In the wake of both the semiotic and the psychoanalytic revolutions, how is it possible to describe the object of religious worship in realist terms? Semioticians argue that each object is known only insofar as it gives birth to a series of signs and interpretants (new signs). From the psychoanalytic side, religious beliefs are seen to belong to transference energies and projections that contaminate the religious object with all-too-human complexes. In Nature's Religion, distinguished theologian and philosopher Robert S. Corrington weaves together the concept of infinite semiosis with that of the transference to show that the self does have access to something in nature that is intrinsically religious. Corrington argues that signs and our various transference fields can and do connect us with fully natural religious powers that are not of our own making, thereby opening up a path past the Western monotheisms to a capacious religion of nature. With a foreword by Robert C. Neville, Nature's Religion is essential reading for philosophers of religion, scholars of the psychology of religion, and theologians.

This distinctive volume offers a thorough examination of the ways in which meaning comes to be shaped. Editors Stephen Reese, Oscar Gandy, and August Grant employ an interdisciplinary approach to the study of conceptualizing and examining media. They illustrate how texts and those who provide them powerfully shape, or "frame," our social worlds and thus affect our public life. Embracing qualitative and quantitative, visual and verbal, and psychological and sociological perspectives, this book helps media consumers develop a multi-faceted understanding of media power, especially in the realm of news and public affairs.

"Human Communication Theory and Research" introduces students to the growing body of theory and research in communication, demonstrating the integration between the communication efforts of interpersonal, organizational, and mediated settings. This second edition builds from the foundation of the original volume to demonstrate the rich array of theories, theoretical connections, and research findings that drive the communication discipline. Robert L. Heath and Jennings Bryant have added a chapter on new communication technologies and have increased depth throughout the volume, particularly in the areas of social meaning, critical theory and cultural studies, and organizational communication.
The chapters herein are arranged to provide insight into the breadth of studies unique to communication, acknowledging along the way the contributions of researchers from psychology, political science, and sociology. Heath and Bryant chart developments and linkages within and between ways of looking at communication. The volume establishes an orientation for the social scientific study of communication, discussing principles of research, and outlining the requirements for the development and evaluation of theories.
Appropriate for use in communication theory courses at the advanced undergraduate and graduate level, this text offers students insights to understanding the issues and possible answers to the question of what communication is in all forms and contexts.

This volume is an investigation into the silence of the feminine voice in Western thought, considering the important relationship between maternity and philosophy. The author shows how maternity has often been appropriated by some male theorists and explores ways of approaching motherhood and pregnancy from a feminist perspective. Drawing on examples such as Plato's allegory of the cave, the "productive man" of Marx philosophy, Sigmund Freud's and Melanie Klein's writings on the mother and the mother-daughter relationship, and the psychoanalytic and feminist insights of Irigaray and Kristeva, she shows how terms such as denial, repression and foreclosure offer insight into the philosophical construction of the maternal body. The book also draws upon the work of Althusser and Lyotard, showing how their work bears importantly on the silence of the feminine. Throughout the text Michelle Boulous Walker questions the assumptions that silence is simply the absence of language and presents new strategies for understanding how silence operates.

This book describes the main characteristics that define the emotion of fear, its dimensions, functions, types, and social and individual meanings. It also shows that fear represents a desire to eliminate the Other and that horror films have their origin precisely in crisis and fear, which gives it a fundamentally xenophobic nature. This is demonstrated in the book through the analysis of the four most important versions of the King Kong myth: 1933, 1976, 2005 and 2017. These versions are the result of the fear of the Other that was generated by particular crises in US society: the stock market crash of 1929, the 1970s energy crisis, 9/11 and the military intervention in Iraq in 2003 and its consequences. These conflicts also led to psychological and sociological effects that created a desire for escape that King Kong's films manifest.

