Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 2016"

Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786 1914

Abstract: In her reappraisal of canonical works such as Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, Wind in the Willows, and Peter Rabbit, Tess Cosslett traces how nineteenth-century debates about the human and animal intersected with, or left their mark on, the venerable genre of the animal story written for children. Effortlessly applying a range of critical approaches, from Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque to feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical theory, she raises important questions about the construction of the child reader, the qualifications of the implied author, and the possibilities of children's literature compared with literature written for adults. Perhaps most crucially, Cosslett examines how the issues of animal speech and animal subjectivity were managed, at a time when the possession of language and consciousness had become a vital sign of the difference between humans and animals. Topics of great contemporary concern, such as the relation of the human and the natural, masculine and feminine, child and adult, are investigated within their nineteenth-century contexts, making this an important book for nineteenth-century scholars, children's literature specialists, and historians of science and childhood.

Internet memes as internet signs: A semiotic view of digital culture

Abstract: This article argues for a clearer framework of internet-based “memes”. The science of memes, dubbed ‘memetics’, presumes that memes remain “copying units” following the popularisation of the concept in Richard Dawkins’ celebrated work, The Selfish Gene (1976). Yet Peircean semiotics and biosemiotics can challenge this doctrine of information transmission. While supporting a precise and discursive framework for internet memes, semiotic readings reconfigure contemporary formulations to the – now-established – conception of memes. Internet memes can and should be conceived, then, as habit-inducing sign systems incorporating processes involving asymmetrical variation. So, drawing on biosemiotics, Tartu-Moscow semiotics, and Peircean semiotic principles, and through a close reading of the celebrated 2011 Internet meme Rebecca Black’s Friday , this article proposes a working outline for the definition of internet memes and its applicability for the semiotic analysis of texts in new media communication.

Towards user-intuitive web interface sign design and evaluation

Abstract: Although signs like navigation links, small images, buttons and thumbnails are important elements of web user interfaces, they are often poorly understood. Based on data gathered over a 3-year period (2011-2013) making use of observations in a usability testing lab, by expert review and by structured and semi-structured interviewing users, we developed a Semiotic Interface sign Design and Evaluation (SIDE) framework, consisting of five semiotic layers: syntactic, pragmatic, social, environment and semantic. The framework includes an extended set of determinants and heuristics, based on four empirical studies that help practitioners design and evaluate intuitive interface signs that can be accurately interpreted by users with less effort. Find the underlying features of users' interpretations of web interface signs.Discover the semiotic features to design and evaluation of web interface signs.Propose a semiotic framework for user-intuitive interface sign design and evaluation.A set of semiotic heuristics for user-intuitive interface sign design is proposed.

Taking meaning in hand : Iconic motivations in two-handed signs

Abstract: Traditionally in sign language research, the issue of whether a lexical sign is articulated with one hand or two has been treated as a strictly phonological matter. We argue that accounting for two ...

The Forbidden Signs

Abstract: While the field of semiotics has been active since it was started by Peirce, it appears like the last decade has been especially productive with a number of important new concepts being developed within the biosemiotics community. The novel concept of the Semiotic scaffold by Hoffmeyer is an important addition that offers insight into the hardware requirements for bio-semiosis. As any type of semiosis must be dependent upon Semiotic scaffolds, I recently argued that the process of semiosis has to be divided into two separate processes of sign establishment and sign interpretation, and that misalignment between the two processes result in faulty sign interpretation and over-signification. Such faulty signs were forbidden in the sign classification system of Peirce, so I defined them as forbidden signs. Here I present an analysis of the forbidden sign categories with examples from Occult semiotics. I also show that biological semiosis offers examples of forbidden signs, where the faulty interpretation of signs may lead to decimation of whole evolutionary lines of organisms. A new concept of Evolutionary memory which is applicable to both human and biological semiosis is explained as the combination of two processes; one leading to diversity generation within semiotic scaffolds followed by a second process of decimation of faulty signs during selection in specific learning environments. The analysis suggests that forbidden signs are always used as early stages in the iterative sign establishment process during semiosis.

