Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 2009"

Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs

Abstract: Recent debates surrounding the teaching of biology divide participants into three camps based on how they explain the appearance of the human race: evolution, creationism, or intelligent design. "Biosemiotics" discovers an intriguing higher ground respecting those opposing theories by arguing that questions of meaning and experiential life can be integrated into the scientific study of nature. This innovative book shows how the linguistic powers of humans suggest that consciousness emerges in the evolutionary process and that life is based on sign action, not just molecular interaction. "Biosemiotics" will be essential reading for anyone interested in the nexus of linguistic possibility and biological reality.

Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology

Abstract: Theses on the semiotic study of life as presented here provide a collectively formulated set of statements on what biology needs to be focused on in order to describe life as a process based on semiosis, or signaction. An aim of the biosemiotic approach is to explain how life evolves through all varieties of forms of communication and signification (including cellular adaptive behavior, animal communication, and human intellect) and to provide tools for grounding sign theories. We introduce the concept of semiotic threshold zone and analyze the concepts of semiosis, function, umwelt, and the like as the basic concepts for theoretical biology.

Visual intonation in the prosody of a sign language.

Abstract: While visual signals that accompany spoken language serve to augment the communicative message, the same visual ingredients form the substance of the linguistic system in sign languages. This article provides an analysis of visual signals that comprise part of the intonational system of a sign language. The system is conveyed mainly by particular actions of the upper face, and is shown to pattern linguistically and predictably in Israeli Sign Language. Its components, aligned with prosodic constituents, are associated with particular but general meanings and may be combined to derive complex meanings. The Brow Raise component is functionally comparable to H tones, signaling continuation and dependency, and characterizing yes/no questions and the if-clause of conditionals, for example. The component Squint instructs the addressee to retrieve information that is not readily accessible, and characterizes relative clauses, topics, and other structures. The details of the componential analysis proposed here explain why the two components together co-occur on such seemingly diverse structures as yes/no questions about mutually retrievable information and counterfactual conditionals. Like auditorily perceived intonational melodies, the visual intonational arrays in sign language provide a subtle, intricately structured, and meaningful accompaniment to the words and sentences of language.

The link between form and meaning in American Sign Language: lexical processing effects.

Abstract: Signed languages exploit iconicity (the transparent relationship between meaning and form) to a greater extent than spoken languages. where it is largely limited to onomatopoeia. In a picture-sign matching experiment measuring reaction times, the authors examined the potential advantage of iconicity both for 1st- and 2nd-language learners of American Sign Language (ASL). The results show that native ASL signers are faster to respond when a specific property iconically represented in a sign is made salient in the corresponding picture, thus providing evidence that a closer mapping between meaning and form can aid in lexical retrieval. While late 2nd-language learners appear to use iconicity as an aid to learning sign (R. Campbell, P. Martin, & T. White, 1992), they did not show the same facilitation effect as native ASL signers, suggesting that the task tapped into more automatic language processes. Overall, the findings suggest that completely arbitrary mappings between meaning and form may not be more advantageous in language and that, rather, arbitrariness may simply be an accident of modality.

The semiotic hierarchy: life, consciousness, signs and language

Abstract: This article outlines a general theory of meaning, The Semiotic Hierarchy, which distinguishes between four major levels in the organization of meaning: life, consciousness, sign function and language, where each of these, in this order, both rests on the previous level, and makes possible the attainment of the next. This is shown to be one possible instantiation of the Cognitive Semiotics program, with influences from phenomenology, Popper’s tripartite ontology, semiotics, linguistics, enactive cognitive science and evolutionary biology. Key concepts such as “language” and “sign” are defined, as well as the four levels of The Semiotic Hierarchy, on the basis of the type of (a) subject, (b) value-system and (c) world in which the subject is embedded. Finally, it is suggested how the levels can be united in an evolutionary framework, assuming a strong form of emergence giving rise to “ontologically” new properties: consciousness, signs and languages, on the basis of a semiotic, though not standardly biosemiotic, understanding of life.