Icons of Power investigates why the image of the cat has been such a potent symbol in the art, religion and mythology of indigenous American cultures for three thousand years.
The jaguar and the puma epitomize ideas of sacrifice, cannibalism, war, and status in a startling array of graphic and enduring images. Natural and supernatural felines inhabit a shape-shifting world of sorcery and spiritual power, revealing the shamanic nature of Amerindian world views. This pioneering collection offers a unique pan-American assessment of the feline icon through the diversity of cultural interpretations, but also striking parallels in its associations with hunters, warriors, kingship, fertility, and the sacred nature of political power. Evidence is drawn from the pre-Columbian Aztec and Maya of Mexico, Peruvian, and Panamanian civilizations, through recent pueblo and Iroquois cultures of North America, to current Amazonian and Andean societies.
This well-illustrated volume is essential reading for all who are interested in the symbolic construction of animal icons, their variable meanings, and their place in a natural world conceived through the lens of culture. The cross-disciplinary approach embraces archaeology, anthropology, and art history.

This third edition of the landmark textbook Reading Images builds on its reputation as the first systematic and comprehensive account of the grammar of visual design. Drawing on an enormous range of examples from children's drawings to textbook illustrations, photo-journalism to fine art, as well as three-dimensional forms such as sculpture and toys, the authors examine the ways in which images communicate meaning. Features of this fully updated third edition include: new material on diagrams and data visualization a new approach to the theory of 'modality' a discussion of how images and their uses have changed since the first edition examples from a wide range of digital media including websites, social media, I-phone interfaces and computer games ideas on the future of visual communication. Reading Images presents a detailed outline of the 'grammar' of visual design and provides the reader with an invaluable 'tool-kit' for reading images in their contemporary multimodal settings. A must for students and scholars of communication, linguistics, design studies, media studies and the arts.

This innovative collection brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars highlighting the "appliability" of Systemic Functional Linguistics and the ways in which theoretical and analytical conclusions drawn from its applications can inform and advance the study of language. The book discusses SFL's theoretical foundations and development in recent years to demonstrate its evolution into a more effective analytical tool. Building on this theoretical framework, the volume showcases the theory's applications in case studies exploring four sub-disciplines of language study: multilingual studies; translation studies; language learning and language teaching; and genre analysis. This all-inclusive volume demonstrates both Systemic Functional Linguistics' efficacy as a means of theoretical analysis, but also its value as a unique approach to the study of language and meaning, making this an indispensable resource for researchers and scholars in applied linguistics, discourse analysis, genre studies, translation studies, and multilingualism.

Vision and the gaze are key issues in the analysis of racism, sexism and ethnocentrism. In recent radical theory, generally, and French theory in particular, vision has been seen as a means of control. But this view is often unnuanced. It bypasses questions such as: Why is it that contemporary theories have been so critical of vision, and generous towards listening (in psychoanalysis) and language (in philosophy)? This collection of original essays brings together historical studies and contemporary theoretical perspectives on vision. The historical papers focus in turn on Ancient Greece, medieval theology, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. These historical studies are themselves thoroughly informed by poststructuralist theory. They provide a rigorous background for several new, exciting articles on vision and its bearings for feminism, race, sexual orientation, film and art. This collection is the first of its kind in juxtaposing historical and contemporary

This work explores the formative power of signs and their impact on the mind, the body and subjectivity, giving special attention to work of the French analyst Jacques Lacan and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

In this original work of psychoanalytic theory, John Muller explores the formative power of signs and their impact on the mind, the body and subjectivity, giving special attention to work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Muller explores how Lacan's way of understanding experience through three dimensions--the real, the imaginary and the symbolic--can be useful both for thinking about cultural phenomena and for understanding the complexities involved in treating psychotic patients. Muller develops Lacan's perspective gradually, presenting it as distinctive approaches to data from a variety of sources, such as cognitive, social and developmental psychology, literature, history, art, and psychoanalytic treatment.
The book's first four chapters present Muller's reading of selected data from child development research, psychology and linguistics, approximating a semiotic model of "normal" development. The following three chapters examine in a Lacanian framework the structural basis of psychotic stages as indicative of massive semiotic failure in development. The final chapters on human narcissism suggest reasons that "normal" development may be impossible.

