Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1985"

Semiotics: An introductory anthology

Abstract: Robert E Innis Introduction Charles S Peirce Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs Ferdinand De Saussaure The Linguistic Sign VN Volosinov Verbal Interaction Karl Buhler The Key Principle: The Sign-Character of Language Susanne K Langer Discursive and Presentational Forms Claude Levi-Strauss Structural Analysis in Linguisits and in Anthropology Gregory Bateson A Theory of Play and Fantasy Roman Jakobson Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics Charles Morris Signs and the Act Roland Barthes Rhetoric of the Image Meyer Schapiro On Some Problems in the Semiotics of the Visual Arts: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs Emile Benveniste The Semiology of Language Umberto Eco The Semantics of Metaphor Rene Thom From the Icon to the Symbol Thomas A Sebeok Zoosemiotic Components of Human Communication Index of Names Index of Subjects

Signs' Place In Medias Res: Peirce's Concept of Semiotic Mediation

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter presents Peirce's theory of the semiotic mediation of thought and reality as it developed in the course of his persistent yet constantly shifting reflection on the nature of signs. In its most basic sense, the notion of mediation can be defined as any process in which two elements are brought into articulation by the means of or through the intervention of some third element that serves as the vehicle or medium of communication. The sign relation necessarily involves three elements bound together in a semiotic moment. In insisting that the representamen and the interpretant are both signs representing the same object, although to different degrees of specificity, and that the object of the sign determines not just that first sign but a second interpreting sign, Peirce implies two things about the sign relation. An important implication of the processual nature of semiosis is that there is an inherent asymmetry in what can be termed the level of semiosis between the vector of determination and the vector of representation.

Fair of speech : the uses of euphemism

Abstract: Can a bomb ever be "clean"? Are we relieved to be warned that there will be an "odor" when once we were told that something would "stink"? Or, to put it another way, when is a euphemism a mark of good taste and when is it a sign of verbal obfuscation? To answer such questions, D.J. Enright invited sixteen distinguished writers to ponder and explore the ubiquitous phenomenon of euphemism. The result is a delightful and provocative collection that not only includes general reflections on euphemism and its history but also treats such specific categories as sex, death, and other natural functions; politics; the language of the great Christian texts; euphamisms spoken to and by children; the law; medicine; office life; and the jargon of official spokesmen, military communiques, and tyrants. Such writers as Diane Johnson, Robert Nisbet, John Gross, Robert Burchfield, and Joseph Epstein bring a variety of perspectives and sensibilities to bear on these topics. Because euphemisms are so intimate and integral to our thinking, any study of them is bound to throw light on the human condition, both past and present. In these essays, humor jostles horror and the homely alternates with the farfetched. Taken together they form an eloquent and often amusing testament to the richness of the subject. About the Author D.J. Enright is a noted English poet and critic. He recently compiled and edited The Oxford Book of Death.

Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time

Abstract: The work of Roman Jakobson has long been recognized as central to debates in linguistics and literary theory. This book makes Jakobson's ideas, previously collected only in a monumental, seven-volume edition of his selected writings, readily available for the first time. It brings together eleven essays on topics of crucial importance to poetics and linguistics.

Beyond Symbolic Anthropology: Introducing Semiotic Mediation

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses certain fundamentals of semiotic theory that are prerequisites to any serious consideration of processes of semiotic mediation. The contrast between index and symbol parallels that between pragmatic and semantic meaning. Pragmatic meaning is defined as meaning that is dependent on context, while the semantic value of a sign is the meaning, or notional core, that it has apart from contextual factors. The structure of discourse is also affected by extralinguistic context. The division between the kinds of context is not clear or absolute; some concepts bridge the gap between intra- and extra-linguistic contexts. In actuality, language can rarely be so neatly sorted into distinct functions, because any particular stretch of language is usually multifunctional, serving several ends at once. The Vygotskian perspective looks at the effects of language, generally conceived, on the development of cognitive processes. A theory of how sign tokens are exchanged and connected must be supplemented with a notion of the way the signs together form an interrelated system.