Language Economy and Linguistic Landscape

Abstract: Language in its written form speaks to us from numerous signs in the public space. In residential areas we may just find street signs, texts on mailboxes or nameplates, but in commercial streets there is an abundance of signs. Many of those signs are put there with economic considerations in mind (Color Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The signs may inform us about the location of a store or the kinds of products that can be bought at that location. Many are advertisements which contain a message that try to convince us to buy a certain product. According to the American Signmakers Association, a good sign for a business is plainly worth a lot of money (Claus 2002). In this contribution we are going to look at the economic side of the environmental print that makes up the linguistic landscape (LL).

Visual Information for Everyday Use: Design and Research Perspectives

Abstract: Methods and methodology user instructions, contents and format warnings forms public forms tables - developing design through dialogue maps and plans wayfinding, signs and sign systems - graphic symbols - design and evaluation of graphic symbols.

Interpreting Meaning: An Application of Peircean Semiotics to Tourism

Abstract: In the background of Dean MacCannell's work on tourists lay the semiotic theory of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce. Peirce's writings are voluminous, at times contradictory and, yet, his theory of semiotics is worth examining for what it can bring to the theorizing of tourism. This paper offers an introduction to Peirce's theory, the essential notion of how signs function, the three parts that constitute a sign – the object, representamen and interpretant – and the way in which the sign relates to its object either iconically, indexically or symbolically. Unlike Saussurian semiotics, which is based in linguistics, Peirce's concept of sign extends beyond the simple arbitrary relationship of a concept to its name and, hence, is far more applicable to explaining how we cognize objects within the physical environment.

Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign

Abstract: Multimodal media make meaning by intersecting the semiotic resources of language, visual display, sound and music, cinematic movement, material artifacts, and abstract animation. As meaning-makers, we live across institutions and media and we make meanings that no single medium or institution can control. Transmedia franchises pursue us, colonizing the chronotopes of postmodern life to array the branded content of their media products everywhere we look and go. Social semiotics provides a foundation for critical multimedia analysis that can reach beyond the internal multimodality of individual works to grasp the social meanings of transmedia franchises and trans-institutional lives. In doing so, I argue that it must reengage with the larger intellectual project of formulating a political economy of the sign.

La eficacia simbólica

Abstract: In his seminal text The Symbolic Efficacy, Claude Levi-Straus carries out an analysis of the shamanic rituals among the Kuna Indians provided to assist women in a difficult labour. He wondered about this particular efficiency, for which he coined the phrase symbolic efficacy. The present paper focuses on a critical review of the said text from the perspective of a theory of the symbolic. Firstly, a differential definition of notions such as sign and symbol, meaning and sense, and semiotic efficacy and symbolic efficiency is made. Then, myth symbolic function is reconsidered by assuming that symbolic stories play a determining role in subjectivity conformation.

Three Types of Semiosis

Abstract: The existence of different types of semiosis has been recognized, so far, in two ways. It has been pointed out that different semiotic features exist in different taxa and this has led to the distinction between zoosemiosis, phytosemiosis, mycosemiosis, bacterial semiosis and the like. Another type of diversity is due to the existence of different types of signs and has led to the distinction between iconic, indexical and symbolic semiosis. In all these cases, however, semiosis has been defined by the Peirce model, i.e., by the idea that the basic structure is a triad of ‘sign, object and interpretant’, and that interpretation is an essential component of semiosis. This model is undoubtedly applicable to animals, since it was precisely the discovery that animals are capable of interpretation that allowed Thomas Sebeok to conclude that they are also capable of semiosis. Unfortunately, however, it is not clear how far the Peirce model can be extended beyond the animal kingdom, and we already know that we cannot apply it to the cell. The rules of the genetic code have been virtually the same in all living systems and in all environments ever since the origin of life, which clearly shows that they do not depend on interpretation. Luckily, it has been pointed out that semiosis is not necessarily based on interpretation and can be defined exclusively in terms of coding. According to the ‘code model’, a semiotic system is made of signs, meanings and coding rules, all produced by the same codemaker, and in this form it is immediately applicable to the cell. The code model, furthermore, allows us to recognize the existence of many organic codes in living systems, and to divide them into two main types that here are referred to as manufacturing semiosis and signalling semiosis. The genetic code and the splicing codes, for example, take part in processes that actually manufacture biological objects, whereas signal transduction codes and compartment codes organize existing objects into functioning supramolecular structures. The organic codes of single cells appeared in the first three billion years of the history of life and were involved either in manufacturing semiosis or in signalling semiosis. With the origin of animals, however, a third type of semiosis came into being, a type that can be referred to as interpretive semiosis because it became closely involved with interpretation. We realize in this way that the contribution of semiosis to life was far greater than that predicted by the Peirce model, where semiosis is always a means of interpreting the world. Life is essentially about three things: (1) it is about manufacturing objects, (2) it is about organizing objects into functioning systems, and (3) it is about interpreting the world. The idea that these are all semiotic processes, tells us that life depends on semiosis much more deeply and extensively than we thought. We realize in this way that there are three distinct types of semiosis in Nature, and that they gave very different contributions to the origin and the evolution of life.