All knowledge is always a matter of change, as this book underlines. All knowledge links You and Me to Reality. This process of positioning cognition has become heavily influenced by conversion. Its cultural background is in this book named 'the New Plural': a worldview based on combinations of Analog, Digital, AI and Quantum understandings of reality. The New Plural, combined with in-depth observations on the Subject in new forms of knowledge formation, forms the background theme of the book. To understand the Subject as defined in past centuries, like Kant's so-called 'split ego' or Voegelin's 'flow', are outlined together with Husserl's 'phenomenology of ego-positions'. Today, one encounters the Subject transformed into a Self with other forms that replace the traditional Subject and its position. The dynamics of the Self are therefore broader than any Selfie can picture. What the book calls 'the Self in digital culture' and for what it introduces the name Self-E, is therefore essential for a semiotic observation of all actual patterns and practices of communication. The decentering of the Subject changed human cognition. The book introduces 'The 3-S Triad' (composed of the 'Subject-Self-Self-E'), which has taken the place and functions of the classical Subject and its dynamics. Cognition has assumed a different position in the heart and mind of every human being. At the same time, the influence of 'The New Plural' has grown, making digital thought formation the leading pattern and foundation of today's knowledge. That different view on human identity made knowledge as understanding and its traditional grasping disappear. All fragments of planetary life were subjected to a newly conceived and often digitally anchored fitting. That forms one of the most powerful and global challenges to the human mind. What if we conclude about climate change that our knowledge fits the problems concerned? The book's final pages outline an epistemological path through such complex zones of knowledge! But its broad and encompassing background question remains, what the concept of change really means when it is challenged to clarify the topic we name climate change.

This book brings together papers which address a range of issues regarding the nature and structure of sign languages and other gestural systems, and how they exploit the space in which they are conveyed. The chapters focus on five pertinent areas reflecting different, but related research topics:
* space in language and gesture,
* point of view and referential shift,
* morphosyntax of verbs in ASL,
* gestural systems and sign language, and
* language acquisition and gesture.
Sign languages and gestural systems are produced in physical space; they manipulate spatial contrasts for linguistic and communicative purposes. In addition to exploring the different functions of space, researchers discuss similarities and differences between visual-gestural systems -- established sign languages, pidgin sign language (International Sign), "homesign" systems developed by deaf children with no sign language input, novel gesture systems invented by hearing nonsigners, and the gesticulation that accompanies speech. The development of gesture and sign language in children is also examined in both hearing and deaf children, charting the emergence of gesture ("manual babbling"), its use as a prelinguistic communicative device, and its transformation into language-like systems in homesigners. Finally, theoretical linguistic accounts of the structure of sign languages are provided in chapters dealing with the analysis of referential shift, the structure of narrative, the analysis of tense and the structure of the verb phrase in American Sign Language. Taken together, the chapters in this volume present a comprehensive picture of sign language and gesture research from a group of international scholars who investigate a range of communicative systems from formal sign languages to the gesticulation that accompanies speech.

Language is the species-specific human version of the animal system of communication. In contrast to non-human animals, language enables humans to invent a plurality of possible worlds; reflect upon signs; be responsible for our actions; gain conscious awareness of our inevitable mutual involvement in the network of life on this planet; and be responsibly involved in the destiny of the planet. The author looks at semiotics, the study of signs, symbols, and communication as developing sequentially rather than successively, more synchronically than diachronically. She discusses the contemporary phenomenon that people in today's society have witnessed and participated in, as part of the development of semiotics. Although there is a long history preceding semiotics, in a sense the field is, as a phenomenon, more "of our time" than of any time past. Its leading figures, whom Petrilli examines, belong to the twentieth and twenty-first century. Semiotics is associated with a capacity for listening. This capacity is also the condition for reconnecting to and recovering the ancient vocation of semiotics as that branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs or symptoms. The pragmatic aspect of global semiotics studies the impact of language or signs on those who use them, and looks for consequences in actual practice. In this respect, Petrilli theorizes that the task for semiotics in the era of globalization is nothing less than to take responsibility for life in its totality.

