Search results for "Semiotics"
showing 10 items of 438 documents
Indispensability and Effectiveness of Diagrams in Molecular Biology
2019
Abstract: In this paper I aim to defend a twofold thesis. On one hand, I will support, against Perini (2005), the indispensability of diagrams when structurally complex biomolecules are concerned, since it is not possible to satisfactorily use linguistic-sentential representations at that domain. On the other hand, even when diagrams are dispensable I will defend than they will generally be more effective than other representations in encoding biomolecular knowledge, relying on Kulvicki-Shimojima’s diagrammatic effectiveness thesis. Finally, I will ground many epistemic virtues of biomolecular diagrams (understandability, explanatory power, prediction and hypothesis evaluation) on their cog…
Designing Dialogs Around Picture Book Apps
2019
In Norwegian kindergartens there is a strong emphasis on communication and language stimulation. In this educational context the reading of picture book apps offers an opportunity for extended dialogs, which have great didactic potential in that they integrate language knowledge with cultural knowledge. In this chapter we discuss what dimensions of the picture book text (words and pictures), medium (app on digital tablet) and situation (adult-child relations) that the teacher needs to take into consideration when designing dialogs to encourage early language and literacy development in kindergarten. This work represents the first phase of a major innovation project that will develop a resea…
Kieli- ja kielitaitokäsitykset tutkivan opettajan kenttäpäiväkirjamerkinnöissä
2018
This article focuses on a young teacher-researcher’s beliefs about language and language skills. The research is motivated by findings of former studies according with which teachers’ beliefs are often relatively permanent and have a strong effect on their teaching and evaluation practices. The data consists of a teacher-researcher’s diary notes from storytelling events (n=19) in which storycrafting has been used with young primary school pupils. The study was carried out by a theory-driven content analysis in order to reveal and to be able to assess teacher-researcher’s beliefs that are only implicitly present in the data: diary markings were analyzed by comparing them to widely used dicho…
Rappresentazioni vertiginose. Tre esempi: Perec, Lequeu, Douat
2022
Nel novembre del 2009 il Museo del Louvre decise di affidare a Umberto Eco la direzione di una serie di conferenze da tenere su un argomento di sua scelta. Eco scelse il tema della ‘lista’ conferendo a quella manifestazione il nome di Vertige de la liste a cui seguì un saggio dallo stesso titolo pubblicato da Bompiani. Questa breve nota prende in prestito la stessa tematica che, per via del suo carattere altamente ete-rogeneo, è in grado di coinvolgere diversi ambiti del sapere senza minimamente accennare ad esaurirsi. L’elenco, strettamente legato alla figura retorica dell’accumulazione, può infatti costituirsi di segni, parole, suoni e di qualsiasi altra forma di rappresentazione utile a …
Time Use of the Self-Employed
2007
SUMMARY It is a well-documented empirical regularity that it is more satisfying to be self-employed than to work as an employee for an organization. A large part of this difference in job satisfaction is attributed in the literature to the strong perception of independence by the self-employed. In this paper we study people's time use as a source of entrepreneurial independence. By making use of disaggregated sequential microdata on people's time use, we are able to document that the self-employed work longer effective hours, as well as more in the evenings and weekends, than those employed by an organization. Even though being able to decide when to do one's work may be a sign of flexibili…
Linguistic Repertoires and Semiotic Resources in Interaction: A Finnish Manager as a Mediator in a Multilingual Meeting
2010
This article examines professional communication in a multilingual meeting in a small company in Finland within ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and discourse analytic frameworks. English is used as a lingua franca by a group of Finnish and Chinese business professionals. The aim is to study how language is used with other semiotic resources to construct meaning in interaction. In particular, with the focus on an individual participant who was the mediator in the meeting, the goal is to analyze participants’ role alignment and interpersonal relationships. The results show that business professionals’ roles are renegotiable in a meeting and by means of language accompanied by embodied actions …
Superdiversity perspective and the sociolinguistics of social media
2018
This chapter shows how the superdiversity perspective suggested in recent critical sociolinguistics provides the study of social media discourse and communication with a useful approach to conceptualizing and empirically investigating complex and multiple axes of diversity and difference in social media practices. It discusses recent work in sociolinguistics of social media, highlighting how social media practices illustrate many of the aspects of contemporary social life and communication that are considered symptomatic of superdiversity. It shows how research in this field has moved from viewing superdiversity as a quality or quantity characterizing specific places, spaces, groups and net…
The Eternal Return of Politics
2003
Politics of Historical Signs In his text The Contest of Faculties, Immanuel Kant makes an attempt to answer the question "Is the human race continually improving?" He identifies such an attempt as belonging to a history of future times. Nevertheless, according to Kant, such a history must start from some sort of experience. He reasons that "[w]e must, therefore, search for an event which would indicate that such a cause exists and that it is causally active within the human race, irrespective of the time at which it might actually operate; and it would have to be a cause which allowed us to conclude, as an inevitable consequence of its operation, that mankind is improving." (1) By reading s…
Images of Europe. The Union between Federation and Separation
2021
This book deals with the fundamental semantics of images of Europe, which consist of valences, mirror beliefs and affectivities. This is why it relaunches the importance of the European discourse in its symbolic dimension. As such, it explores the many images of Europe, or rather the many images through which European discourse is actually constituted in daily life, in search of their enunciative responsibility in today’s world for determining the current “State of the Union”. The identity of the European continent is based on a millenary tension between universalism and particularism: images of Europe have in fact been alternately inspired, over the centuries, by a model of homogeneity – R…
Anti-Speciesist Rhetoric
2017
The various laws protecting animals that were established in Nazi Germany (but for the most part were never put into effect) had, among others, the aim of marking the taxonomic and ontological distance between pure animals and impure sub-humans (Jews, homosexuals, the Roma). The attention to and respect for the alpha predator and noble animals was a vertiginous ignoratio elenchi of the concentration camps. With analogous fallacy, today’s anti-human and anti-speciesist eco-fascism, which regularly makes use of the reductio ad Hitlerum (“meat-eaters = Nazis”), avails itself in an irrational and populist way of the rudimentary argumentum ad personam typical of xenophobic and racist propaganda.…