Methods and procedures in sign language acquisition studies

Abstract: Sign language acquisition is a relatively new field and is still developing its own good practice. This paper gives an overview of the most common procedures in research design, choice of subjects, transcription and documentation. The paper concludes with a brief overview of the chronology of development of sign languages.

Introduction: An Evolutionary History of Biosemiotics

Abstract: The present chapter is intended to provide an introductory overview to the history of biosemiotics, contextualizing that history within and against the larger currents of philosophical and scientific thinking from which it has emerged. Accordingly, to explain the origins of this most 21st century endeavour requires effectively tracing - at least to the level of a thumbnail sketch - how the "sign" con- cept appeared, was lost, and now must be painstakingly rediscovered and refined in science. In the course of recounting this history, this chapter also introduces much of the conceptual theory underlying the project of biosemiotics, and is therefore intended to serve also as a kind of primer to the readings that appear in the rest of the volume. With this purpose in mind, the chapter consists of the successive examination of: (1) the history of the sign concept in pre-modernist science, (2) the history of the sign concept in modernist science, and (3) the biosemiotic attempt to develop a more useful sign concept for contemporary science. The newcomer to biosemiotics is encouraged to read through this chapter (though lengthy and of necessity still incomplete) before proceeding to the rest of the volume. For only by doing so will the disparate selections appearing herein reveal their common unity of purpose, and only within this larger historical context can the contemporary attempt to develop a naturalistic understanding of sign relations be properly evaluated and understood.

New Considerations on the Proper Study of Man – and, marginally, some other animals

Abstract: In order to differentiate the semiotic capacities of animals and human beings we need to understand more exactly what these properties are. Instead of identifying all vehicles of meaning with signs, we certainly have to specify the notion of sign, but it will also be necessary to provide an inventory of other kinds of meaning, starting out from perception, and going through a number of intermediate notions such as affordances, markers, and surrogates before reaching signs and sign systems. This essay proposes a phenomenological description of a few kinds of meaning, which is not meant to be exhaustive, but still should give an idea of the complexity of the task. It suggests that not only the setting up of semiotic levels and hierarchies of evolution and development, but even, to some extent, the comparison of the capacities of animals and human beings must go hand in hand with advances in phenomenological observations.

A study of sign language coarticulation

Abstract: This paper presents a coarticulation-modeling project in French Sign Language (LSF). We briefly introduce what sign language is about and why we study a specific part of it: to coarticulate isolated signs in order to create parameterized utterances. Then we explain what coarticulation means and how it has been studied in several research fields. We describe the methodology we have set up to reach our goal: creation of sign corpora, annotations of these corpora, analysis of these annotations, and finally design of a coarticulation model. The evaluation process will be made by different kind of people in various pieces of software.

Multimedia Courses Generator for Deaf Children

Abstract: In this paper, we present an environment developed in the research laboratory of technologies of information and communication (13) of the university of Tunis to aid deaf people in improving their social integration and communication capabilities. In fact, it is proved that sign language is not innate at deaf children and therefore it needs methodic and specific training. In this context, our environment is a specialized Learning Content Management System that generates multimedia courses to teach and learn sign language. According to our survey we did not find an Learning Content Management System witch can help teachers to generate courses to person with hearing disability. Moreover our tool is original in case that the sign animation is generated automatically from a textual description. The generated courses can be used either by deaf pupils to learn (or e-learn) sign language or also by hearing people to be able to communicate with deaf people. This educational environment uses mainly a web-based interpreter of sign language developed in our research laboratory and called websign (2, 6). It is a tool that permits to interpret automatically written texts in visual-gestured-spatial language using avatar technology.

