A unified academic catalogue for books, journal articles, book chapters, proceedings papers, conference abstracts and semiotic research materials.
A unified academic catalogue for books, journal articles, proceedings papers, collection articles and semiotic research materials. Search across the full database; results are shown with pagination.
Spaces and Meanings
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Other title information: Semantics of the Cultural Landscape
Annotation: This book examines the problem of relationships between culture and space. Highlighting the use of semiotics of culture as a basic concept of research, it describes the power of the cultural landscape in the context of culture philosophical research. Opening with a discussion of the existence of culture in space, it establishes basic concepts such as noosphere and pneumatosphere. The author acknowledges the early contributions of thinkers like Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who first observed that human activity has become a geological force.
Identifier: 9783030151676
Status: Available
Structural Units of Mass Culture Mythology
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Other title information: A Cultural Semiotic Approach
Annotation: My dissertation focuses on the study of myths and their semiotic mechanisms that appear in contemporary mass culture texts. Although myths and mass culture as a whole have been widely discussed from the perspectives of various disciplines, there are no studies that deal with the systematization of mass culture mythology and the semiotic definition of mythic markers. The topic of this dissertation is interesting not only from a general theoretical, philosophical, anthropological and semiotic perspective, but also for practical reasons. I believe that I can convincingly show in my work that the study and identification of semiotic mechanisms of mass culture myths is applicable in the field of marketing semiotics and social communication. In my dissertation, I first compare mass culture mythology from a sociological, philosophical-anthropological and semiotic perspective. This allows me to combine the two main epistemological approaches to myth research and treat myth as a holistic meta-concept on the one hand, and approach myth as a cultural text on the other. Based on the framework I have created, I will analyze various texts of mass culture in my work and focus on identifying the most common and enduring structural units of mass culture mythology. How do I define a smaller unit of myth? In defining it, I will rely on two structural principles of myth: the emic unit, which I denote by the concept of mythologeme, and the hybrid unit, which I denote by the concept of mytheme. In the course of the analysis, I will highlight the following mythologemes: Fate, Journey, Universality, Catastrophe, Golden Age and Mother Nature, and the mythemes: Transformation and Return. In addition to distinguishing the aforementioned mythologemes and mythemes, I will highlight their value and function in mythological discourse. Fate and Journey help to integrate the life of the individual into the whole. The mythologeme of Mother Nature is associated with the existential need of a person to search for authenticity and identity. The mythologemes of the Universe, Catastrophe and Golden Age constitute the human time-spatial past-present-future triad. The latter are related to human questions about the origin of the world, nostalgia for the past and fears about the future. The mythologeme of Transformation points to the idea of miracle and the mythologeme of Return to the time-spatial axis of the human semiosphere, to orderliness. The last chapter of the work applies the theoretical framework developed in the dissertation to specific case studies. The first of them is dedicated to the analysis of the TV political marketing of the Ukrainian politician Darth Vader, and there I show how archetypal mythological meanings were included in the structure of the political narrative. The second case study focuses on the development of a specific brand, which I did in collaboration with the well-known Russian pop artist Manizha, and where I apply the mythologeme of Mother Nature.Further research into mythologemes and mythemes could open up new semiotic markers and thereby expand the field of application of semiotics, as well as help to better understand the mythological basis of culture. This dissertation presents a semiotic study of myth revealing in contemporary mass cultural texts and exploration of its inner semiotic machinery. Although a variety of studies have been devoted to myth, and quite a few studies have tackled mass culture issues, less attention has been given to the systematic articulation of mass cultural mythology and its markers, which reveal its inner semiotic machinery. Those issues are relevant not only from a general theoretical philosophical, anthropological, and semiotic point of view, but also have concrete applicability in marketing semiotics and social communications. Firstly, I discuss mass culture under an emancipatory umbrella approach and explore mass culture mythology from the sociological, philosophical-anthropological and semiotic perspectives. Secondly, I combine two main epistemological attitudes of myth and integrate a holistic object of research – which appears as a meta-concept – from one side, and a text of culture – mass cultural narratives around brands conveying their main values – from the other side . Thirdly, I discuss the smallest units of mass culture mythology and explore its most widespread structural units. I classify the smallest units of myth by their structural principles: the emic units (mythologemes) and the hybrid ones (mythemes). There are the mythologemes of Fate, Course, Universe, Catastrophe, Golden Age, and Mother Nature, and the mythemes of Transformation and Backtracking considered in detail. The main existential values of those smallest mythological units are discussed. The mythologemes of Fate and Course help to understand individual life as a part of an integral whole. The mythologeme of Mother Nature relates to the existential search for inner authenticity and identity. The mythologemes of Universe, Catastrophe, and Golden Age constitute an integral triadic idea about time and space (past-present-future) and reflect the human existential quest for an explanation of the world origin, nostalgia for the past and fears about the future. The mytheme of Transformation represents the idea of mythological miracle, and the mytheme of Backtracking appeals to the idea of a mastered time and space. Fourthly, I extend the process to find more minimal units of myth in cultural texts of different genres. The first case is dedicated to close analysis of the television communication of the Ukrainian politician Darth Vader. This case demonstrates the combination of archaic meanings and contemporary forms of myth within a narrative, producing new powerful connotations. The second case applies the Mother Nature mythologeme as a branding tool for building a coherent image of a musical artist. The further exploration of the mythologemes and mythemes and articulation of other semiotic markers of myth systematically enriches a profound understanding of human mind and culture.
