Since 1997 Representation has been the go-to textbook for students learning the tools to question and critically analyze institutional and media texts and images.

This long-awaited second edition:

• updates and refreshes the approaches to representation, signalling key developments in the field
• addresses the emergence of new technologies, media formats, politics and theories
• includes an entirely new chapter on celebrity culture and reality TV
• offers new exercises, readings, images and examples for a new generation of students

This book once again provides an indispensible resource for students and teachers in cultural and media studies.

This book is the first comprehensive account of 'body language' as 'paralanguage' informed by Systemic Functional Semiotics (SFS). It brings together the collaborative work of internationally renowned academics and emerging scholars to offer a fresh linguistic perspective on gesture, body orientation, body movement, facial expression and voice quality resources that support all spoken language. The authors create a framework for distinguishing non-semiotic behaviour from paralanguage, and provide a comprehensive modelling of paralanguage in each of the three metafunctions of meaning (ideational, interpersonal and textual). Illustrations of the application of this new model for multimodal discourse analysis draw on a range of contexts, from social media vlogs, to animated children's narratives, to face-to-face teaching. Modelling Paralanguage Using Systemic Functional Semiotics offers an innovative way for dealing with culture-specific and context specific paralanguage.

Semiotics has ever-changing vistas in consonance with changes in the ever-increasing complexity of life on Planet Earth. This book presents cutting-edge work in semiotics, projecting developments in the future of the field. Authored by leading semioticians, Semiotics and its Masters, Volume 2 contains essays on learning, transdisciplinarity, science, scaffolding, narrative, selfhood, ecosemiotics, agency, cybersemiotics, pornography, nostalgia, language and money. The volume presents a panorama of semiotics as it will develop in the third decade of the 21st century. This book will furnish the reader with an overview of the challenges that face explorers in the contemporary world of signs.

Shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize 2017 Emoji have gone from being virtually unknown to being a central topic in internet communication. What is behind the rise and rise of these winky faces, clinking glasses and smiling poos? Given the sheer variety of verbal communication on the internet and English's still-controversial role as lingua mundi for the web, these icons have emerged as a compensatory universal language. The Semiotics of Emoji looks at what is officially the world's fastest-growing form of communication. Emoji, the colourful symbols and glyphs that represent everything from frowning disapproval to red-faced shame, are fast becoming embedded into digital communication. Controlled by a centralized body and regulated across the web, emoji seems to be a language: but is it? The rapid adoption of emoji in such a short span of time makes it a rich study in exploring the functions of language. Professor Marcel Danesi, an internationally-known expert in semiotics, branding and communication, answers the pertinent questions. Are emoji making us dumber? Can they ultimately replace language? Will people grow up emoji literate as well as digitally native? Can there be such a thing as a Universal Visual Language? Read this book for the answers.

The concept of 'populism' is currently used by scholars, the media and political actors to refer to multiple and disparate manifestations and phenomena from across both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. As a result, it defies neat definition, as scholarship on the topic has shown over the last 50 years. In this book, Sebastian Moreno Barreneche approaches populism from a semiotic perspective and argues that it constitutes a specific social discourse grounded on a distinctive narrative structure that is brought to life by political actors that are labelled 'populist'. Conceiving of populism as a mode of semiotic production that is based on a conception of the social space as divided into two groups, 'the People' and 'the Other', this book uses semiotic theory to make sense of this political phenomenon. Exploring how the categories of 'the People' and 'the Other' are discursively constructed by populist political actors through the use of semiotic resources, the ways in which meaning emerges through the oppositions between imagined collective actors is explained. Drawing on examples from Europe, North America and South America, The Social Semiotics of Populism presents a systematic semiotic approach to this multifaceted political concept and bridges semiotic theory and populism studies in an original manner.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. The major principles and systems of C. S. Peirce's ground-breaking theory of signs and signification are now generally well known. Less well known, however, is the fact that Peirce initially conceived these systems within a 'Philosophy of Representation', his latter-day version of the traditional grammar, logic and rhetoric trivium. In this book, Tony Jappy traces the evolution of Peirce's Philosophy of Representation project and examines the sign systems which came to supersede it. Surveying the stages in Peirce's break with this Philosophy of Representation from its beginnings in the mid-1860s to his final statements on signs between 1908 and 1911, this book draws out the essential theoretical differences between the earlier and later sign systems. Although the 1903 ten-class system has been extensively researched by scholars, this book is the first to exploit the untapped potential of the later six-element systems. Showing how these systems differ from the 1903 version, Peirce's Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation offers an innovative and valuable reinterpretation of Peirce's thinking on signs and representation. Exploring the potential of the later sign-systems that Peirce scholars have hitherto been reluctant to engage with and extending Peirce's semiotic theory beyond the much canvassed systems of his Philosophy of Representation, this book will be essential reading for everyone working in the field of semiotics.