Levels of Cybersemiotics: Possible Ontologies of signification

Abstract: In this article, it is argued that, in the making of a transdisciplinary theory of signification and communication for living, human, social and technological systems, C. S. Peirce’s semiotics is the only one that deals systematically in an evolutionary perspective with non-conscious intentional signs of the body as well as with language. Thus – in competition with the information processing paradigm of cognitive science – this conception naturally gives rise to biosemiotics. This development has also spawned an interest in the possibility of defining levels of signification. The Cybersemiotic approach proposed in the present article integrates Luhmann’s triple autopoietic theory of communication with pragmatic theories of levels and types of semiosis such as Intrasemiotics (between the psychic system and the biological self) and Thought-semiotics: the linguistic creation of a systematic and generative classification of the phenomenological, “silent” sign world. Finally a model of phenomenological reflection over “the hard problem of consciousness” called The Semiotic Star is suggested.

Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers: Popular Music in the Digital Hypermodern

Abstract: It has been almost twenty years since Andrew Goodwin's classic essay, 'Sample and Hold', claimed that pop music had entered a new phase of digital reproduction. (1) If the digital sampler was postmodernism's musical engine, then hip hop was its recombinant form, and the erosion of divisions between original and copy the celebrated consequence. Popular music had become an engorged repository of itself, its history ransacked as source material for a kind of stitched-together melange of past fragments. For Goodwin, sampling had undermined received ideas of human creativity and craft, deconstructing notions of the romantic author and pouring into pop a distinctly post-human sensibility. In fact, as divisions between human creativity and machinic automation blurred, it became impossible to tell whether a sound had been produced manually, synthesized or reproduced digitally. The 'strange case' of the handclap was a particularly postmodern parable. Techno musicians had favoured the sound of a first-generation synthetic clap produced by the Roland TR-808 drum machine over a more natural-sounding successor provided by Roland's TR-707 because the former, while sonically non-mimetic, had become the 'real' signature of electronic music. In other words, the synthetic sign had replaced the organic referent to become the 'real'. In which case, digitalisation accompanied a wholesale transformation towards postmodern culture as a regime of surface over depth and play over seriousness. (2) But an air of ambiguity pervades Goodwin's essay, and rightly so. As he puts it, 'pop might be eating itself, but the old ideologies and aesthetics are still on the menu' (p272). Indeed, to this day, discourses of authorship and authenticity continue to lubricate pop's sense of itself as trading in talent and originality, while 'aura', far from disappearing, is alive and well in attitudes to the immediacy and presence of the live performer. Meanwhile, the co-mingling of analogue and digital technologies in the studios and bedrooms of musicians is testament to the complex interweavings of socio-technical forms and their convergence in practice, while a distinctly 'modern' medium, vinyl, continues to be valorised by DJs as containing 'warm' qualities flattened by digital reproduction. Hardly postmodern then, if the prefix is taken seriously as a wholesale departure from the conventions, practices and forms of the modern era. Indeed, we might speculate, twenty years after the orgy, that the term postmodern was always a lazy, totalising and fashionable shorthand that could never have captured the full complexity and range of phenomena it was supposed to cover. In this essay I want to examine music's technological mediations, linking this to more recent attempts to theorise the shifting nature of contemporary popular music. The basic argument is that we can learn a lot about where we are in the history of popular music by looking at conditions of cultural production, not merely at single styles, techniques or devices such as the sampler. I want to suggest that an examination of recent production techniques and technologies labelled 'digital' can tell us significant things about contemporary musical cultures, including how they are meeting broader tendencies towards flexibility and de-materialisation in social practices at large, but that this meeting takes place in an extended moment of cultural acceleration and intensity--a hypermodern moment. This moves music onto terrains that threaten, stretch and play with boundaries between human and machine, as well as real and simulated, although not always in expected ways. The focus of attention will be on digital recording practices and changing forms of musical creativity, not merely because so much attention has been heaped upon the digital--in music, in characterisations of so-called 'network economies', in the business of globalisation and the rise of new media--but also because it is an apposite time to grasp Walter Benjamin's 'now of recognisability' and assess how these technologies align with new and old habits of thought and practice, before they slip unnoticed into convention. …