BosphorusSign: a Turkish sign language recognition corpus in health and finance domains

Abstract: There are as many sign languages as there are deaf communities in the world. Linguists have been collecting corpora of different sign languages and annotating them extensively in order to study and understand their properties. On the other hand, the field of computer vision has approached the sign language recognition problem as a grand challenge and research efforts have intensified in the last 20 years. However, corpora collected for studying linguistic properties are often not suitable for sign language recognition as the statistical methods used in the field require large amounts of data. Recently, with the availability of inexpensive depth cameras, groups from the computer vision community have started collecting corpora with large number of repetitions for sign language recognition research. In this paper, we present the BosphorusSign Turkish Sign Language corpus, which consists of 855 sign and phrase samples from the health, finance and everyday life domains. The corpus is collected using the state-of-the-art Microsoft Kinect v2 depth sensor, and will be the first in this sign language research field. Furthermore, there will be annotations rendered by linguists so that the corpus will appeal both to the linguistic and sign language recognition research communities.

Information Structure in Sign Languages

Abstract: This chapter demonstrates that the Information Structure notions Topic and Focus are relevant for sign languages, just as they are for spoken languages. Data from various sign languages reveal that, across sign languages, Information Structure is encoded by syntactic and prosodic strategies, often in combination. As for topics, we address the familiar semantic (e.g. aboutness vs. scene-setting topic) and syntactic (e.g. moved vs. base-generated topic) classifications in turn and we also discuss the possibility of topic stacking. As for focus, we show how information, contrastive, and emphatic focus is linguistically encoded. For both topic and focus constructions, special attention is given to the role of non-manual markers, that is, specific eyebrow and head movements that signal the information structure status of constituents. Finally, aspects that appear to be unique to languages in the visual-gestural modality are highlighted.

The "Face with Tears of Joy" Emoji. A Socio-Semiotic and Multimodal Insight into a Japan-America Mash-Up

Abstract: The blog site of the Oxford Dictionaries features a post dated November 16 2015, which announces that, “for the first time ever”, their “Word of the Year” is not a word, but a pictograph: the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji . The term emoji , which is a loanword from Japanese, identifies “a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication” (OED 2015). The sign was chosen since it is the item that “best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015”. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionaries’ President, Caspar Grathwohl declared that emojis are “an increasingly rich form of communication that transcends linguistic borders” and reflects the “playfulness and intimacy” of global digital culture. Adopting a socio-semiotic multimodal approach, the present paper aims at decoding the many semantic and semiotic layers of the 2015 “Word of the Year”, with a special focus on the context of cultures out of which it originates. More in detail, the author will focus on the concept of translation as “transduction”, that is the movement of meaning across sign systems (Kress 1997), in order to map the history of this ‘pictographic word’ from language to language, from culture to culture, from niche discursive communities to the global scenario. Indeed, the author maintains that this ‘pictographic word’ is to be seen as a marker of the mashing up of Japanese and American cultures in the discursive practices of geek communities, now gone mainstream thanks to the spreading of digital discourse.

Computational power and generative capacity of genetic systems.

Abstract: Semiotic characteristics of genetic sequences are based on the general principles of linguistics formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure, such as the arbitrariness of sign and the linear nature of the signifier. Besides these semiotic features that are attributable to the basic structure of the genetic code, the principle of generativity of genetic language is important for understanding biological transformations. The problem of generativity in genetic systems arises to a possibility of different interpretations of genetic texts, and corresponds to what Alexander von Humboldt called "the infinite use of finite means". These interpretations appear in the individual development as the spatiotemporal sequences of realizations of different textual meanings, as well as the emergence of hyper-textual statements about the text itself, which underlies the process of biological evolution. These interpretations are accomplished at the level of the readout of genetic texts by the structures defined by Efim Liberman as "the molecular computer of cell", which includes DNA, RNA and the corresponding enzymes operating with molecular addresses. The molecular computer performs physically manifested mathematical operations and possesses both reading and writing capacities. Generativity paradoxically resides in the biological computational system as a possibility to incorporate meta-statements about the system, and thus establishes the internal capacity for its evolution.

