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.

Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines: Volume 1: Culture, sensory interaction, speech, conversation

Abstract: In a progressive and systematic approach to communication, and always through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, this first volume presents culture as an intricate grid of sensible and intelligible sign systems in space and time, identifying the semiotic and interactive problems inherent in intercultural and subcultural communication according to verbal-nonverbal cultural fluency. The author lays out fascinating complexity of our direct and synesthesial sensory perception of people and artifactual and environmental elements; and its audible and visual manifestations through our ‘speaking face’, to then acknowledge the triple reality of discourse as ‘verbal language-paralanguage-kinesics’, which is applied through two realistic models: (a)for a verbal-nonverbal comprehensive transcription of interactive speech, and (b)for the implementation of nonverbal communication in foreign-language teaching. The author presents his exhaustive model of ‘nonverbal categories’ for a detailed analysis of normal or pathological behaviors in any interactive or noninteractive manifestation; and, based on all the previous material, his equally exhaustive structural model for the study of conversational encounters, which suggests many applications in different fields, such as the intercultural and multisystem communication situation developed in simultaneous or consecutive interpretating. 956 literary quotations from 103 authors and 194 works illustrate all the points discussed.

On spirit writing: materialities of language and the religious work of transduction

Abstract: This is a speculative essay in comparative possibilities. It looks at some widely separated religious contexts in which a power-laden relationship across ontological difference – for instance, between living humans and a world of gods or spirits – is mediated by operations on the materiality of the written sign. These operations typically result in either materializing something immaterial or dematerializing something material. But they may also involve other activities that take advantage of specific physical properties of the written word such as being persistent, transportable, perishable, alienable, and so forth. Once divine words are rendered into script, they possess a distinctively material quality and form. They appear on some physical medium, and so are both durable and potentially destructible. Anything that can happen to another artefact can happen to them. The practices I dub ‘spirit writing’ subject the written word to radical transformation, taking advantage of its very materiality in order to dematerialize it, even if only in order to be rematerialized in yet some other form (such as a person's body). Many such practices seek to generate or control religious powers by means of transduction across semiotic modalities, material activities that help render experience-transcending forces realistic or at least readily imaginable.

Salish languages and linguistics : theoretical and descriptive perspectives

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.

It’s the little things

Abstract: Now ‘discourse’ is, of course, a notoriously tricky term and (thankfully) I do not have the space to go into all the twists and turns of the debate. But one thing is certain, the assertion that discourse constitutes or inscribes its object, and that there is no outside to language, is now a commonplace. Even so, when it comes to it, surprisingly large numbers of discourse theorists do still work, explicitly or implicitly, with a linguistic model of sign and referent (or expression and content), and so tend to argue that the world cannot be considered to be a purely discursive construction. For example, that apparent Derridean, Drucilla Cornell (1992:1) argues that ‘very simply, reality is not interpretation all the way down’. Even the current doyenne of discourse theorists, Judith Butler (1993:68), argues that ‘it is not the case that everything including materiality, is always already language’. (Though Butler’s position is more nuanced than this statement suggests; Kirby (1997:126) argues that Butler still works with a model of the split-however performative-between sign and referent, thereby intervening only on to ‘the surface of the surface because she assumes that the differentiation of contour-ing is given by/in signification’.)In other words, in many works on discourse representation is continually smuggled back in and all kinds of displaced ghosts and phantoms therefore still haunt this work. Perhaps, then, it may be time to go back to Derrida who, in a sense, tried to mix up sign and referent through a notion of writing which moved beyond the semiological so that ‘nature scribbles or flesh reads’,some sense that word and flesh are utterly implicated, not because ‘flesh’ is actually a word that moderates the fact of what is being referred to, but because the entity of a word, the identity of a sign, the system of language, and the domain of culture-none of these are autonomously enclosed upon themselves. Rather they are all emergent within a force field of differentiations that has no exteriority in any final sense.