Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1995"

The rise of surveillance medicine

Abstract: Despite the obvious triumph of a medical theory and practice grounded in the hospital, a new medicine based on the surveillance of normal populations can be identified as emerging in the twentieth century. This new Surveillance Medicine involves a fundamental remapping of the spaces of illness. This includes the problematisation of normality, the redrawing of the relationship between symptom, sign and illness, and the localisation of illness outside the corporal space of the body. It is argued that this new medicine has important implications for the constitution of identity in the late twentieth century.

Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life

Abstract: Part I: Theoretical Considerations: 1. Semiotics, Socio-Semiotics and Postmodernism: From Idealist to Materialist Theories of the Sign. 2. The System of Objects and the Commodification of Everyday Life: The Early Baudrillard. 3. The Substance of the Expression: The Role of Material Culture in Symbolic Interaction. Part II: The Substance of the Expression: Case Studies: 4. Recapturing the Center: A Socio-Semiotic Analysis of Shopping Malls5. Disneyland: A Utopian Urban Space. 6. Postmodern Architecture and the City. 7. The Political Economy of Postmodernism: The Signs of Growth - A Case Study. Part III: Cultural Studies and Socio-Semiotics: 8. Hegemony and Mass Culture: A Socio-Semiotic Approach. 9. Group Differentiation in a Metropolitan High School: The Influence of Race, Class, Gender and Culture. 10. Unisex Fashions and Gender Role-Change. 11. Recovering Lost Signifieds: Cultural Criticism in a Postmodern World.

More Than Words: The Generative Power of Transmediation for Learning.

Abstract: The emerging shift from transmissionto inquiry-oriented models of teaching and learning implies that students need more than words to learn. Transmediation, the act of translating meanings from one sign system to another, increases students' opportunities to engage in generative and reflective thinking because learners must invent a connection between the two sign systems, as the connection does not exist a priori. In this article I explore the semiotic basis for this claim and illustrate the generative potential of transmediation.

Iconicity in Language

Abstract: 1. Foreword: Under the Sign of Cratylus (by Simone, Raffaele) 2. I. History of Linguistics 3. Criticisms of the Arbitrariness of Language in Leibniz and Vico and the 'Natural' Philosophy of Language (by Gensini, Stefano) 4. II. Semiotic Theory 5. Interactions between Iconicity and Other Semiotic Parameters in Language (by Dressler, Wolfgang U.) 6. Iconicity and/or Arbitrariness (by Engler, Rudolf) 7. Isomorphism in the Grammatical Code: Cognitive and Biological Considerations (by Givon, T.) 8. The Icon as an Abductive Process towards Identity (by Ajello, Roberto) 9. III. Language Description and Linguistic Theory 10. The Iconic Index: From Sound Change to Rhyming Slang (by Anttila, Raimo) 11. Iconicity in Grammaticalization Processes (by Giacalone Ramat, Anna) 12. Iconicity between Indicativity and Predicativity (by Seiler, Hansjakob) 13. Iconic Aspects of Syntax: A Pragmatic Approach (by Simone, Raffaele) 14. Figure and Ground in Second Language Narratives: Traces of Iconicity (by Orletti, Franca) 15. Morphological Markedness in L2 Acquisition (by Berretta, Monica) 16. IV. Sign Systems Other than Verbal Language 17. Terms for Spatio-Temporal Relations in Italian Sign Language (by Antinoro Pizzuto, Elena) 18. Creative Iconic Gestures: some Evidence from Aphasics (by Magno Caldognetto, Emanuela) 19. Iconicity in Children's First Written Texts (by Pontecorvo, Clotilde) 20. Index

Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce

Abstract: The American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce, best known as the founder of pragmatism, has been influential not only in the pragmatic tradition but more recently in the philosophy of science and the study of semiotics, or sign theory. Strands of System provides an accessible overview of Peirce's systematic philosophy for those who are beginning to explore his thinking and its import for more recent trends in philosophy.

Linguistic Change under Contact Conditions

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.

A semiotic approach to determining the sins and virtues portrayed in advertising

Abstract: The meaning of an ad, according to semiotic or sign analysis, is based upon the interpretation of the person seeing or hearing the ad. Analysts selected for their pre-determined point of view narrated in depth interpretations of 12 randomly selected ads. The analysts told the researchers their interpretation of the sins and/or virtues content of the ads. The three analysts provided widely ranging comments and thoughts on the ads. Interestingly, the person from an advertising agency was much less likely to see values portrayed in the ads. This difference based on the exploratory research suggests agency personnel may not be able to rely on their own interpretations or other audiences' perceptions of advertising.