Analysis of improvisation as a compositional practice in the Commedia dell'Arte and related traditions from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Domenic Pietropaolo takes textual material from the stage traditions of Italy, France, Germany and England, and covers comedic drama, dance, pantomime and dramatic theory, and more. He shines a light onto 'the signs of improvised communication'. The book is comprehensive in its analysis of improvised dramatic art across theatrical genres, and is multimodal in looking at the spoken word, gestural and non-verbal signs. The book focusses on dramatic text as well as: - The semiotics of stage discourse, including semantic, syntactic and pragmatic aspects of sign production - The physical and material conditions of sign-production including biomechanical limitations of masks and costumes. Semiotics and Pragmatics of Stage Improvisation is the product of an entire career spent researching the semiotics of the stage and it is essential reading for semioticians and students of performance arts.

This books aims to demonstrate how semiotic models of textual analysis can be used to study any social reality or cultural process. In addition, it shows how semiotic models work by using examples from everyday life and social praxis, communicative processes and modes of consumption, online interactions and cross-media procedures, political experiences and scientific universes.

Our understanding of CS Peirce, and his semiotics, is largely influenced by a twentieth century perspective that prioritizes the sign as a cultural artifact, or as one that that 'distorts', in some way, our understanding of the empirical world. Such a perspective will always undermine appreciation of Peirce as a philosopher who viewed signs as the very mechanisms that enable us to understand reality through concept formation. The key to this repositioning of Peirce is to place his work in the broad frame of Hegelian philosophy. This book evaluates, in detail, the parallels that exist between Peircean and Hegelian thought, highlighting their convergences and also the points at which Peirce departs from Hegel's position. It also considers the work of Vygotsky on concept formation showing that both are, in fact, working within the same Hegelian template. This book, therefore, contributes to our broader understanding of Peircean semiotics. But by drawing in Vygotsky, under the same theoretical auspices, it demonstrates that Peirce has much to offer contemporary educational learning theory.

During the last 300 years circus clowns have emerged as powerful cultural icons. This is the first semiotic analysis of the range of make-up and costumes through which the clowns' performing identities have been established and go on developing. It also examines what Bouissac terms 'micronarratives' - narrative meanings that clowns generate through their acts, dialogues and gestures. Putting a repertory of clown performances under the semiotic microscope leads to the conclusion that the performances are all interconnected and come from what might be termed a 'mythical matrix'. These micronarratives replicate in context-sensitive forms a master narrative whose general theme refers to the emergence of cultures and constraints that they place upon instinctual behaviour. From this vantage point, each performance can be considered as a ritual which re-enacts the primitive violence inherent in all cultures and the temporary resolutions which must be negotiated as the outcome. Why do these acts of transgression and re-integration then trigger laughter and wonder? What kind of mirror does this put up to society? In a masterful semiotic analysis, Bouissac delves into decades of research to answer these questions.