Identifier: 9789949032150
Status: Available
Mimicry and Meaning
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Other title information: Structure and Semiotics of Biological Mimicry
Annotation: The present book analyses critically the tripartite mimicry model (consisting of the mimic, model and receiver species) and develops semiotic tools for comparative analysis. It is proposed that mimicry has a double structure where sign relations in communication are in constant interplay with ecological relations between species. Multi-constructivism and toolbox-like conceptual methods are advocated for, as these allow taking into account both the participants’ Umwelten as well as cultural meanings related to specific mimicry cases. From biosemiotic viewpoint, mimicry is a sign relation, where deceptively similar messages are perceived, interpreted and acted upon. Focusing on living subjects and their communication opens up new ways to understand mimicry. Such view helps to explain the diversity of mimicry as well as mimicry studies and treat these in a single framework. On a meta-level, a semiotic view allows critical reflection on the use of mimicry concept in modern biology. The author further discusses interpretations of mimicry in contemporary semiotics, analyses mimicry as communicative interaction, relates mimicry to iconic signs and focuses on abstract resemblances in mimicry. Theoretical discussions are illustrated with detailed excursions into practical mimicry cases in nature (brood parasitism, eyespots, myrmecomorphy, etc.). The book concludes with a conviction that mimicry should be treated in a broader semiotic-ecological context as it presumes the existence of ecological codes and other sign conventions in the ecosystem.
Identifier: 9783319503158
Status: Available
A note on the meanings of junk food
In: Semiotica 2016, Issue 211
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- 127-137
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/sem-2016-0094
Hidden meanings of the words “religion” and “religious” in legal discourse
In: Semiotica 2016, Issue 209
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- 341-355
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/sem-2016-0014
Identifying the meanings hidden in legal texts: The three conditions of relevance theory and their sufficiency
In: Semiotica 2016, Issue 209
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- 99-123
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/sem-2016-0005
Introduction: Hidden meanings in legal discourse
In: Semiotica 2016, Issue 209
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- 1-3
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/sem-2016-0011
The hidden meanings in the case law of the European Court for Human Rights
In: Semiotica 2016, Issue 209
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- 209-230
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/sem-2016-0009
Uncovering hidden meanings in legal discourse on the elderly: A semioethical perspective
In: Semiotica 2016, Issue 209
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- 301-321
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/sem-2016-0018
Heroizability
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Other title information: An anthroposemiotic theory of Literary characters
Annotation: It is commonly believed that some approaches of structural semiotics, narratology and cognitive science have not yet succeeded in constructing a complete and coherent theory of literary character. The author argues that the primary explanation of the failure is the artificial separation between characters and their actions. One of the chief implications of such separation is treating characters in terms of structures, agents, actants, functions, roles, and signs, which obviously mean that actions can hardly be explained as intended, motivated, performed and experienced. Survival, as a motivation-based concept, is one of the key concepts making the separation between character and action something impossible. Humans in literary narratives search for survival as an aware process of knowing and meaning making. Meaning in literary narratives can be produced by heroizability, which treats literary characters as living anthroposemiotic entities aware of their natural motivation to achieve in order to survive and produce meanings of their survival. As such, characters in literary narratives have active cognitions, and their cognitive activities remain meaningless without a process of semiosis. Applying Anthroposemiotic theory with Modeling System Theory, heroizability provides methodical tools to explain how the narrative text is represented and, thus, how it is to be interpreted properly by the reader not only to find, but also to make meaning in narrative world.
Identifier: 9781501510816
Status: Available
Lectures on the Epistemology of Semiotics
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Annotation: This book presents a functional view of semiotics considering language as a system of signs. In such a means- and ends-oriented perspective, the signs as meaning-bearers are detached, both in concrete and mental existence modes, from their meanings or objects of reference. Some relevant words on the genesis of the author’s contribution to the development of semiotic thought will also include his indebtedness to his preceptors, teachers, friends and colleagues. Preliminary outlines for their foundation have been developed since the late 197os and 1980s in the Department of General Linguistics at Wrocław. Subsequent work on the following theme continued in the Institute of English Philology at Opole and in the School of English at Poznań, over the last five years, has contributed to its present state.