Common Sources for the Semiotic of Charles Peirce and John Poinsot

Abstract: The prevalence today of "semiotics" as the preferred linguistic form for designating the study of signs in its various aspects already conceals a history, a story of the ways in which, layer by layer, the temporal achievement we call human understanding builds, through public discourse, ever new levels of common acceptance each of which presents itself as, if not self-evident, at least the common wisdom. Overcoming such present-mindedness is not the least of the tasks faced by the awakening of semiotic consciousness. One need not go back very far in the literature on this subject to find that the term more widely bandied about with regard to the study of signs and sign-systems (codes) was rather "semiology," particularly in its French form. As recently as 1971, Thomas Sebeok reported that. "this is the term that, reinforced by the prestige of Parisian intellectual life, now turns up regularly in British newspapers and magazines, such as The Times Literary Supplement, and in an outpouring of volumes on the most diverse verbal and nonverbal arts, ranging from architecture . . . to cinematography."(1) What a difference a day makes. There are a host of reasons, from superficial to profound, that play a role in the current dominance of "semiotics" as the preferred linguistic form for designating the study of signs. The reversal of dominance in the discursive rivalry between "semiology" and "semiotics" as cultural forms of understanding, we want to suggest, is owing to the gradual, not to say grudging, recognition of the comparative depth, scope, and importance of the studies authored, on the one hand, by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and those who took their principal inspiration in the study of signs from his work; and, on the other hand, by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and those who took principal inspiration in the study of signs from his work. Saussure, of course, coined the term "semiologie," while Peirce, though he did not coin the word "semiotic," nonetheless took it over from the desuetude into which it had fallen as a neologism at the end of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1690 and put it into current circulation.(2) The last word has not been spoken, but insofar as it is a question of positive evidence, we are obliged to grant that despite their coevality, Saussure and Peirce formulated their ideas for a doctrine or general theory of signs completely independently of one another.(3) This comparative autonomy of their central proposals is reflected in the fact that Peirce sees semiotic as a foundational and architectonic inquiry, while Saussure sees it as a subalternate science that, when realized, "would form a part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology."(4) Partly for reasons of European chauvinism, partly for reasons of their respective biographies (which, in Peirce's case, destined his work to a long obscurity, while the remarks of Saussure on semiology were brought to light within three years of his death), Saussure's proposal for a development of semiology as "a science which studies the life of signs at, the heart of social life"(5) immediately caught the imagination of Europe's intellectual class and became a rallying cry for a flurry of writing. However, what Sebeok said of the works of "Morris, Hjelmslev, Barthes, and their numerous epigones on the holistic force of semiotics" can also be said of Saussure's own remarks on semiology: they "hardly exceed programmatic pronouncements."(6) By contrast, Peirce's writing on semiotic comprises the body of many volumes and calls for a fundamental rethinking of the traditional questions of science, epistemology, and experience together with a recuperation of the previous history of philosophy neglected by modernity, with a particular emphasis - for good reasons, some of the specifics of which we shall be shortly considering - on the achievements of Latin scholasticism.(7) In short, Peirce's call for a doctrine of signs, demanding a thorough overhaul of intellectual traditions and disciplines in general, even had it been more effectively promulgated in his lifetime, lent itself nowhere near so easily as Saussure's vision for semiology to a popular rallying point for journalistic indulgences. …

Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook

Abstract: Carolyne Larrington has gathered together a uniquely comprehensive collection of writing by, for and about medieval women, spanning one thousand years and Europe from Iceland to Byzantiu. The extracts are arranged thematically, dealing with the central areas of medieval women's lives and their relation to social and cultural institutions. Each section is contextualised with a brief historical introduction, and the materials span literary, historical, theological and other narrative and imaginative writing. The writings here uncover and confound the stereotype of the medieval woman as lady or virgin by demonstrating the different roles and meanings that the sign of woman occupied in the imaginative space of the medieval period.Larrington's clear and accessible editorial material and the modern English translations of all the extracts mean this work is ideally suited for students. Women and Writing in Early Europe: A Sourcebook also contains an extensive and fully up-to-date bibliography, making it not only essential reading for undergraduates and post graduates but also a valuable tool for scholars.