Repetitive sequences play a major role as a pattern-building device and are a basic syntagmatic linguistic means on all language levels in spoken and signed languages. Little attention has been paid to investigating them in multimodal language use. Do gestures exhibit different types of repetitive sequences? Do they build complex units based on these types and if so, how is the pattern building to be described? How is the interrelation of gestural and spoken units in such complex units? Is it possible to identify repetitive patterns that are comparable to spoken and signed languages and/or patterns specific to the gestural modality? Based on a corpus-analysis of multimodal usage-events, 7 chapters explore gestural repetitions with regard to their structure, semantic and syntactic relevance for multimodal utterances, and cognitive saliency. Fine-grained cognitive-linguistic analyses of multimodal usage events reveal that gestural repetitions are not only a basic principle of building patterns in spoken and signed languages, but also in gestures. By addressing questions of mediality and multimodality of language-in-use, the book contributes to the investigation of repetition as a fundamental means of sign and meaning construction (crosscutting modalities) and enhances the understanding of the multimodal character of language in use.

Following the heyday of Levi-Straussian structuralism in the 1970s-80s, little attention has been paid by scholars of religion to semiotics. Semiotics of Religion reassesses key semiotic theories in the light of religious data. Yelle examines the semiotics of religion from structural and historical perspectives, drawing on Peircean linguistic anthropology, Jakobsonian poetics, comparative religion and several theological traditions. This book pays particular attention to the transformation of religious symbolism under modernization and the rise of a culture of the printed book. Among the topics addressed are: - ritual repetition and the poetics of ritual performance - magic and the belief in a natural (iconic) language - Protestant literalism and iconoclasm - disenchantment and secularization - Holiness, arbitrariness, and agency Building from the legacy of structuralism while interrogating several key doctrines of that movement, Semiotics of Religion both introduces the field to a new generation and charts a course for future research.

One of the first attempts ever to present in a systematic way a non-western semiotic system. This book looks at Japanese esoteric Buddhism and is based around original texts, informed by explicit and rigorous semiotic categories. It is a unique introduction to important aspects of the thought and rituals of the Japanese Shingon tradition. Semiotic concerns are deeply ingrained in the Buddhist intellectual and religious discourse, beginning with the idea that the world is not what it appears to be, which calls for a more accurate understanding of the self and reality. This in turn results in sustained discussions on the status of language and representations, and on the possibility and methods to know reality beyond delusion; such peculiar knowledge is explicitly defined as enlightenment. Thus, for Buddhism, semiotics is directly relevant to salvation; this is a key point that is often ignored even by Buddhologists. This book discusses in depth the main elements of Buddhist semiotics as based primarily on original Japanese pre-modern sources. It is a crucial publication in the fields of semiotics and religious studies.

"Semiotic Landscapes" is an exciting addition to the study of linguistic landscapes.
It looks at how landscape generates meaning and combines three major areas of scholarly interest each concerned with central dimensions of contemporary life: language and visual discourse, spatial practices, and also the changes bought about by global capitalism and ever increasing mediatization.
The editors look at: the textual/discursive construction of place; the use of space as a semiotic resource; the extent to which these processes are shaped by wider economic and political re-orderings of post-industrial or advanced capitalism; changing patterns of human mobility and transnational flows of ideas and images.
The collection demonstrates the way written discourse interacts with all other discursive modalities: visual images, nonverbal communication, architecture and the built environment. From the red light districts of Switzerland to the transgressive public art of graffiti, all landscape can be seen to generate meaning. "Semiotic Landscapes" looks at how and why, and places this meaning generation in an interdisciplinary and thoroughly modern cross-section of global trends.

Encounters between people of diverse religious faiths and worldviews are becoming more common in an increasingly globalized and mobile world. Research has not, however, kept pace by investigating how people talk about their faith with others who believe differently. This monograph addresses that deficit by taking an emergent path, combining qualitative and quantitative analysis to investigate and understand multilingual speakers' discursive behaviors in multiparty interreligious dialogues. Using 33 hours of recordings from conversations across seven research sites, Sauer Bredvik investigates how speakers' multilanguaging practices interact with other indexical and referential signs (unfilled pauses, disfluency, pragmatic markers) to affect how constitute messages are understood. By combining corpus-assisted discourse analysis with emic data taken from observation and 11 hours of participant interviews, one is able to identify distinct patterns of use between these metalinguistic indicators and a dialogue outcome. Readers will gain an understanding of how people of various linguistic and faith backgrounds use all their semiotic resources to display hospitality and respect for the Other in multilingual, multifaith settings.