The biosemiotic imagination in the Victorian frames of mind : Newman, Eliot and Welby

Abstract: This thesis traces the development of thought in the philosophical and other writings of three nineteenth-century thinkers, whose work exemplifies that century’s attempts to think beyond the divisions of culture from nature and to reconcile empirical science with metaphysical truth. Drawing on nineteenth-century debates on the origin of language and evolutionary theory, the thesis argues that the ideas of John Henry Newman, George Eliot and Lady Victoria Welby were cultural precursors to the biosemiotic thought of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, specifically in the way in which these three thinkers sought to find a ‘common grammar’ between natural and human practices. While only Lady Welby communicated with the scientist, logician and father of modern semiotics, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), all three contributed to the cultural sensibility that informed subsequent work in biology/ethology (Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944), zoosemiotics (Thomas A. Sebeok (1920-2001), and the development of biosemiotics (Thomas A. Sebeok and Jesper Hoffmeyer (1943-present), Kalevi Kull (1952-present) among others. Each of these nineteenth-century writer’s intellectual development show strong parallels with the interdisciplinary endeavour of biosemiotics. The latter’s observation that biology is semiotics, its postulation of the continuity between the natural and cultural world through semiosis and evolutionary semiotic scaffolding its emphasis on the coordination of organic life processes on all levels, from simple cells to human beings, via semiotic interactions that depend on interpretation, communication and learning, and its consequent refusal of Cartesian divide, all find distinct resonances with these earlier thinkers. The thesis thus argues that Newman, Eliot and Welby all gave articulation to what the thesis identifies as the growth of a ‘biosemiotic imagination.’ It argues that Newman, Eliot and Lady Welby envisaged a unity, or a holistic understanding, of life based on a European developmental tradition of biology, philosophy and language which was familiar to Charles Darwin himself. This evolutionary ontology called forth a new epistemology grounded in a mode of unconscious creative inference (biosemiotic imagination) akin to Charles S. Peirce’s concept of abduction. Abduction is the logical operation which introduces a new idea and, as such, is the only source of adaptive and creative growth. For Peirce, it is closely tied to the growth of knowledge via the evolutionary action of sign relations. The thesis shows how these thinkers conceptualised their own version of what I suggest can be understood as this biosemiotic imagination and the implications this has for understanding creativity in nature and culture. For John Henry Newman, it was a common source of inspiration in religion and science. For George Eliot, it lay at the basis of any creative process, natural and cultural, between which it forged a link. Similarly to Eliot, Lady Victoria Welby saw abduction as a signifying process that subtends creativity both in nature and culture.

On Not Being a Sign: Gold’s Semiotic Claims

Abstract: In this essay I examine gold’s semiotic claims in the context of perceptions of gold in global financial markets, beginning with an intriguing parallel drawn by my informants between gold and Bitcoin. I make several interrelated arguments: (1) that in a variety of cultural contexts, gold has become a site for a very particular semiotic claim—that of not signifying at all; (2) that in the contemporary instance of physical gold in relation to other assets based on gold, this is expressed in an attention to gold’s material, tactile qualities (represented both iconically and indexically), and its extrasocial character; (3) that similar claims are made for Bitcoin, often drawing on a “digital metallism,” and idiom of gold; and (4) that the self-reflexive semiotic properties of gold have a long and diverse cultural history. In concluding, I speculate on how gold’s particular semiotic stance reflects one possible articulation of nature and convention as sources of meaning.

Division of Labor in Vocabulary Structure: Insights From Corpus Analyses

Abstract: Psychologists have used experimental methods to study language for more than a century. However, only with the recent availability of large-scale linguistic databases has a more complete picture begun to emerge of how language is actually used, and what information is available as input to language acquisition. Analyses of such "big data" have resulted in reappraisals of key assumptions about the nature of language. As an example, we focus on corpus-based research that has shed new light on the arbitrariness of the sign: the longstanding assumption that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. The results reveal a systematic relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, which is stronger for early acquired words. Moreover, the analyses further uncover a systematic relationship between words and their lexical categories-nouns and verbs sound differently from each other-affecting how we learn new words and use them in sentences. Together, these results point to a division of labor between arbitrariness and systematicity in sound-meaning mappings. We conclude by arguing in favor of including "big data" analyses into the language scientist's methodological toolbox.