Beholding Art History: Vision, Place and Power

Abstract: In his book Painting as an Art, published in 1987, Richard Wollheim draws attention to the peculiarity of art history.1 Alone amongst those disciplines which deal with our cultural patrimony, the study of the visual arts stresses history over criticism, the common term for literature or music or dance studies. It is a point well worth noting. It might be said that some of the current debates which animate the field of art history pivot on the precise nature of the historical character of the visual arts. What is admissible as argument, evidence or concept, namely what social theory shapes the research or its conclusions is deeply contested. Part of the resistance from the conservative establishment against the revitalized Marxists and feminists of the second wave, the intense precisions of the structuralists and post-structuralists, the fantasies of the psychoanalyticals, is that their critical theories bring a lot of trouble into the field of vision. They make it difficult to look at art in the same old ways. The deployment of a variety of theories which interlace the visual arts with cultural sign systems or with discursive formations and ideological apparatuses are perceived by many a defender of tradition as introducing alien textualities into a virgin and pristine domain where, as with an attractive woman, all that is really required is some good hard looking.

Constraints and possibilities of performance elements in drama translation

Abstract: The double nature of theatre texts (as both literary texts and performance scripts) renders drama translation into a particularly complex task, as the translator does not only have to deal with a linguistic system but with a complex set of other sign systems. The feedback effect that every receptor produces on a translator will also be more complex than in other translation activities, since in drama texts this effect will not only come from a hypothetical reader but also from a potential director, actor and audience. As in other genres of an essentially oral nature, the communicative process in drama texts will be marked by an impression of temporariness, and the phonological level of language will make its presence felt in translation decisions, as it will have an important effect on factors such as running‐time, body‐gesture and tempo. Drama translation is also characterised by its economy since all the sign systems that constitute the play may be combined in order to solve translation problems.

The Structure and Persuasive Power of Mark: A Linguistic Approach

Abstract: The Structure and Persuasive Power of Mark: A Linguistic Approach, by John G. Cook. SBLSS. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. Pp. xviii + 384. $29.95 (paper). This book is a revision of a doctoral dissertation completed at Emory University in 1985 under the direction of William Beardslee and David Hellholm (of the University of Oslo). The book has two agendas: (1) to explicate a text-linguistic method that can provide "a modest addition to historical critical exegesis" (p. 1) and (2) to apply text-linguistic insights to the Gospel of Mark, particularly to an understanding of the structure and persuasive power of that Gospel. Text linguistics is linguistics with all of its theories, abstractions, and abstruse vocabulary. It is not philology. It is a linguistics that moves beyond the sentence and sentence grammar to the text and text grammar. An important concept is that the language system (langue) behind language in use (parole) must be envisioned as a system of interrelated elements and not as a collection of self-sufficient entities. Chapters 2 and 3 of the book explicate a text-linguistic method and apply that method in a linguistic outline of the Gospel of Mark. For his text-linguistic method, Cook draws upon the work of David Hellholm, who has synthesized the work of several linguists in order to understand the use of signs in a language-syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In his explication of semantics, Cook distinguishes between sense and reference. He sees this as an important distinction that has not yet been fully adopted by NT scholars. A given word has a conceptual meaning (sense) and can refer to an element in reality (reference). Cook reproduces the triangle developed by Stephen Ullmann as a way of modeling the distinction between the word (signifier), the concept in our understanding (signified), and the reality referred to by the word. Cook sees this triangle model as too simple and he considers the trapezium model developed by Kurt Baldinger and his student Klaus Heger as one that is more useful. The trapezium model uses a number of technical terms and allows conceptualization of additional categories and levels of abstraction. The left side of the trapezium is comparable to the left side of the triangle in that there is a sign or signeme composed of the signifiant (name or signifier, the material substance of the sign such as the sound) and a signifie (sense or signified, the content level of the sign). The right side of the trapezium is comparable to the right side of the triangle as it shows the relationship between class and seines and noems. Class corresponds to the triangle's "reference." It connotes a group of elements that exist in a logicaI class or set. Senes and noemes are not the same as the signifie but are connected with the signifie (forming the trapezium). A sene is a minimal unit of meaning in one language; a noeme is a sente that exists in two or more languages or in different stages of one language. A semenw comprises senes and together the sememes constitute a word's signifig. Signs may be examined on the level of parole, that is, as they are used in actual context. They may also be examined on the level of langue or the level of language including all systems of langue. Another technical term is "monosemization." This takes place when an interpreter chooses one meaning from among the many possible senses of the word or sign. In a less-technical section on pragmatics, Cook concentrates upon presuppositions shared by senders and receivers and on the use of language to do things. The ability of language to do things, or speech-act theory, is a major focus of the theoretical and exegetical work of Cook, Two basic techniques are introduced by Cook in the outlining of Mark. …

