ISI Library

Annotation: This book was initiated by a graduate course of Elin Sütiste about semiotics of Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), given in the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu. The contributions include articles by the doctoral students as well as co-lectures, visiting scholars and colleagues. These seminars affirmed that Jakobson was truly an ambitious, forward-thinking scholar who exerted himself to establish semiotics as a discipline. Though Jakobson identified himself as a philologist, he played a pivotal role in the development and institutionalization of semiotics. Jakobson’s ability to grasp the potential of new ideas and to inspire others was remarkable. Juri Lotman has commented that “Wherever his fate of a mid-20th-century man took him, everywhere Jakobson attracted a group of scientists that soon grew into a scientific centre of global importance”.

Identifier: 9789949036301

Status: Available

Other title information: Towards a Solipsistic Paradigm of Semiotics

Notes: One of the copies of this book was given to the library by Ludmila Lackova

Annotation: This publication traces the human capacity for sign use from its linguistic and cultural context. Such scholarship suggests the foundation of a discursive paradigm for semiotics stuck in mundane phenomenology, associated inter alia with the contributions of Leo Zawadovski and Ernst Cassirer drawing their inspiration from Karl Buhler.

Identifier: 9788323230823

Status: Available

Other title information: René Thom’s Semiotic Heritage

Annotation: The central concern of this volume is semiogenesis, i.e. the evolution and differentiation of meaningful («pregnant») forms in the field of symbolic systems – from bio-communication to language and cultural forms like music, art, architecture or urban forms. The basic questions are: How are meanings created and further differentiated? Where do they come from? What kind of forces drive their unfolding? How can complex cultural forms be understood based on simple morphodynamic principles? Applications concern the perception of forms by animals and humans, the categorization of forms e.g. in a lexicon, and predication or other complex symbolic behaviors which show up in grammar or in cultural artifacts like the unfolding of urban centers.

Identifier: 9783034304672

Status: Available

Annotation: Systemic linguistics is an approach which views language as a strategic, meaning making resource. This text, an introduction to this semiotic approach, focuses on the analysis of authentic, everyday texts, and asks both how people use language to make meanings, and how language itself is organised to enable those meanings to be made.

Identifier: 185567209X

Status: Available