Identifier: 9788360097243
Status: Available
The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education
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Annotation: This book offers educational experiences, including reflections and the resulting essays, from the Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law and Semiotics held during 2008 – 2011 at Penn State University’s Dickinson School of Law. The texts address educational aspects of law that require attention and that also are issues in traditional jurisprudence and legal theory. The book introduces education in legal semiotics as it evolves in a legal curriculum. Specific semiotic concepts, such as “sign”, “symbol” or “legal language,” demonstrate how a lawyer’s professionally important tasks of name-giving and meaning-giving are seldom completely understood by lawyers or laypeople. These concepts require analyses of considerable depth to understand the expressiveness of these legal names and meanings, and to understand how lawyers can “say the law,” or urge such a saying correctly and effectively in the context of a natural language that is understandable to all of us. The book brings together the structure of the Seminar, its foundational philosophical problems, the specifics of legal history, and the semiotics of the legal system with specific themes such as gender, family law, and business law.
Identifier: 9789400713406
Status: Available
Semiosis and Catastrophes
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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
Mediating the 'idea of One'
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Other title information: Arvo Pärt's pre-existing music in film
Notes: Kaire Maimets-Volt's dissertation
Annotation: The principal aim of this dissertation is to examine the use of Arvo Part's pre-existing tintinnabuli compositions in contemporary film soundtracks in order to determine the aesthetic reception of this music in film art. This will be achieved primarily through film analyses that explore the functions of tintinnabuli music in film, and the expressive meanings this music is considered suitable to communicate (with).
Identifier: 9789985979761
Status: Available
Murtuvat merkit
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Other title information: semiotiikan teoreettisen ja soveltavan tutkimuksen näkökulmia
Annotation: The work considers the fracture and transition of signs and texts - and thus also meanings - into each other. Meaning is always formed towards the future. The use of signs to convey and present meanings is already a productive process. Meaning inevitably becomes more than what is conveyed or presented. The production of meanings is also based on various structural elements, rules and practices. Static and permanent as well as dynamic and developing are in constant interaction with each other. The articles in the work represent the rich semiotics of the early 21st century. The approaches and the theories that define them are united by the glow of comprehensive research, in which the differences between sign categories and systems are understood as task-specific and contextual, not essential.
Identifier: 9789515707642
Status: Available
Meanings come in six
In: Sign System Studies 2008, Volume 36, Issue 2
- Pages
- 493-508
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Identifier: 10.12697/SSS.2008.36.2.09
Music and the Arts
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Other title information: Volume II
Annotation: Music, in some forms, declares itself autonomous and absolute. But semiotics has taught us that no sign system can function alone, isolated from other texts. Correspondences and interrelationships of arts have always been fertile soil from which musical meanings to grow. Thus, among the topics of these proceedings, one finds music and painting, ekphrasis, interpretation, semiotic theory of music, pragmatism, aesthetics, topics, narrativity, music and media, opera, cinema, literature, music history, hermeneutics, dance and music psychology. Musical Signification is a world-wide research project that tries to open new avenues for an innovative science of music as a meaningful practice throughout the ages.
Identifier: 9525431096
Status: Available
Live Samba
- Dependent title
- Analysis and Interpretation of Brazilian Pagode
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Annotation: Live Samba takes as its main topic the pagode movement, which apperead in the 1980s as a re-invention of the samba tradition. Deeply grounded in the most idiosyncratic musical patterns of samba, pagode countered the hegemony of the samba-schools and their media appeal. Pagode, too, became a major commercial success. It appeared in a transitional period, at the moment the music industry was shifting its focus towards lowe classes of the population. As a result, pagode and other local-based styles led the way to a recoinfiguration of Brazilian music. The transitional nature of this moment is reflected in the ambivalent nature of tpagode meanings. Those meanings were firmly attached to the local sphere, while at the same time open to communocation with translocal levels. In Live Samba, the author analyses pagode as a practice comprising both musical traits and symbolic associations with other spheres of Brazilian culture. The book looks at pagode songs through the frames of the samba tradition, of Brazilian society, of the commodity environment, and of musical signification, and it provides an introductory survey of samba and of the Brazilian music indurstry.
Identifier: 9519865497
Status: Available
Sign, Thought, Culture
- Dependent title
- A basic course in semiotics
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Annotation: An introduction to semiotics, written in accessible language with references to everyday life so that the reader can develop an understanding of how signs work in the social world and communication.
