Sign (semiotics)

About: Sign (semiotics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4080 publications have been published within this topic receiving 70333 citations. The topic is also known as: semiotic sign.

Sociolinguistic Typology and Sign Languages.

Abstract: This paper examines the possible relationship between proposed social determinants of morphological ‘complexity’ and how this contributes to linguistic diversity, specifically via the typological nature of the sign languages of deaf communities. We sketch how the notion of morphological complexity, as defined by Trudgill (2011), applies to sign languages. Using these criteria, sign languages appear to be languages with low to moderate levels of complexity. This may partly reflect the influence of key social characteristics of communities on the typological nature of languages. Although many deaf communities are relatively small and may involve dense social networks (both social characteristics that Trudgill claimed may lend themselves to linguistic ‘complexification’), the picture is complicated by the highly variable nature of the sign language acquisition for most deaf people, and the ongoing contact between native signers, hearing non-native signers, and those deaf individuals who only acquire sign languages in later childhood and early adulthood. These are all factors that may work against the emergence of linguistic complexification. The relationship between linguistic typology and these key social factors may lead to a better understanding of the nature of sign language grammar. This perspective stands in contrast to other work where sign languages are sometimes presented as having complex morphology despite being young languages (e.g., Aronoff et al., 2005); in some descriptions, the social determinants of morphological complexity have not received much attention, nor has the notion of complexity itself been specifically explored.

Female Status and Cultural Evolution: A Study in Ethnographer Bias

Abstract: The theory that female status will increase with societal complexity is tested. Two independent measures of female status are compared with a measure of societal complexity. Both tests produce sign...

Pain as Symptom, Pain as Sign

Abstract: This article proposes a theoretical contribution to critical health psychology. Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics provide health psychology and related fields with an analytic that centers interes...

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.

Cross modal comprehension in ZARDOZ an English to sign-language translation system

Abstract: The sign languages used by deaf communities around the world represent a linguistic challenge that natural language researchers have only recently begun to take up. Zardoz is a system which tackles the cross-modal machine-translation problem, translating speech and text into animated sign language. Native sign languages, such as ISL (Ireland), BSL (Britain) and ASL (U.S.A.) have evolved in deaf communities as natural methods of gestural communication. These languages differ from English, not only in modality, but in grammatical structure, exploiting the dimensions of space as well as time. This paper presents an architectural overview of Zardoz, and describes the methods employed to analyse the verbal input and generate the corresponding signed output.