A descriptive grammar of morphosyntactic constructions in Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL)

Abstract: The Ugandan Deaf Community, consisting of approximately 25,000 sign language users, has seen significant developments in its recent history. Government recognition of sign language, establishment of schools for the deaf, and the beginnings of research into Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL) have been important milestones. While Deaf Ugandans are entering university level education for the first time, a number of challenges to the community remain. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the linguistic structures of UgSL in order to produce a description of the language’s morphosyntax. There is a close relationship between word (or sign) properties and syntactic expressions, so UgSL is described here in terms of its morphosyntactic constructions, rather than a differentiation between morphological and syntactic features (cf. Croft 2001; Wilkinson 2013:260). While a substantial number of such descriptions exist for languages outside of Africa, this thesis is the first attempt at describing the morphosyntax of an African sign language. Many African sign languages are severely under-documented, and some are endangered. This study uses an inductive approach and a corpus-based methodology, examining how UgSL signers construct utterances of morphosyntactic complexity. The thesis is in three parts: part I is an introduction and overview of UgSL and also provides the theoretical and methodological background; part II provides a preliminary survey of UgSL grammar to provide a sider context for subsequent chapters; and part III is a detailed survey of five morphosyntactic domains of UgSL. The author is a native Deaf user of UgSL and a member of the Ugandan Deaf Community, as well as being fluent in several other sign languages and participating in international communities of Deaf people.

Emotional translations: conceptual history beyond language

Abstract: Conceptual history is a useful tool for writing the history of emotions. The investigation of how a community used emotion words at certain times and in certain places allows us to understand specific emotion knowledge without being trapped by universalism. But conceptual history is also an inadequate tool for writing the history of emotions. Its exclusive focus on language fails to capture the meanings that can be derived from emotional expressions in other media such as painting, music, architecture, film, or even food. Here emotion history can contribute to a rethinking of conceptual history, bringing the body and the senses back in. This article proposes a theoretical model to expand conceptual history beyond language by exploring three processes of emotional translation: First, how the translation between reality and its interpretation is mediated by the body and the senses. Second, how translations between different media and sign systems shape and change the meanings of concepts. Third, how concepts translate into practices that have an impact on reality. The applicability of the model is not limited to the research on concepts of emotion; the article argues that emotions have a crucial role in all processes of conceptual change. The article further suggests that historicizing concepts can best be achieved by reconstructing the relations that actors have created between elements within multimedial semantic nets. The approach will be exemplified by looking at the South Asian concept of the monsoon and the emotional translations between rain and experiences of love and romance.

Italo Calvino and the organizational imagination: Reading social organization through urban metaphors

Abstract: This article explores the way in which uses or abuses of urban metaphors can inform differing polities and ethics of human organization. From its earliest inception, the city has taken on a metaphorical significance for human communities; being, at one and the same time, a discursive textual product of culture and, reciprocally, a provider of artefacts and architecture that produces culture and meaning. The city can be interpreted as a trope that operates bidirectionally in cultural terms. It is a sign that can be worked to serve the principles of both metonymy and synecdoche. In metonymical or reductive form, the city has the propensity to become weighty and deadening. The work of Michael Porter on competitive strategy is invoked to illustrate this effect. In the guise of synecdoche, on the other hand, the city offers imaginative potential. Drawing inspiration from the literary works of Italo Calvino (in particular, his novel Invisible Cities), the article attempts to reveal the fecundity of the city for...

Sampling shared sign languages

Abstract: This article addresses some of the theoretical questions, ethical considerations, and methodological decisions that guided the creation of the Kata Kolok corpus as well as the Kata Kolok child signing corpus. This discussion is relevant to the formation of prospective sign corpora that aim to portray the various sociolinguistic landscapes in which sign languages, whether rural or urban, emerge and evolve.

Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies*

Abstract: 1.1. Pragmatics has been much neglected in literary and cultural studies. In the semiotic sense in which I am using it, it was defined already by Charles Morris as the domain of relationships between the signs and their inter preters, which clarifies the conditions under which something is taken as a sign. From CS. Peirce, G.H. Mead, and Karl B?hler, through M.M. Bakhtin/Volosinov, Morris, R. Carnap, and the Warsaw School, to (say) R.M. Martin, L?o Apostel, and John R. Searle, pragmatics has slowly been growing into an independent discipline on a par with syntactics (the domain of relationships between the signs and their formally possible com binations) and with semantics (in this sense, the domain of relations between the signs and the entities they designate). But what is more, there are since the late 1950s strong arguments that it is a constitutive and indeed englobing complement of both semantics and syntactics. The basic?and to any ma terialist sufficient?pair of arguments for it is, first, that all objects and events are (only or also) signs and, second, that any object or event becomes a sign only in a signifying situation; it has no "natural" meaning outside of it (e.g., in More's Utopia gold is a sign of shame). This situation is constituted by the relation between signs and their users; a user can take something to be a sign only as it is spatio-temporally concrete and localized, and as it relates to the user's disposition toward potential action. Both the concrete localization and the user's disposition are always socio-historical. Furthermore, they postulate a reality organized not only around signs but also around subjects, in the double sense of psychophysical personality and of a socialized, collectively representative subject. The entry of potentially acting subjects reintroduces acceptance and choice, temporal genesis and mutation, and a possibility of dialectical negation into the frozen

Reactive effort as a factor that shapes sign language lexicons

Abstract: Many properties of languages, including sign languages, are not uniformly distributed among items in the lexicon. Some of this nonuniformity can be accounted for by appeal to articulatory ease, with easier articulations being overrepresented in the lexicon in comparison to more difficult articulations. The literature on ease of articulation deals only with the active effort internal to the articulation itself. We note the existence of a previously unstudied aspect of articulatory ease, which we call reactive effort: the effort of resisting incidental movement that has been induced by an articulation elsewhere in the body. For example, reactive effort is needed to resist incidental twisting and rocking of the torso induced by path movement of the manual articulators in sign languages. We argue that, as part of a general linguistic drive to reduce articulatory effort, reactive effort should have a significant effect on the relative frequency in the lexicon of certain types of path movements. We support this argument with evidence from Italian Sign Language, Sri Lankan Sign Language, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, evidence that cannot be explained solely by appeal to constraints on bimanual coordination. As the first exploration of the linguistic role of reactive effort, this work contributes not only to the developing field of sign language phonetics, but also to our understanding of phonetics in general, adding to a growing body of functionalist literature showing that some linguistic patterns emerge from more fundamental factors of the physical world.

Self-Directed Ostensions and Mediations of the Adult at the Age of 8-, 12- and 16 months.

Abstract: One of Vygotsky's main insights was to highlight the role of linguistic signs in psychological development. In this paper, following the works carried out through the Object Pragmatics paradigm, which is grounded in Vygotsky's cultural-historical and semiotic framework, we will explore non verbal signs addressed toward herself by the infant in the process of communication toward oneself, in relation to the appropriation of the objects' canonical uses by infants at 8-, 12- and 16 months in triadic infant-object-adult interaction. More specifically, our focus will concern the development of self-directed ostensions. We will examine how this movement, under the impulse related to other's people signs and public meanings of the object, endorse the status of sign during development and specifies itself in ostension. Ostension as a sign refers to a presentation of an object to someone and has been initially defined within the framework of communication toward other people in semiotic literature. In our works, this sign is studied in communication toward oneself and in its development. It should be noted that very few studies have been done on this topic. Following Vygotsky, we consider that turned toward oneself, ostension plays a crucial role in the formation of thought and consciousness (in the sense of awareness). This paper will focus on the social and semiotic conditions of production of this sign and, more precisely, on the role of the adult's non verbal and verbal mediations, which aim to elicit and sustain its realisation by the infant.

Shop sign as monument: The discursive recontextualization of a neon sign

Abstract: Ethnographic studies of linguistic landscape have shed light on the complex processes in which signage is designed, created, perceived, and interpreted. This paper highlights the role of public discourse in such processes by tracing how the neon sign of a restaurant in Hong Kong ironically reached monumental status after its removal. Expanding the geosemiotic framework with the theory of recontexualization, it examines the shifting meanings of the sign as represented in four types of discourse, and suggests that it is their contradiction and divergence that has shaped the shop sign into an urban monument.