Meaning: an intersemiotic perspective

Abstract: Meaning is not well described as a merely linguistic notion Yet in the majority of works in semantics, what someone means by doing something is strictly separated from what a linguistic expression means, what a visual sign means, what an action means, and from what all this means What tends to be looked at is the meaning of a word, phrase, or sentence; in short, the meaning of a linguistic expression on its own or in the context of other expressions To simplify, the meaning of such an expression is then secured by showing how its structure, its syntax, is related to a broader linguistic context and a referential background This background is usually summed up as 'the world', as, for instance, in the naturalistapproach defended by Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny ( 1990) A further step in this direction is the formalization of both syntax and world into a tertium comparationis, a fully formalized language, such that natural language and world can be compared without loss or surplus This has been the arena of formal semantics which has achieved formidable complexity, a complexity, however, of a very different kind if we compare it with that found in natural languages From the work of Rudolf Carnap (eg 1967b) to that, for instance, of John N Martin (1987) the formal tradition has not only played its separate scientific language games but has also had a powerful influence on non-formal semantics

Tolstoy's use of light and dark imagery in the death of ivan il'ic

Abstract: In a recent study of the aesthetics of Tolstoy, Rimvydas Silbajoris asserts that an examination of the use of detail in Tolstoy is central to an understanding of his art, writing. "The secret of his power as a writer often resides in his ability to use an artistic language in which each single semiotic sign reveals itself upon observation as a microcosm of the whole text" (Silbajoris, 109). As Edward Wasiolek has pointed out, the significance of detail increases in the later, shorter works.1 This paper will formally analyze Tolstoy's use of light and dark imagery in one of his later stories, The Death of Ivan Il'iN. It will be shown that more or less conventional images of light and dark serve a narrative function in the text, entering systematically into an extended, figurative motif which comes to reflect the text considered as a whole.

The Resistance to French Theory in the United States: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry

Abstract: The development in recent French-American intellectual relations that I would like to examine in this essay is the strange fate of what in this country sometimes goes by the name of "French Theory." By strange, I mean that what was originally a corpus of very demanding, and more than often arcane, philosophical and critical texts from a foreign culture has given rise over the course of the last decade to one of the most hotly debated domestic issues in recent American history, carrying in its wake considerations on multiculturalism, the state of the nation's universities, and the very future of the American moral and social fabric, all topics which have far exceeded the initial, rather modest, impact of structuralism and poststructuralism on literary studies. The story of the importing of French theory in the United States is a two-step process: the dazzling success of the French philosophies of desire and of the sign during the first ten or fifteen years which followed the International Conference on Structuralism at Johns Hopkins in 1967 has given way, as we all know, to increasing resistance from various quarters of the American intellectual and even political fields. It is in this second, reactive phase that the social and cultural construction of the meaning of "France" and "French culture" played a crucial role in drawing lines of contention, filling what had hitherto been mainly a theoretical and largely academic dispute with a powerful emotional and ideological charge. I propose to examine more closely in the following pages the

Carlyle and the Economics of Terror: A Study of Revisionary Gothicism in The French Revolution

Abstract: Using Aristotle's oikonomia to establish a paradigm of wholeness and authentic engagement, Desaulniers argues that Carlyle returns language to material wholeness by insisting on situating sign within representation so that the materiality of the sign is not surrendered to the idea imposed on it. By focusing on reading as an act of Constitution within The French Revolution, she places the political crisis within a linguistic one: the Constitution becomes both a thematic and self-reflexive constituent of the linguistic process. Desaulniers concentrates on Carlyle's use of Gothic conventions, drawing upon Goethe's Faust and the Gothic romances of Maturin and Lewis. Establishing The French Revolution as a precursor to Browning's Sordello, she illustrates that the "economics" of representation remains a pivotal nineteenth-century linguistic strategy.

