Search results for "semi"
showing 10 items of 3894 documents
The look of writing in reading. Graphetic empathy in making and perceiving graphic traces
2021
This article presents preliminary considerations and results from a research project designed to investigate the relation between (i) gestures, (ii) graphic traces and (iii) perceptions. More specifically, the project aims to test the hypothesis that graphic traces, including handwriting, can set up graphetic empathy between writers and readers of traces across long temporal and spatial distances. Insofar as a graphic trace is lawfully related to the gesture by which it came into being, the trace itself will hold information about the gesture, which may resonate with the sensorimotor system of a perceiver as if they themselves performed the gesture. If this is in fact so, it will have impor…
Researching Identity and L2 Pragmatics in Digital Stories: A Relational Account.
2020
This study explores college EFL learners' construction of identity through the analysis of their pragmatic choices in digital stories, in which they narrated their relationship with another person they had helped in the past. More specifically, such choices were examined following Relational Dialectics Theory in learners' enactments of "connection" with and "autonomy" from this person. A specific view of identity in language education, the notion of "relational work" in (im)politeness research, and a social semiotic framework were also employed in data analysis. Learners' pragmatic choices ranged from the selection of the topic of their narratives according to types of social bonds, to the …
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…
Anti-Semitism and Progressive Era Social Science. The case of John R. Commons
2016
This paper explores Common’s views toward Jews in order to assess whether his published writings contain assertion that today would be stigmatized as anti-Semitic. The evidence we provide shows that Commons’ racial characterization of Jews was framed within a broad and indiscriminate xenophobic framework. With other leading Progressive Era social scientists, in fact, Commons shared the idea that the new immigration from Eastern and southern Europe would increase competition in the labor market, drive down wages, and lead Anglo-Saxon men and women to have fewer children, since they would not want them to compete with those who survive on less. Within this general xenophobic context, Commons …
Relational work in multimodal networked interactions on Facebook
2018
Abstract The paper argues that the notion of Relational Work (Locher and Watts 2005) needs to be expanded to be able to account for sociability in the networked interactions afforded by social platforms such as Facebook. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore how the nature of networked interactions impacts the emergence of relational practices therein. Importantly, Relational Work is a language based framework whereas networked interactions are highly multimodal. By applying Norris’ (2004) multimodal framework to the analysis of a Facebook wall event, we show how key sociability functions are carried out by semiotic modes other than language. Furthermore, the analysis shows how relation…
Special issue: Social media as semiotic technology
2018
Social media technology has become ubiquitous in modern life. Take as an example, the role of social media in the mundane routine of waiting for the bus. People may take a picture of a funny bird a...
Software as ideology
2016
Software has become ubiquitous in higher education, especially often taken-for-granted Microsoft Word. Educational writing involves more than horizontal lines of text, but also multimodal representations. When students write in Word, the affordances of the program constrain what multimodal representations of knowledge they can and cannot make. Software such as Word is not neutral tool-kits, but also historical and semiotic constructs loaded with social values and ideologies. By taking a social semiotic approach to Word and SmartArt, this article shows how this software is pre-loaded with values and styles from office management. These values are then infused into education, in the case this…
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).
Indexing epistemic incongruence: uy as a formal sign of disagreement in agreement sequences in Spanish
2018
Abstract This study explores epistemic incongruence in Spanish by focusing on the particle uy in Iberian Spanish. It is claimed that this interjection has a basic change-of-state meaning and that it is commonly used to stress disagreement. Despite its general association to disagreement, the particle can be used in agreeing responses, where it also treats the previous turn as problematic. In this sequential environment, however, it is not the content of the previous turn but rather the underlying assumptions (the basic epistemic configuration of an assertion-answer adjacency pair) that are challenged by the second speaker. The evidence for this analysis comes from the sequential context. Ty…