The Semiotic Mediation of Mental Life: L. S. Vygotsky and M. M. Bakhtin

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the specific issue of Vygotsky's analysis of the properties of semiotic mechanisms that influence the nature of higher mental processes. Vygotsky began with the assumption that the mastery of language and other cultural sign systems is not the sole factor that accounts for the emergence of higher mental processes such as thinking, logical memory, and voluntary attention. Because he employed a genetic or developmental method, Vygotsky assumed that the only way to unravel the nature of such functioning in the individual is to trace it back to its origins. Vygotsky's account of semiotic mediation is based on two opposing tendencies he recognized in the organization and use of human language. The existence of generalized categorization as reflected in interpsychological functioning is only the first step in Vygotsky's line of reasoning about decontextualized word meaning. Vygotsky's most specific examination of this general claim can be found in his account of inner speech, which he viewed as a dynamic flow or stream of mental functioning.

Charles S. Peirce and the linguistic sign

Abstract: This monograph is about the semiotics of lexical signs, and is of particular interest for historical linguists, in particular those interested in etymology. Specialists in linguistic change have long noticed that certain classes of words seem to be in part exempt from regular patterns of sound change, or perhaps more likely to undergo unusual analogical shifts. The problem is far worse for the etymologist, since the lexicon of every language contains some hundreds of semiotically problematic vocables which must, if the etymological dictionaries are ever to be completed, be explained somehow. Always been struck by the sheer capriciousness of etymologies in which some sort of unusual form-meaning relations are involved, the author, with the help of C.S. Peirce, provides answers to crucial questions in his search to make sense of those capricious etymologies.

The Semiotics of Two Speech Styles in Shokleng

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter highlights that speech style is a complex linguistic sign vehicle composed of numerous types of signals that manifests considerable functional richness. The multifunctionality of speech styles is apparent in the fact that it is perfectly conceivable for two linguistic utterances to be functionally equivalent in propositional or semantico-referential terms and yet to form parts of distinct speech styles, and in the fact that a given linguistic sign vehicle can be put to multiple social ends. The hypotheses seem to follow naturally from the general conception of speech style as indexical signal. Ritual wailing is characterized at the sound level by the following features–a sing-song intonation pattern, creaky voice throughout, and broken voice, that is, rapid-fire glottal stops coupled with intonational modulation used intermittently on certain protracted vowels. The formal characteristics of Shokleng ritual wailing and origin-myth telling can be grouped into two general classes, according as they seem to fall under the principle of expressive restriction, or formal amplification.

Simultaneous interpretation of sign languages: Semiotic and psycholinguistic perspectives

Abstract: Simultaneous Interpretation has generally been regarded äs a process involving spoken languages. Either the source language or the target language, however, may be a natural sign language. In this paper, sign language Interpretation is defined within a semiotic framework of the broader field of translation. Psycholinguistic studies of sign language Interpretation are reviewed in the areas of time lag, probability prediction, error analysis, and memory. Semiotic and psycholinguistic models of sign language Interpretation are presented.

Seeing and feeling: representation in two poems of theocritus

Abstract: A S SOON AS poets begin to speak, at the end of the fifth century, about their skill at capturing the familiar look of things,' others begin to ask questions about the limits of this endeavor First, they ask technical questions, like the one posed in Aristophanes' Frogs: can the naturalistic manner adequately represent every kind of object? (According to "Aeschylus" in this play, there is a moral kind of object that literal images of life do not capture) Later, Plato suggests that some things cannot be represented directly by any manner of verbal or visual art Theocritus has similar concerns, partly technical and partly philosophical, about the peculiar status of human beings as objects of representation He sets human beings against a background of inhuman things, and he distinguishes consciously between the representation of one and the other Theocritus also distinguishes between different levels in the representation of human beings There is a category of feeling (Aristotle would call it pathos) that can be made recognizable in lifelike representation because its causes are visible and because it produces visible, physical symptoms; its primary elements are pleasure and pain2 A man's pathos, the way he responds to circumstances with pleasure or pain, may serve in turn as a sign of something deeper, his moral disposition or his character (Aristotle would call this ethos), which is not itself accessible to observation3 The first step away from the visible is easily made Pathos seems bound to its causes and symptoms by natural laws, and so the inferences required to detect it also seem natural; one recognizes another man's pathos instinctively, without conscious thought The next step, inferring another man's character, is more difficult because character is not wholly natural Social custom helps to form it, for example, in variable and unpredictable ways Therefore, the signs of ethos seem less natural and clear than the signs of pathos When someone tries to put his ethos into speech, his words may

New Essays on 'The Scarlet Letter'

Abstract: Preface 1. Introduction: the spirit and the sign Michael J. Colacurcio 2. Arts of deception: Hawthorne, 'romance' and The Scarlet Letter Michael Davitt Bell 3. Hester's labyrinth: transcendental rhetoric in Puritan Boston David van Leer 4. 'The woman's own choice': sex, metaphor and the Puritan 'sources' of The Scarlet Letter Michael J. Colacurcio 5. His folly, her weakness: demystified adultery in The Scarlet Letter Carol Bensick Notes on contributors Selected bibliography.

