movement, a ratio of maximum velocities throughout the movement perfectly captures the linguistic classification of forms along this dimension. In the second, we map out a two-dimensional visual-articulatory space that captures in terms of signal properties, relevant relationships among movement forms that were independently posited as linguistically relevant. The fact that we are finding direct correspondences between properties of the signal and properties of the 'phonological' system in sign language, may arise in part because in sign languages, unlike in spoken languages, the movements of the articulators themselves are directly observable, and, also in part, because of the predominantly layered 'phonological' organization of sign language.

Pensamento, fenômeno experimental e experimento na proposta pragmaticista

Abstract: The Pragmaticism of Charles Sanders Peirce, as a general theory of conception, is a theory of sign and a theory of thought. Limiting itself on the consideration of the "rational purport" of symbols, the Pragmaticism seeks to establish the kind of causation atribuitive to thought: an efficient causation centralized in perception and experiment and a final causation determining a rational habit of conduct before the general class of experimental phenomena represented by the concept.