Interformative meaning of signs: brand naming and globalization in China

Abstract: This article looks at how global and local values are interformed in the linguistic signs of global brands transposed in China. The data under study here consist of a variety of American global brand transpositions collected from Chinese websites, newspapers, magazines, and television. A close examination of these Chinese transpositions reveals that American brands are transposed in three different methods: phonetic, semantic, and phonosemantic. Drawing on the social semiotic approach, this study attempts to explicate the specific ways in which the Confucian views of the interconnection between sign and reality are signified in the globally stylish signifiers of the US brands. It is argued that global brand transposition is a process of semiotic construction in which global and local cultures converge into a unique system of signification in China.

Troubles with trichotomies: Reflections on the utility of Peirce's sign trichotomies for social analysis

Abstract: This essay assesses the potentials and limitations of using Peirce's trichotomies of sign classes for social analysis, first, by examining selective applications of the model that rely primarily on the Icon-Index-Symbol division and, second, by exploring several extensions that move beyond a strict interpretation of Peirce. While process and complexity are shown to be not as productive as hoped, metasemiotic metaphors of replication are examined as the key to the creative power of indexicality.

Sign-Gesture Symbiosis in Brazilian Sign Language Narrative

Abstract: In sign language linguistics, the tendency to maintain a categorical distinction between the gestural and the verbal has made it difficult to solve persistent problems in the description of sign language grammar and discourse. Discourse coherence and often syntactic relations appear to be at least as much a result of gestural contributions as of purely verbal structures, such that no analysis of the strictly verbal elements can fully account for the construction of text. Liddell (2003) broke new ground by showing how the blending theory of Fauconnier and Turner (2002) can account for signing resources that are neither wholly verbal nor wholly gestural. Our study contributes to this approach by highlighting the complex array of integrated resources that signers make use of in producing richly informative, grammatically cohesive, and artful texts. By analyzing a scene in a signed "pear story" narrative and comparing it to the filmed original (Chafe 1980), we show how gestures and verbal elements of varying degrees of conventionality work tightly together to mutually catalize their expressive potentials. Neither gesture alone nor lexical signs alone would be able to produce the kind of discourse sophistication that we find in naturally-occurring texts. More of the burden of conceptualization of events and of discourse coherence in signed narrative is carried by the expressive and scene-creating possibilities of the signer's body in space. On this view, verbal and syntactic elements can be understood as cues to referential categories within an enacted scene.

On the legal status of sign languages: a commented compilation of resources

Abstract: This brief article reviews printed and digital resources on the legal status of a sign language.