A Response to the Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin

Abstract: Critical Inquiry's Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin [Critical Inquiry 10 (December 1983): 225-319] is the latest contribution to the spectacular effort of interpretation and assimilation that is being applied to the work of this recently recovered critic. In such a situation, analysis proceeds with one eye on the work in question and the other on current debates in the field; in the case of Bakhtin, interpretation is at the same time an attempt to come to grips with challenges posed by recent literary theory to certain axiomatic critical assumptions about intentionality, textuality, and the human subject. But the matter is also complicated by the fact that we are dealing here with a critic who was active in the USSR. This brings into play additional ideological pressures, generated by the cold war, which bear on the scholarly assimilation of his work. The debate on Bakhtin is made yet more difficult by the nature of his writing: immensely varied stylistically and topically but also-and more importantly, I believe-writing which strives for solutions it cannot quite articulate. It moves between alternative and contradictory formulations in a single essay and thus produces a set of concepts whose explanatory importance is matched by an unnerving tendency to slide from one formulation to the next with disturbing ease. Such ambiguities are not the sign of an open and sceptical mind, but neither are they mere inconsistencies which can be safely ignored. These internal contradictions dictate that argument over concepts like "dialogism" and "heteroglossia" cannot be settled by a definitive decision as to what they 'really' mean; instead, we must discuss how to manage these complexities and contra-

Growing into literacy

Abstract: Consider these events in the life of pre-school children: A 3-year-old boy is riding in the back seat of the car with his family. 'Daddy,' he says, 'You didn't stop for that stop sign. You might get into trouble.' ' I can read,' says the 4-year-old girl talking to strangers in the airport waiting room. 'See? That says "Taxi", ' she says, pointing to the sign overhead. 'How do you know?' asks the interested stranger. 'Because it says T-R-A-N-S-P-O-R-T-A-T-I-O-N, ' she replies. Children growing up in literate societies, surrounded by the printed word, begin to read and write long before they start school. They become aware of many of the uses of written language, they develop a sense of the written forms, and they begin to make sense of print and to experiment with communication through writing. Until recently, this growth into literacy has not been expected or appreciated, even by professional educationists. In this article, the extent and scope of early literacy development will be considered. Theoretical explanations for the reasons of this development will be offered. The reasons why such significant and widespread development has been overlooked and minimized will be examined and the implications for reform of school programmes will be considered. The ability to develop and use language is a universal human quality; it is perhaps the most uniquely human trait. All people and all human societies are able to create language. Language

Popular Memory and the Voortrekker Films

Abstract: The South African political discourse of the 1980s roots itself in absolutes -facts, objectiveness and the 'hard, tangible and exploitable images of reality'-but paradoxically, it also implies degree o& fact: fact, true facts and hard facts. This semantic contradiction hides a welter of political machination as language and other forms of semiotic sign locate the site of struggle between dominant and opposing ideologies.

Transgressions: A quantum approach to literary deconstruction

Abstract: Summary Deconstruction has not taken root in the Anglo‐Saxon world and is generally treated with suspicion outside France because it threatens the comfortable certainty of language and meaning Both the terms of reference and the development of deconstruction can be compared to the development in the natural sciences of quantum physics and the theory of relativity Quantum physics has absorbed and transcended the Newtonian notion of a stable physical world by advocating that light consists of both particles and waves This seemed in traditional terms to be impossible: it was advocating two mutually exclusive forms of ‘being’ What this meant in philosophy (and literature) was that reality was no longer perceived as stable and predictable The word or the sign was no longer simply seen as a reflection of reality (particle) but played an active part in creating ‘reality’ (wave) Subsequently modern theorists have entered the myriad worlds of interpretations ‐ a state of transgression (Derrida) or permanent