The power of language policy : the legal recognition of sign languages and the aspirations of deaf communities

Abstract: De Meulder, Maartje The power of language policy: The legal recognition of sign languages and the aspirations of deaf communities Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2016, 134 p. (+ included articles) (Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities) ISSN 1459-4323; 301 (nid.) ISSN 1459-4331; 301 (PDF) ISBN 978-951-39-6875-5 (nid.) ISBN 978-951-39-6876-2 (PDF) This thesis explores Sign Language Peoples’ aspirations for the legal recognition of sign languages, with specific focus on Finland and Scotland. It highlights the timely need to strengthen (in practice) and scrutinize (academically) the legal measures that have been achieved as well as their implementation – and to measure all this against the challenges of endangerment and sustaining vitality. The theoretical framework for this study is centred in language policy and planning and political theory. The research methodology draws on principles of the ethnography of language policy and uses two traditional qualitative research methods, that is, interviews and participant observation, plus desk research. Sign Language Peoples’ campaigns for recognition seek a differentiated citizenship – a form of group representation rights which can accommodate their communities’ particular needs and practices. The study identifies five categories of recognition legislation and demonstrates that most legislation remains symbolic: while some legislation grants instrumental rights to sign languages, legislation establishing or protecting educational linguistic and language acquisition rights remains scarce. This is especially problematic given the complex combination of demographic, political, economic, social and educational pressures facing Sign Language Peoples’ communities. The study further identifies both common ground with other linguistic and cultural minorities and one significant difference – that Sign Language Peoples are also perceived and administered as people with disabilities and, as such, manifest dual category membership. While this should not in theory be problematic, in fact the policies which govern their lives traditionally frame them within only one category – as people with disabilities. The study demonstrates how this has negatively impacted the recognition of sign languages and signing communities. It goes on to analyse the highly politicized nature of sign language planning, especially in relation to discourses around the linguistic rights of deaf children. It also critically evaluates the mixed rationales for sign language rights and the justifications on which these rights are based. The evidence suggests that sign language legislation and the arguments for sign language rights are subject to a very particular set of discourses, which expose them to a degree of scrutiny not experienced by discourses for spoken minority language rights and legislation. Comparison of these discourses leads the author of this thesis to argue that it is essential that the protection and promotion of sign languages should include recognition of the multilingual practices of signing communities, and of their group rights. To conclude, it is argued that recognition legislation should specifically address the issue of vitality and the factors and strategies needed to ensure this vitality, including ways in which sign languages can create new generations of users without relying solely on intergenerational transmission.

Symbolic representation in early years learning: The acquisition of complex notions

Abstract: This article defines the concepts related to symbolic and sign representations, cognition and learning in the early years. The first study experiment of teaching 33 preschool children (19 boys and 14 girls; M = 68, 5 months) the notion of rainbow phenomenon proved the equal effectiveness of the use of both sign and symbolic tools. The second study experiment of teaching 49 schoolchildren (23 boys and 26 girls; M = 102 months) the complex notion of a mathematical function furthered our understanding of the impact of sign and symbolic tools and showed that the use of symbolic tools (metaphors and imagery) as mediators for successful transference to sign representation is effective for children who otherwise experience difficulties mastering new and complex content. The authors discuss the importance of children's play in the early years as a space where children experience and acquire operations with symbols, and the role of symbolic tools in transference to sign representation. The article furthermore prov...

Deconstruction the end of writing: 'Everything is a text, there is nothing outside context'