Systematicity and arbitrariness in novel communication systems

Abstract: Systematicity and Arbitrariness in Novel Communication Systems Carrie Ann Theisen (C.A.Theisen@sms.ed.ac.uk) School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK Jon Oberlander (jon@inf.ed.ac.uk) School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK Simon Kirby (simon@ling.ed.ac.uk) Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, University of Edinburgh Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, UK Abstract Human languages include vast numbers of learned, arbitrary signal-meaning mappings but also many complex signal- meaning mappings that are systematically related to each other (i.e. not arbitrary). Although arbitrariness and systematicity are clearly related, the development of the two in communication systems has been explored independently. We present an experiment in which participants invent signs from scratch to refer to a set of real concepts that share semantic features. Through interaction, the systematic re-use of arbitrary elements emerges. Keywords: arbitrariness; systematicity; signs; language evolution; emergent communication Introduction Two of language’s most fascinating properties, arbitrariness and systematicity, characterize the nature of the mappings between signals and meanings. A sign is arbitrary when there is no inherent relationship between the signal and its meaning. For example, the sounds in the word “house” have nothing to do with what the word means. In contrast, some subsets of signs in a language are systematic, in that signals for similar meanings share an element. The referring expressions “big house”, “red house”, “big apple”, and “red apple” are an example. In language, words are often arbitrary while multi-word phrases are systematic. How does this property, the systematic re-use of arbitrary elements, emerge in communication systems? Recent experimental work has shown that people are able to successfully communicate in the absence of conventional communication systems, often by creating novel signs. (de Ruiter et al., 2007; Galantucci, 2005; Garrod et al., 2007; Healey et al., 2002; Scott-Phillips, 2009). The first signs people produce in these situations are often not arbitrary, but rather iconic or motivated in some other way. (Galantucci, 2005; Garrod et al., 2007) Psycholinguistic work has demonstrated how referring expressions can change during dialogue. (Garrod & Doherty, 1994; Pickering & Garrod, 2004). In particular, conversational partners collaborate to establish definite references, and allowing their referring expressions to shorten. (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986). This simplification causes iconic signs in novel communication systems to become more arbitrary. (Garrod et al., 2007) Kirby (2001) demonstrated how, given a set of arbitrary signs, systematicity might evolve. Simple artificial agents learn sets of signs and detect chance regularities in them (e.g., that the words for two red items both contain the syllable “ka”). Over many generations of agents producing signals for new meanings (meanings they didn’t learn signals for) according to the regularities they observed, a set of signs can become systematic. Kirby et al. (2008) confirmed the result in human experimental participants. Taking these two lines of research together, we have one route to the systematic re-use of arbitrary elements: people generate signs that are non-arbitrary, those signs become arbitrary as they simplify, by chance there are a few signal- meaning regularities, generations of people propagate these regularities, and the language becomes systematic. It’s this longer history of a communication system, from the birth of the first sign to a set of signs which systematically re-uses arbitrary elements, that the current work aims to explore. Goldin-Meadow et al. (1995)’s study on the emergence of systematicity in homesign (gestures created by deaf, non- signing children for use with their caretakers) covers this range. They found that, in the early stages of the homesign systems, a particular value of a particular gesture component (such as a 1” distance between the thumb and index finger) was used in gestures for just one object. In the later stages, the homesigners apparently collapsed some distinctions between objects and applied some values of gesture components to more than one object, increasing the systematicity of his or her set of gestures. This work shows that systematicity doesn’t require complete arbitrariness – the recurrences between signal components and meaning components weren’t chance. Unfortunately, we cannot know whether homesigners systems would have been systematic from the earliest stages, given similar-enough objects. Here we present an exploration of the emergence of the systematic re-use of arbitrary elements in one controlled experiment. In this way, we can probe the relationship between systematicity and arbitrariness as communication systems develop.

Peirce, phenomenology and semiotics

Abstract: Semiotics (or semeiotics) is a field of research that began in earnest with the innovative thought of Charles Sanders Peirce but that only began to be explored within mainstream disciplines in the late 1930s (for the history of sign theory and precursors to Peirce’s semiotics see Deely 2001a). At the opening of the twentieth century, Josiah Royce at Harvard, and a few philosophers in Europe, gave some attention to Peirce’s theory of signs, but it was in the 1930s and 40s that the Unity of Science philosophers, largely at the urging of Charles Morris, recognized the importance of the systematic study of signs and of sign relations and, through Morris’s influence on Carnap, incorporated a limited form of Peirce’s tripartite science into philosophy with their famous trilogy: syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. But semiotics, as a complete science, soon became marginalized and largely abandoned by philosophy and it survived by finding refuge in linguistics and in the interdisciplinary research programme founded by Morris’s student, Thomas A. Sebeok. During the last generation, with the weakening of the hegemony of Analytic philosophy, semiotics has shown evidence of returning to philosophy and other established disciplines; this is especially true in Europe and South America. It remains to be seen if semiotics will survive as an interdisciplinary field of research as Sebeok believed it should be, or if it will evolve into a discipline in its own right, as seems to be happening with informatics, or if it will devolve into a variety of discipline-specific programmes.