The result of a conference on language and related cognitive processes in animals, this book brings together scientists working on language and communication, reviews research done on language in apes and dolphins, and places this work in a larger perspective of animal communication and cognition. The conference convened an international group of distinguished scientists interested in exploring the neurological, cognitive, social, and behavioral aspects of communication in animals. A broad spectrum of perspectives was represented, including naturalistic investigations of animals in their natural habitat as well as strictly controlled laboratory investigations. Similarly, a broad range of species was described including rats, parrots, monkeys, apes, dolphins, and humans.
New methodologies and perspectives are continuously emerging that allow consideration of issues that previously could not be resolved. Emerging technology such as video equipment and advanced database systems allow one to exhaustively record in an accessible format the evidence on which scientific conclusions must be based. Investigation of animal language and communication is a small, but vigorously exciting area of scientific investigation as the chapters in this volume clearly attest.

The question of how language relates to the world is one of the most important problems of philosophy. What the word "God" refers to and the question "Does God exist?" are clearly linked. The existence or non-existence of God (or electrons or unicorns) is directly related to the issue of what and how a name names. "Naming and Reference" tackles the challenge of explaining the referring power of names. More specifically it explores the reference of lexical terms (especially proper names and pronouns) and the issue of empty or speculative names such as "Satan" and "leptons". The lack of semantics of such terms is a serious difficulty for linguistics, cognitive science and epistemology. In the first half of the book, a survey of the history of the subject is made from Locke to Kripke and Fodor. The second half contains a theory of reference which takes seriously the causal notion of reference, while at the same time preserving Frege's distinction between sense and reference. The algorithmic theory of reference that results treats reference in explicitly non-semantical terms. It incorporates or reflects the latest work in computational logic, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind.

Since the publication of Vygotsky's Thought and Language in the United States, a number of North American and European investigators have conducted systematic observations of children's spontaneous private speech, giving substantial support to Vygotsky's major hypotheses - particularly those regarding the social origins of higher psychological functions. However, there still remain many vital questions about the origins, significance, and functions of private speech: How can social and private speech be validly differentiated? What kinds of social interactions promote the use of private speech? What are the sources of individual differences in the use of private speech? This unique volume addresses these and many other important questions. Characterized by a strong emphasis on original data, it reports on systematic observations of spontaneous private speech in children and adults in both laboratory and naturalistic settings. In addition to its systematic analysis of common methodological problems in the field, the book contains the most comprehensive bibliography of the private speech literature currently available.

This book provides a cross-cultural analysis of how religious symbols function from a theological and philosophical perspective. Showing how religious symbols can be true in various qualified senses, Neville presents a theory of religious symbolism in the American pragmatic tradition extending and elaborating Tillich's claim that religious symbols participate in the divine realities to which they refer and yet must be broken in order not to be idolatrous or demonic.

Semiotics is a superpower for marketers. It generates profits for brands. It's a proven, powerful method of uncovering consumer insight and tailoring brand strategies that work. Companies such as Unilever and P&G attest to the success of Lawes semiotics in stimulating innovation and boosting sales. This book makes semiotics accessible. You can do semiotics. All agency-side and client-side marketers can pick up the skills to use and apply semiotics to brands. Using Semiotics in Marketing is an acclaimed how-to guide. It's the only book on semiotics ever published that sets out a complete blueprint for research projects. Clear instructions show how to write briefs and proposals, design projects, conduct analysis, write reports and present research findings. Newly updated, this second edition is packed with even more revelations about brands, consumers and their emerging needs. Three new chapters reveal the unseen social forces that drive the Be Kind movement, public appetite for sincerity and the emotions of younger generations. Start using semiotics today. Position and launch new brands. Rejuvenate established brands. Design products and packaging. Inspire timely and provocative ad campaigns. Innovate. See the future.

