Search results for " semiotics"
showing 10 items of 129 documents
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).
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.
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 …
Teste e testimonianze: i falsi Modigliani
2011
Analisi sociosemiotica della celebre beffa delle false teste di Modigliani.
Semiotics, blogs and gastromania
2021
The current culinary megatrend owes much to Internet socialization practices. Discussions online began very early (the boards of Chowhound, for example, have already been operating since 1997), which says a lot about how much the “great conversation” of online communities is linked to gastronomic discourse. This paper propose a semiotic assessment of such a connection.
The soundslide report : innovative journalism or misplaced works of art?
2014
Published version of an article in the journal: Nordicom Review. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/nor-2014-0007 Open Access The audio slideshow-or soundslide report-represents a new format for journalistic reporting on online news sites. It is not very widely used, but it has certain discursive and aesthetic potentials indicating that it could contribute substantially to the ecology of journalistic genres. The article offers an illustration and discussion of these potentials, asking how the format communicates and how it affects journalism in general. Starting out with a close reading of a sample text and a discussion of the format's position in a network of g…
How Body and Soul Interact with the Spiritual Mind: Multimodal Cognitive Semiotics of Religious Discourse
2008
Cognitive Linguistics as an enterprise provides new theoretical and methodological instruments in understanding the relationship between people's thoughts and the language they use. Spiritual and religious experiences (particularly the ones involving some type of revelation from or communication with a transcendent being) are especially interesting since they involve some type of external, physically invisible force or agent, contributing an "ineffable" quality to the phenomenon. However, people can and do describe such events, and metaphors and blends pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental when attempting to talk about such abstract ideas. One of the main ten…
Modality and Uncertainty in Data Visualizations: A Corpus Approach to the Use of Connecting Lines
2020
In data visualizations, connecting lines may have various semiotic functions, including the semiotic potential of indicating modality and uncertainty. The goal of this article is to find out how this semiotic potential is realized in current best practices of data visualizations and what conventions exist for the visual manifestations of these functions. This issue is addressed by using a corpus-based approach and a two-level analysis method within a social semiotic framework. First, the article offers a theoretical discussion on how the concepts of modality and uncertainty interrelate. Second, a method for investigating how these concepts are visualized at different levels is presented. Th…