Peirce, Frege, Saussure, and Whorf: The Semiotic Mediation of Ontology

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on semiotic mediation of ontology. Peirce formulates the problem of semiotic mediation by asking how knowledge of anything is possible. The ontological implications of Peirce's theory are clearest in his account of linguistic propositions or dicent symbolic legisigns. Reference presupposes the uniqueness and specificity of the objects to which a term refers. Because quantifiers are indexical specifications of how to pick out objects, the ontological implications of a theory can be discovered by looking at the quantificational structure of its propositions. The apparatus of quantificational theory that Frege invented allowed him to see sentences as being constructed in ordered sequence of steps. The particular problem that caused Frege to introduce the concept of sense was that of co-denoting singular terms, such as the evening star and the morning star which both have the same denotation, namely, the planet Venus. To analyze the nature of the internal system of language, Saussure presents an analysis of the linguistic sign.

Marginality, stigma and conversion in the context of medical knowledge, professional practices and occupational interests: A case study of professional homeopathy in nineteenth century Britain and the United States

Abstract: During the development of medicine in nineteenth century Britain and the United States, the 'regular' profession was faced with severe competition from 'unorthodox' practitioners. Most significant amongst these were the professional homeopaths. They were just as ~ell educated and qualified as the regulars, and so they posed the deepest threat to their continued plausibility as the source of all that was 'Good', 'True' and 'Scientific' in professional medicine. The cognitive anxiety which professional homeopathy raised was further intensified by the fact that recruitment to the ranks of homeopathy was made from the regular profession itself. Many converts to homeopathy were prepared to pay the professional and personal costs of being labelled a 'quack' for the sake of their own integrity and the apparently more effective therapeutic certainties of homeopathy. They were prepared to abandon the systems of regular medicine, be they heroic, sceptical, neovigorous or eclectic, in order to be at peace with their own conscience, and to practice a system of medicine they were now convinced was far more effective than any form of regular therapy. During this period, regular medicine passed through three basic styles of theory and practice. These were the Heroic-Bedside, Clinical-Hospital and Bacteriological-Laboratory Medical Cosmologies. Particularly during the Heroic and Clinical phases, the regulars developed an anti-homeopathic ideology which they deployed in the various conflicts which ensued. I ts purpose was to define the homeopaths as 'deviants' and medical 'heretics'. The regulars did this by the use of a 'vocabulary of insult' which stigmatized their opponents. By further employing the tactics of intolerance and social control they were able to secure their own claims to political and 'scientific' legitimacy. However, the supposedly 'rational' and 'scientific' refutations of homeopathy by many eminent regular practitioners (such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Young Simpson) were actually constructed at a time when the therapeutic, pharmacodynamic and aetiological knowledge of regular medicine was immature and highly uncertain. I shall argue that the claimed refutation of homeopathy during the 1830's to 1860's was not, indeed could not be, accomplished on scientifically 'objective' grounds (i.e. on the grounds of intersubjectively testable, empirical and experimentally reproduceable knowledge). Therefore, its actual grounds were those of conventional professional social norms, practices and traditions. The defence of regular medicine by means of an anti-homeopathic, anti-quack ideology and the rhetorical claim to 'scientificity' was a sign of an insecure and crisis-ridden profession. It was dangerous for regulars to admit, both professionally and personally, the therapeutic efficacy of homeopathy claimed by its adherents. For the majority of the regulars, the cost - emotional, cognitive and social – would be too high. In these terms (rather than mere professional duplicity) we can explain the attempted suppression of the statistical returns of the London Homoeopathic Hospital, which showed the success of their treatments, from the official report on the 1853/54 cholera epidemic. A mature scientific therapeutics began to develop with the emergence of the bacteriological research programme, based upon the work of Robert Koch. He was able to provide a secure experimental, methodological and ontological basis for the germ theory of disease causation. However, its therapeutic fruitfulness was not realised in practice (for people that is) until the 1890's, with the mass manufacture of diphtheria anti-toxin based upon the research of Emil von Behring. Therefore, the known development of medicine, and especially of therapeutics, does not support the claim by the regulars during the nineteenth century (and after) that homeopathy was refuted by unambiguous experimental, clinical and 'scientific' means. The actual means to do that did not emerge upon the historical scene until 1876 at the earliest (with Koch's bacteriological work) and with fuller effect not until the 1890's. However, by that time the conflict between regular and homeopathic practitioners was no longer of any interest to the centres producing standardized scientific knowledge; the bacteriological laboratories of university-hospitals, the proprietary drug industry, and various government and private research institutes. The 'refutations' of homeopathy developed a half-century earlier, were taken to be sufficient warrant to continue to (a) reject homeopathy cognitively, if not legislatively,- and (b) refuse it the courtesy of agreed experimental test when the actual means to do so were then available. Therefore, within the asymmetries of power, structures of domination and mechanisms of social control developed by the regulars in their pursuit of 'scientific' legitimacy, occupational closure and market monopolisation, the homeopaths were marginalized. However, they were not completely powerless against the regulars. They were able to obtain some important compromises and concessions from them, even if what was gained in America turned out to be far more temporary compared to the moral and legislative achievements of their less numerous British counterparts. The medical historians standard model to explain the 'success' of 'scientific' regular medicine and the 'failure' of 'unscientific' homeopathic medicine, as the result of the progressive, linear, accumulation of 'facts' is no longer adequate to the task. This is because of the model's/historian's assumptions that the ideological evaluations already performed in relation to those it has stigmatized as 'unscientific' and (or because) 'unorthodox', during the nineteenth century, were (and are) epistemologically 'True' and l:npolluted by political/ideological interest. It is the purpose of this work to demonstrate that such a science/ideology polarity is unable to adequately explain the historical rejection of homeopathy throughout the century and to propose a conception of monopoly, marginality, power and ideology which is adequate to that task.

