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.

The Structure of Allegorical Desire

Abstract: ed from its constituent units, on the other, a clamor of signifiers signifying nothing but themselves. Remembering the sententiousness of allegory, we are entitled to ask whether with such a structuralist description the thematic has not been "structured" out of court. The paradox is, of course, only an apparent one, but I draw it out in this way so as to point to a real difficulty in structuralist poetics: namely, that in order to maintain any thematic meaning at all, structuralism, like allegory, must assume a meaningful connection between metaphoric and metonymic poles. That meaning is either what permits the two to join or the consequence of their juncture. What this means in practice is that Jakobson will pick up the tradition of Pope and Hopkins, or, for that matter, Wimsatt, and argue that sound is echo to sense. Jakobson does not, of course, intend the naive claim that there are different phonemes for different qualities-the notorious murmuring of innumerable bees-though he does accept studies which support Mallarm9's discriminations of 12. Jakobson, p. 109. 13. Ibid., p. 95. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.159 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 04:42:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Structure of Allegorical Desire 53 dark and light vowels. Rather, Jakobson wants to say that the structure of poetic sounds functions in relation to the structure of its poetic signifieds as a kind of Peircean index, a little like that to which it points, or, in negatively contrapuntal fashion, conspicuously, but equally indicatively, unlike. In pointing to themselves, therefore, as in rhyme, the sounds thus also point beyond themselves to the structure of their signifieds. The same goes for the signifieds themselves, which at a semantic and thematic level are again a structure of signifiers pointing both to themselves and to a structure of signifiers beyond themselves, all of them, alone or together, eventually pointing to the structure of language itself. This is the essentially Hegelian assumption that lies behind Jakobson's claim that "The history of a system is in turn also a system," 14 i.e., that historical diachrony, the evolution of a language, reacts structurally upon the synchronic linguistic code. Once the signifier's relation to the signified, i.e., the sign as a whole, is in this way understood to be relatively motivated, rather than utterly arbitrary as in Saussure, it is possible to make the sign itself into an index pointing to the structure it embodies and supports. Thus all the levels of allegory, up through and including the thematic, will display themselves and each other with resoundingly poetic and emphatically structural effect."5 But this harmonious, now Leibnitzian structure, depending as it does on an utter idealization of the structure of the sign, occurs at a significant cost. "The supremacy of poetic function over referential function does not obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous."16 What this typically unbending aphorism means is that in a structuralist poem every signifier will be simultaneously metaphor and metonymy. Jakobson's example is the girl in the Russian folk tale who comes to be symbolized by the willow under which she walks. Ever after in the poem, girl and tree are metaphors each of the other by virtue of their metonymic intersection, just as the sequential movement of the poem is conditioned by their metaphoric equivalence. In classical rhetoric we would call this a synecdoche: the girl is represented by the tree or it by she in that one possesses the other. But in Jakobson's terms what we have is a metaphoric metonymy and a metonymic metaphor, and the result, not surprisingly, is allegory: Similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts to poetry its thoroughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic essence which is beau14. Jurii Tynianov and Roman Jakobson, "Problems in the Study of Language and Literature," The Structuralists, p. 82. 15. Similarly, because messages about the code are selected from the code, Lacan denies the possibility of a radical concept of metalanguage: "There is the relation here of the system to its own constitution as a signifier, which would seem to be relevant to the question of metalanguage and which, in my opinion, will demonstrate the impropriety of that notion if it is intended to define differentiated elements in language." (Jacques Lacan, "On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis," Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, Norton, 1977, p. 185). 16. Jakobson, p. 112. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.159 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 04:42:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Hamlet the Sign: Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation

Abstract: This work is an attempt to answer one simple question: What is Hamlet? Based on the material of Hamlet translations into Russian, the dissertation scrutinizes the problems of literary canon formati ...

Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom's gift economy

Abstract: Fandom's gift economy should be understood as involving a wide variety of gifts, a complex system of reciprocation, and the use of gifts as a sign of their reception.

Signs Grow: Semiosis and Life Processes

Abstract: This is the third volume in Floyd Merrell's trilogy on semiotics focusing on Peirce's categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. In this book the author argues that there are passageways linking the social sciences with the physical sciences, and signs with life processes. This is not a study of the semiotics of life, but rather of semiosis as a living process. Merrell attempts to articulate the links between thought that is rooted in that which can be quantified and thought that resists quantification, namely that of the consciousness. As he writes in his preface, he is intent on 'fusing the customary distinctions between life and non-life, mind and matter, self and other, appearance (fiction) and .reality,...to reveal the everything that is is a sign.' In order to accomplish this goal, Peirce's terciary concept of the sign is crucial. Merrell begins by asking 'What are signs that they may take on life-like processes, and what is life that it may know the sign processes that brought it - themselves - into existence?' In order to answer this question he examines semiotic theory, philosophical discourse, the life sciences, the mathematical sciences, and literary theory. He offers an original reading of Peirce's thought along with that of Prigogine and of many others. Following Sebeok, Merrell reminds us that 'any and all investigation of nature and of the nature of signs and life must ultimately be semiotic in nature.'

The Palm-Up Puzzle: Meanings and Origins of a Widespread Form in Gesture and Sign

Abstract: During communication, speakers commonly rotate their forearms so that their palms turn upward. Yet despite more than a century of observations of such palm-up gestures, their meanings and origins have proven difficult to pin down. We distinguish two gestures within the palm-up form family: the palm-up presentational and the palm-up epistemic. The latter is a term we introduce to refer to a variant of the palm-up that prototypically involves lateral separation of the hands. This gesture—our focus—is used in speaking communities around the world to express a recurring set of epistemic meanings, several of which seem quite distinct. More striking, a similar palm-up form is used to express the same set of meanings in many established sign languages and in emerging sign systems. Such observations present a two-part puzzle: the first part is how this set of seemingly distinct meanings for the palm-up epistemic are related, if indeed they are; the second is why the palm-up form is so widely used to express just this set of meanings. We propose a network connecting the different attested meanings of the palm-up epistemic, with a kernel meaning of absence of knowledge, and discuss how this proposal could be evaluated through additional developmental, corpus-based, and experimental research. We then assess two contrasting accounts of the connection between the palm-up form and this proposed meaning network, and consider implications for our understanding of the palm-up form family more generally. By addressing the palm-up puzzle, we aim, not only to illuminate a widespread form found in gesture and sign, but also to provide insights into fundamental questions about visual-bodily communication: where communicative forms come from, how they take on new meanings, and how they become integrated into language in signing communities.