A Medieval Semiotic: Reference and Representation in John of St. Thomas' Theory of Signs

Abstract: This work is both an analysis of one of the most important theories on signs and signification of the Middle Ages and a spirited defense of the objectivity of knowledge. The author compares the sign theory of the medieval epistemologist John of St. Thomas to that of the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. He finds that John of St. Thomas' theory endures as the more philosophically compelling because it describes the relationship between reference and representation in a manner that shows why thought and language must be fundamentally objective. The medieval theorist stands in opposition to the subjectivism and irrationalism associated with much of current research in semiotics.

MA/Advanced Diploma in BSL/English Interpreting

Abstract: Differences between signed and spoken language and between Deaf and hearing communities may affect the nature and practice of sign language/spoken language interpreting and hence the nature of interpreter education. The University of Durham postgraduate courses on interpreting between British Sign Language (BSL) and English are profiled in this article against the background of debates and changes occurring within the sign interpreting profession and the Deaf community in Britain.

The Semiotics of Logo

Abstract: Logo is a computer language that has been located in a variety of classrooms, in a variety of experimental settings, and has been examined and interpreted from the perspective provided by a variety of discursive frames. Logo is also a sign, and Peirce's construction of iconic, indexical, and symbolic sign functions are used in this article to link Logo to one particular frame, labelled “progressive education” for the purposes of this article. It is argued that an explication of Logo's sign function contributes to the debate about Logo in so much as it allows discussants to either proceed within a common frame of language, presuppositions and constructions, or, if coming from different epistemological directions, allows discussants to challenge the language, presuppositions and constructions of opposing frames.

Emptiness and Plenitude in "Bartleby the Scrivener" and 'The Crying of Lot 49.'

Abstract: Most literary periods are defined by a number of formal, technical, and thematic devices that suggest the distinctiveness of one era in contrast to another. In this way the modern period has been construed through various disruptions in standard techniques, certain formal strategies through which the contradictory nature of the West has come to the fore, and numerous concerns for the changed status of the individual human. We have come to think of the modern era as the one in which some of the fundamental tenets of our civilization have been found at odds with other aspects of our cultures that we have tried to repress more deeply than we knew. At the same time, there has been a tendency in recent criticism to argue that all period definitions are invariably arbitrary and bankrupt, that they have been imposed by critics themselves for specific reasons that usually concern their own self-serving purposes. Reflecting modernism's own awareness of the arbitrariness of the sign, such arguments usually proceed to demonstrate how the presumed concerns of any period are more often than not the preoccupations of the critic and not the eminent domain of any particular period. This argument can in turn be reinforced by demonstrating that the putative distinctive feature of this or that period is indeed present in earlier epochs, and thus it can hardly be said to distinguish one period over another. Nevertheless, there do seem to be certain characteristics that are stressed more than others in particular periods, even if there are always precursor texts that manifest the tendencies and texts that follow after the period that also use the strategies of an earlier epoch. There are, we know, certain texts before the modern era that deliberately called attention to their fictive status - Tristram Shandy is the usual example - just as the concerns with the arbitrariness of the sign and the limitations of language have continued to preoccupy us in the contemporary period. But there is no doubt that modern novels and poems of many varieties distinguish themselves by the relentless manner in which they inquire into the nature of form and language and into that which constitutes us as human beings. Other writers have considered these subjects, and other periods have been concerned with similar formal and thematic constraints, but no period has so thoroughly explored them as the modern. In the thematic context, perhaps no modern topic has been given more consideration than the way in which we are thought to create our own selves, or to put it another way, the way in which we are ourselves finally arbitrary signs to be filled up by whatever haunts us at the moment. If the moderns called language and form into question, if they seriously considered the degree to which all utterance is devoid of ground, they also pursued the ways in which the same thing could be said of our conceptions of individual humans. Indeed, one of the great early modern texts, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," has as its main character one of the first creations to represent a sort of nothing, a void of a human who is not just a surd in the end but highly meaningful precisely because the echoes of his alienation and meaninglessness in the modern era are to be found in the employer, the reader, and anyone else who takes up space in the world we presently live in. The companion text to "Bartleby," I would argue, the one that marks the end of this modern thematic, is Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a work in which it is not the void at the center of humans that is at issue but rather the great plenitude. Both works focus on the same questions - the problem of identity in the modern world, the question of the reality of our identity, the related concerns of alienation and despair - but "Bartleby" marks these problems in terms of lack whereas Lot 49 construes them in terms of the horrifying plenitude of meaning. just as Derrida was to demonstrate that the supplementary character of language meant both that language never says enough and that it always says too much - that the problem was as much a plenitude of meanings as a lack of them - so too Pynchon shows that the problem is not that we are confronted by our own meaninglessness but rather that we are forced to deal with the fact that we have too many meanings, that we are far too rich in our plenitude to be contemplated in any bearable manner. …