An Exploratory Investigation of the Comprehension of English Through Sign English (Siglish) and Seeing Essential English (SEE1)

Abstract: The purpose of this paper was to explore comprehension levels of deaf children for English stories via Seeing Essential English (SEE1) and Sign English (Siglish). Eleven children using SEE1 and 11 ...

Music to Their Eyes: Song-to-Sign Interpreting at the Hudson Clearwater Festival

Abstract: Interpreting popular music into Sign for deaf audience members has become increasingly common. Interpretation of the songs permits the deaf community to participate in a congenial forum where significant social and political views are aired. Fifteen interpreters were interviewed at a Hudson Clearwater Festival and their ideas recorded on popular music interpreting and its differences from speech interpreting and transliterating. Nineteen members of their deaf audience were interveiwed for their reactions and opinions. The central concerns of the deaf audience differ somewhat from those of the interpreters. The future of concert interpreting will be determined not by educators or by the benevolence of the hearing world but by economic factors such as the appeal of sign language “music” to paying audiences, both deaf and hearing.

4. Ethics in the Age of Rousseau: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida

Abstract: Structuralism exists, Levi-Strauss claims in the shadow of Rousseau, to return man to nature, and deconstruction makes its debut as a challenge to structuralism, most specifically, the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss. Derrida dedicates Of Grammatology to a critique of the "age of Rousseau," the age of anthropology, in which the concept, "Man," reaches its greatest power as an explanatory category. Structuralism is in Derrida's view only the latest phase in Western logocentrism, and his early essay, "Sign, Structure, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," attacks the notion of structure with which Levi-Strauss hopes to reconcile nature and culture. The central issue in the disagreement between Levi-Strauss and Derrida is the explanatory status of the anthropological.' Much has been written about their debate, but its ethical dimension has been largely ignored. The declared Rousseauism of Levi-Strauss is not merely an idiosyncratic preference for one historical figure,

Deconstruction, literature and ideology

Abstract: Summary This paper attempts to show how deconstruction is liable to misunderstanding and non recognition (especially in South Africa and in the USA) because of the fact that it is divorced from its materialist base and because of the failure to understand it as essentially a critique of Western metaphysics, as a deconstruction of (Hegelian) idealism in all its ramifications, and not of texts as such. When texts are read/written, they are used to illustrate concepts and to unearth codes of society structured by ideology. Thus The Theory of the Text, in fact, necessitates a sociology of literature. The deconstructionist needs to know exactly what he or she is trying to escape from and needs to make visible the hidden ideologies and thereby supplying intertextually validated alternative interpretations. This is allowed for by Barthes, but Barthes did not bother to undertake it, thus ignoring a central discovery of the Bakhtin school: that the ideological nature of meaning implies that the sign, when used, is...

Building a U.S.‐Soviet Working Relationship

Abstract: The crucial determinant of U.S. and Soviet security, and the security of the world, will not depend on technological development, breakthroughs in deterrence theory, or even on agreements the two countries might sign at the summit talks. The future depends on whether the two governments are able to work together.