Violations of international law and human rights laws are the plague of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. People's inhumanity to people escalates as wars proliferate and respect for human rights and the laws of war diminish. In Decoding International Law: Semiotics and the Humanities, Professor Susan Tiefenbrun analyzes international law as represented artfully in the humanities.
Mass violence and flagrant violations of human rights have a dramatic effect that naturally appeals to writers, film makers, artists, philosophers, historians, and legal scholars who represent these horrors indirectly through various media and in coded language. This reader-friendly book enables us to comprehend and decode international law and human rights laws by interpreting meanings concealed in great works of art, literature, film and the humanities. Here, the author adopts an interdisciplinary method of interpretation based on the science of signs, linguistics, stylistics, and an in-depth analysis of the work's cultural context.
This book unravels the complexities of such controversial issues as terrorism, civil disobedience, women's and children's human rights, and the piracy of intellectual property. It provides in-depth analyses of diverse literary works: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and the movie Hotel Rwanda (both representing terrorism); Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail; two documentary films about women and family law in Iran, Divorce Iranian Style and Two Women; Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (women's human rights and human trafficking in China); Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts ofNo Nation (shedding light on child soldiering and trafficking in Africa), and much more.

Multimodality is one of the most popular and influential semiotic theories for analysing media. However, the application and conceptual anchoring of multimodality often remains geographically and disciplinarily grounded within local systems of thought. New Studies in Multimodality combines the expertise of multimodalists from around the globe, offering novel readings and applications of central concepts in multimodality and inviting innovative synergies between previously disparate schools. Combining perspectives from the most actively developing traditions of theory and research, this book progresses from classic concepts to more empirically and practice-motivated contributions. Contributors engage in mutual dialogue to present new theoretical perspectives and compelling applications to a variety of old and new media. Expanding the basis and scope of multimodality, this volume shows awareness and experience of this field in many disciplines and illustrates how versatile, pervasive and relevant it is for studying today's communication phenomena.

This highly readable book develops a numanistic, and specifically semiotic approach to multiculturalism. It reveals how semiotics provides fresh and valuable insights into multiculturalism: in contrast to the binary logic of dualistic philosophy, semiotic logic does not understand the value of truth in rigid terms of 'true' or 'false', 'right' or 'wrong' only. The value of truth resides in meaning, which is a dynamic, evolutionary phenomenon, rooted, nevertheless, in factuality. Drawing on recent developments in biosemiotics, the book presents a theoretical approach to multiculturalism, regarding the lives of people living in multicultural environments. Rather than analyzing political or economic phenomena, it offers a semiotic analysis of multiculturalism and discusses its educational implications. It also invites readers to regard learning as a phenomenon of ecological sign growth and to understand multiculturalism along the same lines. As such, it brings together the life and social sciences and the humanities in a unified perspective, in an approach fitting postmodernism. Developing a postmodern philosophy for contemporary non-experts, which allows distancing from political discourse in favor of a posthumanistic stand, where altruism is seen as an opportunity, not a threat, this book appeals to a wide readership, from scholars seeking state-of-the-art theories to general readers looking for a thought-provoking and enlightening read.

Now available in paperback, this volume presents a theory of the circus as a secular ritual and introduces a method to analyze its performances as multimodal discourse. The book's fifteen chapters cover the range of circus specialties (magic, domestic and wild animal training, acrobatics, and clowning) and provide examples to show how cultural meaning is produced, extended and amplified by circus performances. Bouissac is one of the world's leading authorities on circus ethnography and semiotics and this work is grounded on research conducted over a 50 year span in Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas. It concludes with a reflection on the potentially subversive power of this discourse and its contemporary use by activists. Throughout, it endeavours to develop an analytical approach that is mindful of the epistemological traps of both positivism and postmodernist license. It brings semiotics and ethnography to bear on the realm of the circus.

