Search results for " Semiotic"

Towards understanding nonmanuality : A semiotic treatment of signers’ head movements

2019

This article discusses a certain type of nonmanual action, signers’ head movements, from a semiotic perspective. It presents a typology of head movements and their iconic, indexical and symbolic features based on Peircean and post-Peircean semiotics. The paper argues for the view that (i) indexical strategies are very prominent in head movements, (ii) iconic features are most evident in enacting, while non-enacting description is less common, (iii) symbolic types for tokens are infrequent, although some movements—such as nodding and shaking the head—may become more conventional or schematized, and (iv) different types of head movements involve different proportions of iconicity, indexicalit…

The Semiotics of Test Design: Conceptual Framework on Optimal Item Features in Educational Assessment Across Cultural Groups, Countries, and Languages

2021

This paper offers a conceptual framework on test design from the perspective of social semiotics. Items are defined as arrangements of features intended to represent information, convey meaning, and capture information on the examinees’ knowledge or skills on a given content. The conceptual framework offers a typology of semiotic resources used to create items and discusses item representational complexity—the multiple ways in which the semiotic resources of an item are related to each other—and item semiotic alignment—the extent to which examinees share cultural experience encoded by items. Since the ability to make sense of items is shaped by the examinees’ level of familiarity with the s…

La saisie esthétique, transformation non narrative de la subjectivité

2017

Abstract Post-Greimassian semiotics has worked toward a return to phenomenology, with the aim of studying the sensorial dimension and the body. Most of this research, however, has all but forgotten Greimas’s last book, De imperfection (1987), in which he proposes an original version of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy with the notion of the aesthetic grasp. I propose to reconsider this almost abandoned notion, both from a theoretical point of view (a new version of the catharsis of philosophical aesthetics) and from the vantage of textual descriptions (the short story “The Naked Bosom” by Italo Calvino and the movie Ratatouille).

Oggi viene male questo celeste. Paolo Conte e il dilettantismo

2022

The figure of the amateur is emerging on the contemporary semiosphere, both in terms of scientific research and in the artistic domain. In this paper we discuss this phenomenon from the textual analysis of a song by Paolo Conte. We thus deal with the relations of mutual inter semiotic translation between music and image by showing how, in Conte, a musical compo sition can, at the level of utterance, become the theory of a given pictorial making and, at the level of enunciation, be transposed into a drawing that predicates it by its own expressive and semantic means. But also how, in the reverse sense, a certain form of life of the amateur visual artist can be transposed into a precise devic…

International Journal for the semiotics of law - Special Issue Animals in law

2018

This essay opens the Special Issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law dedicated to Animality, entitled “Animals in Law”. It focuses on revealing the principal issues faced in the volume, by positioning the contributors’ works into the general theoretical perspectives which shape the social discourse over animals.

Martyrdom in Contemporary Animalist Discourses

2019

Is it possible to use the notion of martyrdom in order to explain the communicative strategies and the semiotic mechanisms of the animalist movement? Is the animal a sort of contemporary martyr? This study aims to apply the notion of martyrdom outside the traditional boundaries of religion and politics, testing it in another relevant socio–cultural phenomenon: the contemporary animalist discourse. This paper analyses texts from animalist advertising, essays and novels promoting animal rights and vegetarianism. The main features of the traditional notion of martyrdom are compared to the semiotic structures of the animalist discourse. The questions of the efficacy of images and that of the ex…

Il lavoro e l'arte della ricerca: Antonino Buttitta

2018

Si tratta della ricostruzione del profilo intellettuale e scientifico di Antonino Buttitta, tra i capiscuola delle discipline demoetnoantropologiche in Italia, al quale si deve una originale declinazione dell'approccio strutturalista nell'analisi dei fatti culturali nell'ambito della semiotica della cultura.

"Il viaggio" di Tomasi di Lampedusa. Uno sguardo antropologico sullo spazio dell'attraversamento

2011

The Exhibition of a Mud-brick Monumental Complex in a Stratified Mound: the Case of 4th Millennium Arslantepe (Malatya)

2010

Un dilettantismo felice: ricostruzione testuale di Tvergastein

2023

For the past few years - few compared to the long historical duration of the human species on Earth - we have been witnessing a profound cultural revolution, perhaps even an anthropological one. Cultural because, after all, this revolution concerns first and foremost knowledge - and before that, belief, and after that, everyday life, human and social experience, and widespread sensitivity. Anthropological because this knowledge is essentially ethnological, of an ethnology that, however, denies itself in order to embrace the totality of things, or, better, to allow itself a holistic look that is not only aimed at homo, in order to attribute to itself an object of study, a much broader field …