Temporalidade e espacialidade na estrutura do self nas abordagens semiótica e dialógica

Abstract: The main goal of this article is to introduce to a critical account of two communicative approaches on phenomenon of self: semiotic self and dialogical self theoretical frameworks. Both perspectives are analyzed separately and then compared. One argues that differences on space-temporal dimension of the self in each theory imply distinct epistemology and ontology. Although both perspectives work with the sign that is the conversational (or dialogical) perception of meaning, and the functionality (or pragmatics) of expression, different assumptions concerning the culture influences set different places for both theories. The semiotic perspective turns to the phenomenon's functionality and sets a research context embedded on psychology of basic process, supported by evolutionary ontology concerned to self as meaning creator. The dialogical perspective turns to the applicability of the concept and sets an applied research context directed towards clinical psychology and supported by metaphoric and romantic ontology concerned to dialogue among self positions.

Are clefts contagious in conversation

Abstract: It is well known that conversationalists often imitate their own body language as a sign of closeness and empathy. This study shows that in spontaneous, unplanned conversation, speakers go as far as emulating each other's grammar. The use of a family of focusing constructions (namely, the cleft), such as it was my mother who rang the other day, or what I meant to say was that he should go Thursday, was investigated in a corpus of conversation excerpts in New Zealand English. Findings show that clefting is contagious. In other words, if one speaker uses a cleft, others will be likely to do so too.

"Valor de Marca" para quem? Rumo a uma teoria da significação das marcas pelos consumidores

Abstract: Lately, discussions on brands have gained an outstanding space in the marketing literature, above all through the concept of brand equity. However, in spite of seeing a great effort in thinking the importance of brands for organizations, we question what is the importance of brands for persons. Reflecting on this, we developed the present critical theoretical essay. Departing from a post-modern position, in that we assume the consumer as a homo symbolicus, we approached the construction of brand meanings. For such, we discuss the problem of signification, assuming the notion of "language-in-use", that sustains that any sign acquires meaning just when it is used by speakers. After a sweeping in the state of the art brand literature, we conclude that there is a semantic vision concerning brand meaning, in that, it is assumed, the possibility of attributing a prior meaning to them. Alternatively, we propose a theory in that the significance of brands comes from consumers' as they use them in their daily lives through language. We also poised possible methodological roads for investigations of this nature.

Justifications for a perceptually oriented theory of language

Abstract: The paper identifies three dominant traditions in the theorisation of language responsible for a 19th century bias towards formalisation. What is glaringly missing, the paper suggests, is iconicity in Peirce’s sense. This is seen as the main reason why our existing paradigms have failed to address the crucial relation between language and perception. First, I offer a series of justifications in support of a perceptually oriented theory of natural language. Second, I present redefinitions of the linguistic sign, meaning, reference, deixis and other aspects of language as necessary preconditions for a reconciliation of percepts and verbal expressions. Such a theory hinges on the claim that culturally saturated discourse can function as it does only because the schematic skeleton of its signifiers is brought to life in each meaning event by a socially monitored process of activation by iconic, nonverbal semiosis.

Hearing deafness: Subjectness, articulateness and communicability

Abstract: I am deaf, not culturally Deaf. I am not a member of the signing, cultural Deaf American community; I lip-read and speak and do not sign. My access to language or the ability to use speech, strictly defined, defines me and my status as an actor with social abilities within the hearing world. Without it, I would remain a largely isolated, noncommunicable entity deemed unsuitable for social life. In fact, the ability to communicate, along definite scripts, defines all of us, not only me. Communication, primarily defined as speech, has been the basis of all social life from ancient times. Aristotle still resonates among us today, and everyday, when he says that humans are animals with language, that the ability to communicate through language as speech (logos) distinguishes humans from animals.1 ‘A will to speech’ (Brueggemann 1999) metaphysic has dominated and driven how society awards and withholds the subject status to individuals; moreover, as I argue, this will to speech manifests itself not simply in the spoken word, but rather in the articulately spoken word. One must use clear and distinct speech in order to be heard and listened to.2 Articulateness, the paradigmatic embodiment of the rhetorical will to speech, displaces and supersedes one’s subjectness when introduced to the bodies of the deaf, or to the bodies of others with ‘communication disorders,’ because of how articulateness defines subjectivity.