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.

A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychic States

Abstract: Can there be culture without melancholia? This seems to be the central question posed by contemporary theories of representation which repeatedly associate the making of narrative with the death of the author. What dies with the author is not merely intentionality in interpretation. In its wake arises the figure of the textual sign that resists the ‘innate’ or autonomous coherence of the corpus and locates meaning on the boundaries of that loss that generates meaning, turning interpretation into an inevitable passage through the intertextual. For Derrida, the process of writing is a form of survival, or living on the borderline1 of the violence of the letter and its doubles — mark, trace, crypt. For Lacan the scenario of the birth of the ego is staged in the ‘fading’ of the signifier, as it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy assent in which, he says, we see the very essence of anxiety.2 Even Lyotard’s comic Oedipus, who refuses the melancholic moment of modernity in the postmodern condition, has finally to concede that the terror of ‘death’ in all its forms traverses the pragmatics of language games and leads him to question the social bond.3

Japan's emblematic English

Abstract: An analysis of ‘public English’ and (not) learning the language in Japan.Visitors to Japan, whether linguists or laymen, frequently come back with their own collection of quaint uses of English, gathered from public signs, advertising and so on, which vary from the odd to the simply incorrect. This may provide complacent amusement for the native speaker, but is not surprising or unique: Budapest airport until relatively recently sported a large sign reading Welcome in Hungary. What is especially interesting in Japan is not the mistakes but the puzzling function of many such signs. English words and messages are often combined with Japanese, so that, as a non-Japanese speaker, your eye is at first attracted then baffled, until you realise that the English is not aimed at you, a native speaker, but at native speakers of Japanese. But who among the Japanese is it aimed at, and why?

Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

Abstract: Just as the critique of political economy set for itself the task of analyzing the commodity-form, the Critique of the political economy of the sign intends to do so of the sign-form. As the commodity is both exchange value and use value-requiring that a total analysis of this form consider both slopes of the system-so too is the sign both signifier (Sr) and signified (Sd); the analysis of the sign-form must therefore proceed at both levels. Of course, this simultaneously requires a logical and strategic analysis of the relationship between the two terms, namely; 1) Between the EV system and the UV system (or between commodity-form and object-form), which we endeavored to do in the preceding article*: 2) Between the system of the Sr and that of the Sd (or between the respective codes which define the articulation of the sign-value and of the sign-form). This relationship sets itself up in both cases as an hierarchical function between a dominant form and an alibi form, or satellite form, the latter being both the logical crowning and ideological fulfillment of the former.

The dicta-sign wiki: enabling web communication for the deaf

Abstract: The paper provides a report on the user-centred showcase prototypes of the DICTA-SIGN project (http://www.dictasign.eu/), an FP7-ICT project which ended in January 2012. DICTA-SIGN researched ways to enable communication between Deaf individuals through the development of human-computer interfaces (HCI) for Deaf users, by means of Sign Language. Emphasis is placed on the Sign-Wiki prototype that demonstrates the potential of sign languages to participate in contemporary Web 2.0 applications where user contributions are editable by an entire community and sign language users can benefit from collaborative editing facilities.

Introduction: An Evolutionary History of Biosemiotics

Abstract: The present chapter is intended to provide an introductory overview to the history of biosemiotics, contextualizing that history within and against the larger currents of philosophical and scientific thinking from which it has emerged. Accordingly, to explain the origins of this most 21st century endeavour requires effectively tracing - at least to the level of a thumbnail sketch - how the "sign" con- cept appeared, was lost, and now must be painstakingly rediscovered and refined in science. In the course of recounting this history, this chapter also introduces much of the conceptual theory underlying the project of biosemiotics, and is therefore intended to serve also as a kind of primer to the readings that appear in the rest of the volume. With this purpose in mind, the chapter consists of the successive examination of: (1) the history of the sign concept in pre-modernist science, (2) the history of the sign concept in modernist science, and (3) the biosemiotic attempt to develop a more useful sign concept for contemporary science. The newcomer to biosemiotics is encouraged to read through this chapter (though lengthy and of necessity still incomplete) before proceeding to the rest of the volume. For only by doing so will the disparate selections appearing herein reveal their common unity of purpose, and only within this larger historical context can the contemporary attempt to develop a naturalistic understanding of sign relations be properly evaluated and understood.