Identifier: 1551301318
Status: Available
The generation of meanings in liturgical songs
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Notes: 1
Annotation: This book is about the meaning of liturgical songs. Everybody who sings liturgical songs knows what liturgical songs is and also what it means. But when we start to talk about them, things become confused. We know too much and there are too many languages in which we can express what we think their meaning is. And what is worse, other people seem no to understand what we say and immediately reply that we may know a lot but not what they know. Then the discussion turns into a quarrel amongst people who know too much and cannot communicate what they know. A wise person may enter into the quarrel and say that communication about liturgical songs can only succeed when we sing together. Then we will sing together, confused and angry, because we now also know that the other people may sings very well, but do not understand what they are doing. This is what has been happening for decades in the Dutch churches. Perhaps we should be silent and start to look and listen very carefully to liturgical songs, while developing a language in which the songs themselves can speak, communicating what they have to say. The looking and listening will take much time and energy: there are no more easy answers. And the language will be so difficult that we are forced to be silent, waiting and hoping for a word to come. -back cover
Identifier: 9039005117
Status: Available
An introudction to systemic functional linguistics
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- 2 edition
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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
Ecstatic Naturalism
- Dependent title
- Signs of the world
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Annotation: Semiotic theory, which has restricted its focus largely to human forms of signification, is transformed by Robert S. Corrington into a semiotics of nature itself. Corrington situates the divide between "nature naturing" and "nature natured" within the context of classical American pragmaticism and postmodern psychoanalysis. At the heart of this new metaphysics is an insistence that all signs participate in larger orders of meaning that are natural and religious. Meanings embodied in nature point beyond nature to the mystery inherent in positioned codes and signs
Identifier: 0253314410
Status: Available
Messages and Meanings
- Dependent title
- An introduction to semiotics
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Annotation: An overview of semiotics applied to different topics, such as media, communication and aspects of everyday life like food or clothing
Identifier: 1551300273
Status: Available
Pandora and Occam
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Other title information: on the Limits of Language and Literature
Annotation: Evoking Pandora and Occam as metaphoric corner posts in an argument about language as discourse, Horst Ruthrof brings analytic philosophy to bear on issues of Continental philosophy, with attention to linguistic, semiological, and semiotic concerns. Instead of regarding meanings as guaranteed by definitions, the author argues that linguistic expressions are schemata directing us more or less loosely toward the activation of nonlinguistic sign systems. Ruthrof draws up a heuristic hierarchy of discourses, with literary expression at the top, descending through communication-reduced reference and speech acts to formal logic and digital communication at the bottom.
Identifier: 0253349958
Status: Available
Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism
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Annotation: In his most wide-ranging and accessible work, Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural response to the latest systemic change in world capitalism. He seeks here to crystallize a definition of a term which has taken on so many meanings that it has virtually lost all historical significance. He presents an extensive discussion on the cultural landscape—both ‘high’ and ‘low’—of postmodernity, evaluating the political fortunes of the new term and surveying postmodern developments in a range of different fields—from market ideology to architecture, from painting and instalment art to contemporary punk film, from video art and high literature to deconstruction. Finally, Jameson revaluates the concept of postmodernism in light of postmodern critiques of totalization and historical narratives—from the notion of decadence to the dynamics of small groups, from religious fundamentalism to hi-tech science fiction—while touching on the nature of contemporary cultural critique and the possibilities of cognitive mapping in the present multinational world system. This provocative book will be fundamental to all future discussions of postmodernism.
Identifier: 9780860915379
Status: Available
Blame–account sequences in therapy: The negotiation of relational meanings
In: Semiotica 1990, Issue 2024-03-04 00:00:00
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1990.78.3-4.219
The iconography of landscape
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Annotation: The Iconography of Landscape draws together fourteen scholars from diverse disciplines across the humanities and social sciences to explicate the status of landscape as a cultural image, 'a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings'. By applying the art-historical method of iconography - interpreting levels of meaning in human artifacts - to landscapes on paper or canvas, in literary form or on its ground, its contributors show how landscape is an important mode of human signification, informed by, and itself informing, social, cultural and political issues. The range of examples is wide in terms of medium, period and place. It covers poetry and promotional literature, architectural design and urban ceremonial, maps and paintings. The historical periods discussed include sixteenth-century Italy, eighteenth-century England, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland and twentieth-century Canada. The book is introduced by the editors' discussion of the meanings of landscape and of the iconographic method in the context of contemporary theoretical and methodological debates on culture and society
Identifier: 0521324378
Status: Available
The meanings of bodily artifacts: Variation in domain structure, communicative functions, and social contexts
In: Semiotica 1987, Issue 2024-01-02 00:00:00
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1987.65.1-2.107
Many meanings, one formula, and the myth of the Aloades
In: Semiotica 1980, Issue 2024-01-02 00:00:00
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1980.29.1-2.39
On the Nature of Meanings
In: Semiotica 1979, Issue 4
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Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1979.27.4.307