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.

Dialogic semiosis : an essay on signs and meaning

Abstract: A study of C. S. Peirce's conception of the sign, with a critique of Saussure and Hjelmslev, Dialogic Semiosis presents a semiotics of the production, transmission, and interpretation of signs in human communication. Jorgen Dines Johansen studies the process of sign creation, how signs fulfill their office of transmitting information between human agents, chiefly through a study of human speech. In the first part of the book, Johansen focuses on Hjelmslev's concept of the sign and the study of semiotic systems. In Part II, he undertakes a detailed explication of Peirce's concepts of the process of signification with the intention of inducing readers to think semiotics with Peirce. In the conclusion, Johansen analyzes a specific micro system from both Hjelmslevian and Peircean perspectives and summarizes the basic features of an intentionally produced semiotic."

Semiosis and the elusive final interpretant of understanding

Abstract: While the conceptual history of the sign, as recounted by John Deely in Four ages of understanding, is immensely enlightening, history is never enough. If, before Augustine, it had occurred to no one that such diverse phenomena as are covered by this term had something in common, and if, in the time of Aquinas, Fonseca, and Poinsot, different usages of the term were in competition, the reason is not simply intellectual confusion, but rather that meaning is of many kinds. In this essay, I have shifted the terrain from socio-history to phylogeny and ontogeny, suggesting that, in the child, as well as in the human species, perception is the primary type of meaning, whereas true signs are acquired much later, followed by signs systems and organism-independent artifacts. The whole point of having a semiotic theory, it is argued, is to be able to account for the differences, and not only the similarities, of different kinds of meaning.

The point of agreement: Changing how we think about sign language, gesture, and agreement

Abstract: This paper reconsiders arguments suggesting that sign language analyses must proceed differently to take into account their gestural, iconic origins. Lillo-Martin & Meier (2011) argue that agreement is ‘person marking’, shown by directionality. Liddell (2003, 2011) argues that directional verbs move between locations associated with referents; given an infinite number of points, the forms of these verbs are unlistable, and therefore just gestural indicating; he claims that this makes sign languages different from spoken languages, a position that I will argue against. In their response, Lillo-Martin & Meier then agree that real-world referent locations are not part of grammar, so language must interface closely with the gestural system. In contrast, Quer (2011) argues that Liddell’s reasoning is flawed. I will present evidence to agree with Quer and argue that the linguistic discussion was prematurely derailed by noting the recent alternate analysis offered by Gokgoz (2013). There may well be a role for visual iconicity in relation to sign language structure, as demonstrated by Schlenker (2013a,b), but unless we pursue linguistic analysis further, we will never get a clear understanding of what that role is.

Of the body and the hands: patterned iconicity for semantic categories*

Abstract: This paper examines how gesturers and signers use their bodies to express concepts such as instrumentality and humanness. Comparing across eight sign languages (American, Japanese, German, Israeli, and Kenyan Sign Languages, Ha Noi Sign Language of Vietnam, Central Taurus Sign Language of Turkey, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language of Israel) and the gestures of American non-signers, we find recurring patterns for naming entities in three semantic categories (tools, animals, and fruits & vegetables). These recurring patterns are captured in a classification system that identifies iconic strategies based on how the body is used together with the hands. Across all groups, tools are named with manipulation forms, where the head and torso represent those of a human agent. Animals tend to be identified with personification forms, where the body serves as a map for a comparable non-human body. Fruits & vegetables tend to be identified with object forms, where the hands act independently from the rest of the body to represent static features of the referent. We argue that these iconic patterns are rooted in using the body for communication, and provide a basis for understanding how meaningful communication emerges quickly in gesture and persists in emergent and established sign languages.

Africa in Theory: A Conversation Between Jean Comaroff and Achille Mbembe

Abstract: Achille Mbembe I would like to start with an anecdote. I first met Jean Comaroff not literally, but through her thought provoking, generous, and hospitable Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance during the winter of 1987. I was then on a Ford Foundation grant, spending a year at the University of Madison-Wisconsin- my first ever trip to the United States. I was writing a book on "political religion"- in this case Christianity-published in Paris a year later under the title Afriques indociles. Christianisme, pouvoir et Etat en societe postcoloniale (Paris, Karthala, 1988)- like the rest of my work in French, a book hardly known in the Anglo-Saxon world. I went to Memorial Library that night not knowing that the book existed and never having heard of Jean Comaroff. I stumbled over the book accidentally while trudging through the shelves. I took it home and spent almost the entire night reading it. Since then, Body of Power has not only remained with me; it has pursued me, and it is easy to find its echoes in the deepest recesses of On the Postcolony. Body of Power is a detailed, vivid, and richly textured historiography of everyday life in a remote and not so remote corner of South Africa under apartheid-from the minutiae of dress, spatial organization, bodily gestures to productive techniques, rites of initiation, and cult practices. It is a powerful example of how we should think and write about human agency; what analytical strategies we should deploy in order to describe and interpret specific forms of social life in particular settings. Situated beyond the strictures of positivist epistemology and objectivist ontology, it is also an account of what is life for and what is most at stake, especially for people living in what Jean calls "the shadow of the modern world system"-people who are forced to undo and remake their lives under conditions of precariousness and uncertainty. That this amazing book, a combination of thick ethnography, interpretive history, and symbolic analysis, helped to set the stage for the critical debates on the forms and methods of social inquiry that dominated the mid-1980s to mid-1990s has not been sufficiently recognized for various reasons. Unfortunately, the most compelling reason is that the immediate and most apparent object of Body of Power is the study of life forms in this place called Africa. As a name and as a sign, Africa has always occupied a paradoxical position in modern formations of knowledge. On the one hand, it has been largely assumed that "things African" are residual entities, the study of which does not contribute anything to the knowledge of the world or of the human condition in general. Rapid surveys, off-the-cuff remarks, and anecdotes with sensational value suffice. On the other hand, it has always been implicitly acknowledged that in the field of social sciences and the humanities, there is no better laboratory than Africa to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination or to pose questions about how we know what we know and what that knowledge is grounded upon; how to draw on multiple models of time so as to avoid one-way causal models; how to open a space for broader comparative undertakings; and how to account for the multiplicity of the pathways and trajectories of change. In fact, there is no better terrain than Africa for a scholarship keen to describe novelty, originality, and complexity. Those of us who live and work in Africa know first hand that the ways in which societies compose and invent themselves in the present-what we could call the creativity of practice- is always ahead of the knowledge we can ever produce about them. Therefore, to think or to theorize from Africa implies an acute awareness of the existence of this rift-even a full embrace of this rift which is at the same time a risk, and the understanding that "the social" is less a matter of order and contract than a matter of composition and experiment; that what ultimately binds societies might be some kind of artifice they have come to believe in; the realization that societies' capacity to continually produce something new and singular, as yet unthought, which is yet to be accommodated within established conceptual systems and languages-this is indeed the condition of possibility of social theorizing as such. …