Contemporary culture is as much visual as literary. This book explores an approach to the communicative power of the pictorial and multimodal documents that make up this visual culture, using Peircean semiotics. It develops the enormous theoretical potential of Peirce's theory of signs of signs (semiotics) and the persuasive strategies in which they are employed (visual rhetoric) in a variety of documents. Unlike presentations of semiotics that take the written word as the reference value, this book examines this particular rhetoric using pictorial signs as its prime examples. The visual is not treated as the 'poor relation' to the (written) word. It is therefore possible to isolate more clearly the specific constituent properties of word and image, taking these as the basic material of a wide range of cultural artefacts. It looks at comic strips, conventional photographs, photographic allegory, pictorial metaphor, advertising campaigns and the huge semiotic range exhibited by the category of the 'poster'. This is essential reading for all students of semiotics, introductory and advanced.

Introduces the reader to the ways in which Saussure developed his revolutionary insights on language and demystifies his complex theories. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is generally considered one of the main founders of modern linguistics and semiotics. The book that was derived from his teaching, the Course in General Linguistics, had a lasting impact on the intellectual life of the 20th century and remains today an object of debates and controversies. This "Guide for the Perplexed" introduces the reader to the ways in which Saussure developed his revolutionary insights on language in the context of the linguistics of his time. It also provides clear definitions and explanations of the basic notions that form the substance of his work, with relevant examples of how they apply to the understanding of language and other symbolic systems. The book demonstrates how Saussure's ideas have subsequently been used in the humanities and social sciences. It concludes by pointing to the continuing relevance of the theoretical and practical problems that were articulated by Saussure. This is the ideal book for those studying Saussure, structural linguistics or semantics and semiotics, offering a clear overview and explanation of all the key aspects of this fascinating linguist's work. Continuum's "Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

This volume provides new insights on lying and (intentionally) misleading in and out of the courtroom, a timely topic for scholarship and society. Not all deceptive statements are lies; not every lie under oath amounts to perjury-but what are the relevant criteria? Taxonomies of falsehood based on illocutionary force, utterance context and speakers' intentions have been debated by linguists, moral philosophers, social psychologists and cognitive scientists. Legal scholars have examined the boundary between actual perjury and garden-variety lies. The fourteen previously unpublished essays in this book apply theoretical and empirical tools to delineate the landscape of falsehood, half-truth, perjury, and verbal manipulation, including puffery, bluffing, and bullshit. The papers in this collection address conceptual and ethical aspects of lying vs. misleading and the correlation of this opposition with the Gricean pragmatic distinction between what is said and what is implicated. The questions of truth and lies addressed in this volume have long engaged the attention of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, organizational research, and the law, and researchers from all these fields will find this book of interest.

We communicate multimodally. Everyday communication involves not only words, but gestures, images, videos, sounds and of course, music. Music has traditionally been viewed as a separate object that we can isolate, discuss, perform and listen to. However, much of music's power lies in its use as multimodal communication. It is not just lyrics which lend songs their meaning, but images and musical sounds as well. The music industry, governments and artists have always relied on posters, films and album covers to enhance music's semiotic meaning. Music as Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest considers musical sound as multimodal communication, examining the interacting meaning potential of sonic aspects such as rhythm, instrumentation, pitch, tonality, melody and their interrelationships with text, image and other modes, drawing upon, and extending the conceptual territory of social semiotics. In so doing, this book brings together research from scholars to explore questions around how we communicate through musical discourse, and in the discourses of music. Methods in this collection are drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Semiotics and Music Studies to expose both the function and semiotic potential of the various modes used in songs and other musical texts. These analyses reveal how each mode works in various contexts from around the world often articulating counter-hegemonic and subversive discourses of identity and belonging.

This volume brings together Northrop Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, a body of work produced over almost sixty years. Including Frye's incisive book, T.S. Eliot, as well as his discussions of writers such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and George Orwell, the volume also contains a recently discovered review of C.G. Jung's book on the synchronicity principle and a previously unpublished introduction to a twentieth-century literature anthology. Frye's insightful commentaries demonstrate definitively that he was as astute a critic of the literature of his own time as he was of the literature of earlier periods.

Glen Robert Gill's substantial introduction delineates the development of Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, puts it in historical and cultural context, and relates it to his overarching theory of literature. This volume in Frye's Collected Works is indispensible not only for readers of Frye's work but for all scholars and students of twentieth-century literature.