Kommunikasie, kommunikeerbaarheid en hermeneutiek

Abstract: SUMMARY The contribution of hermeneutic philosophy to communication theory is remarkably illustrated in the work done by Paul Ricoeur. Typical of his radical philosophising, he departs from communication, not as a given fact, but as a problem and a paradox due to mans essential fallibility, historicity and solitude. In an effort to overcome the problem linguistics is relied upon, more specifically linguistics of discourse with the sentence and not the sign as the basic unit. The sentence as bearer of meaning and reference has the function of mediating and communicating whereby it becomes possible to reach the other and the world — a first step towards solving the problem. The search for the founding of communicability must be pursued beyond the theory of discourse. In the event of a successful founding, the communication problem can be positively solved by eliminating (or at least reducing) the impact of ambiguity, distortion, prejudice and misunderstanding. With this in view, the semantics of discourse, ...

The Voices of Silence and Underwater Experience

Abstract: After positing that water has a body, a soul, and a voice, Gaston Bachelard argues in Water and Dreams, „Possibly more than any other element, water is the complete poetic reality“through which we enjoy, among other things, an intimate taste of our destiny. The „poetic reality“ which water is capable of manifesting is a way of perceiving meaning in the world, a meaning which defies the linear and temporal assumptions that structure the operations of utilitarian language. In his essay on „Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,“Merleau-Ponty describes the dynamics of poetic language: „it is the lateral relation of one sign to another which makes each of them significant, so that meaning appears only at the intersection of and as it were an interval between words.“ In The Psychoanalysis of Fire Bachelard defines the manner in which poetic language negates its temporal texture (where meaning is seen as progressing from one word to another) by commenting, „metaphors summon one another and are more coordinated than sensations, so much so that a poetic mind is purely and simply a syntax of metaphors.“ It is in the name of „a truer relation between things,“ Merleau-Ponty observes while discussing the aesthetic philosophy of Malraux, „that their ordinary ties are broken.“ Prosaic syntax is transcended by perception, the prose of the senses which is poetry, he argues: „It must be poetry; that is, it must completely awaken and recall our sheer power of expressing beyond things already said or seen.“ Immersed and imprisoned in a world of time where he chants that he has known it all („For I have known them all already, known them all“ — „known them all“ — „known them all“), T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock laments his inability to make contact with and express that poetic reality: „It is impossible to say just what I mean!“ To do so would require the courage which he does not have: „To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.’ For, indeed, would it have been worth it, after all?“

Medical Semiology and Linguistic Semiology

Abstract: Reading Francois Leguil’s thesis1 is discouraging at first. Each page is a reminder of the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of real communication between neighboring disciplines, for lack of a common language. It is indeed the same French, the same words, the same (or nearly the same) grammar, but it is never (or almost never) the same language. We appear to be speaking of the same concepts, yet we almost never seem to be referring to the same thing. Leguil, strongly marked by the most fashionable styles (Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Michel Serres), is almost elusive on the essential points because of the generality of his formulations or the esoteric usage of too many metaphors, his own and those of his models (“objects are looking at us,” p. 141; “it is the light which looks at us,” p. 143; etc.). These metaphors. moreover, frequently hide truisms; for instance, “in somatic medicine the thing seen is the zero degree of the sign,” meaning by this that as long as we have not found the explanation of an indice, it has no signification. One can only remark, regarding these authors as well as Leguil, that the tendency to obscure what needs to be clarified is an ailment of the times. How odd to seek the definition of the symptom in Merleau-Ponty, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, without noticing that these minds, so rich and so brilliant, have fallen back on the most obsolete academicism, pedantic intellectualization, and superficial word-play! It must be said at the outset that if physicians, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts really want a dialogue with linguists and semiologists, they will have to seek alternate means of expression, scientific ones, that is,—as Lanteri-Laura has done,for instance, or as Leguil himself does at times (for the clinical signs of measles and scarlet fever, pp. 43–44).

Allegory, An-Other-World

Abstract: The word and the concept of allegory in English is part of a chain of related terms and concepts, including parable, symbol, image, sign, emblem, figure, aphorism, metaphor, and translation. All name ways of saying one thing with another thing, or by means of another thing, in short, ways of speaking in figure.