Abstract: In this article, I read Derrida’s critique of the ‘sign’ over against the challenges of the metaphysics of presence as featured in Western theology and philosophy. Derrida argues that logocentric interpretive interest in theology and philosophy is widely held and contradict by the West, as this somehow reveals the Western belief of the metaphysics of presence. He argues that the idea of metaphysics of presence which is strongly held in Christianity and Judaism is somehow privileged speech (Logos) over against writing which is seen as death and alienated from existential and transcendental reality. Derrida focuses on the reading of Saussure and how presence has been perceived over against writing in Western discourse in terms of the interpretation from Plato to Rousseau. Derrida prefers to deconstruct presence, which is perceived in Western theology and philosophy as truth and the ideal moment of pure, unmediated firstness. This article focuses on the reading of the work of Saussure, who has been greatly influential in the study of oral traditions, verbal arts and the interpretive interest of the sign. For Derrida writing has been suppressed by Western discourse for almost 400 years, as speech has been privileged over writing. The function of deconstruction is to deconstruct the binary opposition between speech and writing. Derrida provides clear examples of his deconstructive activity, which turns the text in traces of more text in opposing speech as unmediated firstness of presence. Derrida’s critique of speech hopes to expose the dishonesty and false consciousness in a Western interpretive discourse that suppressed writing and perceived speech as presence. This relation is both oppositional and hierarchical, with writing as secondariness understood as a fall or lapse from firstness. For Derrida, ‘there is nothing outside of the text’. In the original French, Derrida wrote: ‘ Il n’y a pas de hors-texte ’ [There is no outside-text]. Language is a constant movement of differences and everything acquires the instability and ambiguity inherent in language (Callinicos 2004). The implications of Derrida’s reading based on his work Of Grammatology (1976) have impacted everything in the humanities and social sciences, including law, anthropology, linguistics and gender studies, as the meaning of the text is not only inscribed in the sign (signifier and the signified), but everything is a ‘text’ and meaning and representation are how we interpret it. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Derrida sought to subvert the ‘sign’ in structuralism, as it opens the door to dialogue with the socially constructed ‘Other’ in relation to the ‘sign’ and the false consciousness construction of the text by the West. This challenges the existing interpretive paradigm and open oral and written dialogue of the text for the ‘other’ in terms of the meaning and representation of the oral text, the oral archival memory of the other, indigenous knowledge systems, African rituals, folklore, storytelling and verbal arts.

Klee's Cognitive Legacy and Human Rights As Intercultural Transducers: Modern Art, Legal Translation, and Micro-Spaces of Coexistence

Abstract: The essay addresses the issue concerning intercultural translation and its relationship with human rights. This matter is analyzed by taking human rights as interfaces of metaphorical intercultural “transduction” rather than as parameters to assess the lawfulness of people’s behaviors or their legal systems of belonging. Such an approach is in tune with the intercultural law methodology. It implies a threefold reading of Otherness, which comprises the accomplishment of the following three passages: 1) Crossing narratives; 2) Intercultural cross-contextualizations; 3) Translations/Transactions. The completion of these tasks is designed to allow legal interpreters to go beyond the morphological appearance of the conduct of Others. The necessity of acquiring such an ability to look beyond appearances is coextensive with the need for self-distancing from one’s own cultural habits and patterns of judgment when Otherness is to be understood and then legally qualified. For this purpose, the intercultural approach includes, as one of its main requirements, learning to see morphological appearances as hermeneutical and phenomenological results rather than data. Each of these results is an outcome of a process; and every process unfolds by drawing a story. The narrative components of such experiential plots can be observed and considered as connotative elements of the above result, namely the socio-cultural datum. Subjects and objects are both dialectical ingredients and actors of the narrative traces that give rise to the semantic structure and morphological appearance of the datum. Understanding and translating Otherness requires, therefore, an effort to dis-compose the connotative landscapes underlying forms and appearances of phenomena (conduct, behaviors, words), so as to see the formation processes of data in their constitutive elements. Forms and their spatial fashion can be considered, then, through the lens of a temporal assessment capable of sequencing and contextualizing the constitutive elements of morphological appearances. This sort of microscopic gaze cast towards and through the connotative prehistory of facts involving cultural Otherness can open the way to a creative intercultural translation. Human rights can serve, at that point, as axiological and semantic interfaces able to reveal continuities between the connotative landscapes upon which cultural differences rely. The artistic avant-garde of the early XX century and, specifically, Paul Klee’s “figuration theory,” paved the way to this “art” of connotative dis-composition and creative re-composition. For this very reason, the essay undertakes, in its central section, a sort of journey through the imaginative and theoretical territories of Klee’s “figurational” thought. The essay contends that jurists and politicians may have much to learn from the cognitive legacy of this great artist. This is because the intercultural conflicts that contemporary global society faces have primarily to do with—this is the central point—a form of cognitive unreadiness prior to rather than after conflicts of values. Following an analysis of Klee’s discompositional methodology, the essay proceeds with the application of an intercultural approach to practical issues, and specifically to the troubles of coexistence between cultural differences in urban micro-spaces. Lived spaces are, however, social spaces: as such they are targets of axiological, teleological and normative projections. Understanding the spaces of coexistence requires, therefore, an analysis of its connections with categorical and normative “scansions” that give “rhythm” to the uses of that space and, consequentially, mold the meaning of it. The reciprocal implications between subjectivity, spatiality and categorization can be effectively understood through the spectrum of a typical legal feature of housing coexistence: nuisance law. The outcome of such an analysis leads to the recognition of human rights and their intercultural use as interfaces/transducers suitable for conveying translation and interpenetration between physical and cultural, close and remote, spaces of experience. Such translational and transactional practices allow for the emersion of a space for multicultural coexistence endowed with the effectiveness inherent to the normativity of law. It appears as a chorological dimension, within which sign and matter, subject and space, categories and geography/topography, together, rearticulate their connotations along a continuum of sense and experience that finds in the condominium and its process of apartment (separation/seclusion) both a metaphor and a laboratory for the possibilities of global coexistence.