First Things First: Clarifying Intention

Abstract: Two decades ago, novelist Robert Pirsig (1974) noted the confusion about what constitutes education. He began with an anecdote about a country church that had been sold and was being used as a bar. Dismayed by the electric beer sign hanging over the building's front entrance, many people complained to church officials-but rather than being outraged, the priest who responded to the criticism was irritated by their misunderstanding of what constitutes a church:

Nathalie Sarraute : une écriture de l'effraction

Abstract: This work, which deals with the integrality of nathalie sarraute's writings, tries to give a precise approach to the writer's aesthetics by placing all her formal choices under the common sign of a movement, called here "break through". The first part, dedicated to the origines of the works, also justifies the chosen point of view by focusing on the connection between the material of fiction that supplies the text with their figures and the work on the writing itself. The second part is essentially centred on the dialogue as a form, and in particular it studies the deconstruction of the narrative and of the univocal discourse induced by the choice of this narrative form. The third part is concerned with the assemblage of the different narrative moments in the space of the book (especially with repetition, that substitutes to the narration of the event the writing of the instant), and with the metaphor, which is not here a "figure", but the excess and the truth of the language. The style of the "break through writing", as we finally try to define its fundamental characteristics, appears as the movement that leads far away from the univocal : thus, nathalie sarraute's sentence figures the rhythm itself of the research, pursuing a reality that is being perceived in its instability.

Everything Old is New Again: Observations from the Nineteenth Century about Sign Communication Training with Mentally Retarded Children

Abstract: Contemporary reviews of sign communication training programs for mentally retarded children indicate that such programs are of recent origin. Examination of an 1847 report by W. R. Scott, however, reveals that sign communication training with mentally retarded children was used successfully during the last century. The children in Scott’s report were described as acquiring signs and demonstrating improvement in their personal and social behavior. These findings are similar to those reported in recent research. It is not clear why this promising approach was not more widely adopted, although biases last century against sign language and negative characterizations of mentally retarded children probably contributed to its disappearance. The efficacy of sign communication training was to be re-discovered more than a century after Scott’s report.

Rules and Methods: Die Grammatikalisierung von Sprach- und Dichtungstheorien im England des 17. Jahrhunderts

Abstract: The concept of an English baroque age has been largely rejected in English, American and, more recently, in German literary and cultural studies. This refusal is mainly based on the process of change from medieval to modern perceptions of the universe and of society - a process which develops differently in England in comparison to continental Europe. The modulation of perceptions can be understood in terms of a shift from a paradigmatically to a syntagmatically organised construction of reality. At its core this process of change involves the substitution of the medieval system of eternal equivalences by the modern objectivation of reality whereby objects are perceived and arranged according to the categories of identity and difference. One major consequence of this shift in patterns of thought is marked by the desire to represent the new mental order in a new order of signs. Such a transformation of mentalities had immediate consequences for contemporary theories of language and literature. By using the writings of Francis Bacon and John Locke as delimiting boundary marks of seven-teenth-century critical discourse it is argued in this paper that the characteristic tendency for representation is realised through rule-governed approaches to language and to literature whereby linguistic practices are increasingly subjected to the process of grammaticalisation. The notion of developing grammars for human behaviour which is characteristic for all fields of seventeenth-century social interaction is, however, far from uniform. As is argued in this paper linguistic theory shows a strong tendency towards reforming the English language according to rules whereby simplicity is discovered as the new linguistic ideal, notably by experiments with universal languages as carried out by the Royal Society. On the other hand, literary theory seeks to reform the English language by refining its standards so as to be able to compete culturally with other European nations. The result is a fierce battle of discourses on linguistic ideals and literary practices. Ultimately, the conflicting theoretical approaches are largely reconciled by the philosophy of John Locke whose concept of the arbitrary sign and the accompanying notion of the communicative contract put an end to seventeenth-century controversies and prepare the discoursive strategies of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

The difficulties of learning fingerspelling: an experimental investigation with hearing adult learners

Abstract: Fingerspelling is used to support sign languages, providing a means by which words without signs may be communicated. As with signing itself, it has often been reported that learners find greater d...