Joint Attention, Semiotic Mediation, and Literary Narrative

Abstract: In this paper I discuss the importance for narrative theory of the concept, drawn from developmental psychology, of “joint attention”. In the first part, I explain the basic concept and its significance for the emergence of narrative in young children. In the second part I draw out the implications of this genetic approach for our understanding of the nature of narrative signification: where classical narratology is based on a chain of representational and “communicative” dyads (signifier/signified and sender/receiver), joint attention integrates these functions into a triadic semiotic by which the sign mediates between three poles: the producer of the sign, the receiver of the sign and the object of their joint attention. In the third part, taking Boccaccio’s Decameron as an example, I illustrate how this approach to the semiotics of narrative elucidates aspects of literary narrative that are obscured by the classical semiotic. Joint attention offers affordances for quasi-recursive re-contextualization, since the object of joint attention may consist of another act of joint attention: literary narrative can create complex joint attentional structures by which the story is “seen” through nested perspectival prisms of embedded narrative and character.

Inferences from Signs: Peirce and the Recovery of the σημεῖον

Abstract: In this article I connect Peirce’s early logico-semiotic investigations (1865–1867) to the doctrine of sign-inference presented by Aristotle in the Prior Analytics. In section III I argue that An. Pr. II.27 showed Peirce the possibility of a syllogistic reconstruction of non-syllogistic inferences, and taught him (i) to consider the premises of an argument as affording a σημeῖον or sign of the conclusion, and (ii) to consider the three syllogistic figures as three different signs based on three different semiotic principles. As a preliminary to my argument, in section II I discuss some of Peirce’s later remarks on semiotic terminology that collectively throw some light on the historical models of Peirce’s semiotic enterprise.

The Blackbird Whistling or Just After? Vygotsky’s Tool and Sign as an Analytic for Writing

Abstract: Based on Vygotsky’s theory of the interplay of the tool and sign functions of language, this study presents a textual analysis of a corpus of student-authored texts to illuminate aspects of develop...

Habits of Reasoning: On the Grammar and Critics of Logical Habits

Abstract: We explain the grammar and the critics of the habits of reasoning, using Peirce’s 1903 Lowell Lectures and the related Syllabus as the key textual source. We establish what Peirce took sound reasoning to be, and derive a major soundness result concerning his logic as semeiotic: an argument is valid if for any object that the premises represent, the conclusion represents it as well, which in semeiotic terms translates to a sign being a valid argument if for any object that the sign represents, the interpretant sign represents it as well. The perfect adherence of the grammar to the critics is evidenced by the un-eliminability of leading principles. Just as a logical leading principle is an un-eliminable element of reasoning, because any attempt to use it as a premise engenders an infinite regress, so a logical representative interpretant is a habit that cannot be rendered a sign. The logical representative interpretant is a principle not itself a premise, a rule not itself subject to rules, a habit not itself a sign.