First published in 1977, this book presents a comprehensive and lucid guide through the labyrinths of semiology and structuralism - perhaps the most significant systems of study to have been developed in the twentieth century. The authors describe the early presuppositions of structuralism and semiology which claim to be a materialist theory of language based on Saussure's notion of the sign. They show how these presuppositions have been challenged by work following Althusser's development of the Marxist theory of ideology, and by Lacan's re-reading of Freud. The book explains how the encounter of two disciplines - psychoanalysis and Marxism - on the ground of their common problem -language - has produced a new understanding of society and its subjects. It produces a critical re-examination of the traditional Marxist theory of ideology, together with the concepts of sign and identity of the subject.

First published in 1982, this book looks at a wide variety of issues concerning the vast field of study that is 'semiotics. It begins by tracing the beginnings of modern semiotics in the works two pioneering figures - Saussure and Peirce - in order to present fundamental assumptions, notions and distinctions which provide an essential background to the more recent developments. The author then goes on to look at Behavioural Semiotics, Luis Prieto's idea of "l'Acte Semique", Austin's theory of 'Speech Acts' and Searle's elaborations, Barthes' move away from philosophical and scientific approaches in his ideology of Socio-Cultural Signification, Functionalism and Axiomatic Functionalism, style as a form of communication, semiotics of the cinema, and communicative behaviour in non-human species.

Since before the dawn of history, people have been telling stories to each other and to themselves. Thus stories are at the root of human experience. This volume describes empirical investigations by Jerome Bruner, Wallace Chafe, David Olson, and others on the relationship between stories and cognition. Using philosophical, linguistic, anthropological, and psychological perspectives on narrative, the contributors provide a definitive, highly diversified portrait of human cognition.

Originally published in 1980, this title looks at the mental processes involved in producing and understanding spoken language. Although there had been several edited volumes on speech in the previous ten years, this volume was unique in that it deals exclusively with perception and production of fluent speech. The chapters in this volume, contributed to by distinguished scientists from psychology, linguistics and computer science, deal with such questions as: How are ideas encoded into sound? How does a speaker plan an utterance? How are words recognized? What is the role of knowledge in speech perception? In short, how do people communicate with each other using speech?

Semiotics is a superpower for marketers. It generates profits for brands. It's a proven, powerful method of uncovering consumer insight and tailoring brand strategies that work. Companies such as Unilever and P&G attest to the success of Lawes semiotics in stimulating innovation and boosting sales. This book makes semiotics accessible. You can do semiotics. All agency-side and client-side marketers can pick up the skills to use and apply semiotics to brands. Using Semiotics in Marketing is an acclaimed how-to guide. It's the only book on semiotics ever published that sets out a complete blueprint for research projects. Clear instructions show how to write briefs and proposals, design projects, conduct analysis, write reports and present research findings. Newly updated, this second edition is packed with even more revelations about brands, consumers and their emerging needs. Three new chapters reveal the unseen social forces that drive the Be Kind movement, public appetite for sincerity and the emotions of younger generations. Start using semiotics today. Position and launch new brands. Rejuvenate established brands. Design products and packaging. Inspire timely and provocative ad campaigns. Innovate. See the future.

Gender Matters presents a feminist linguistic analysis of texts - literature, media and lyrics - and conversation. It explores how gender relates to and shapes our understanding of sexism, reading and writing, politeness and public speaking. The essays in the book examine a range of questions: why is it necessary for feminists to analyse or comment on sexism when sexism is widely regarded as an anachronistic concern? How can feminists describe the effect of gender on the experience of literature? Why are women conA--sidered more capable of private rather than public speech? What is the relation between gender and politeness and are women more polite than men? In analysing these themes, Gender Matters highlights the insights and strengths of both second and third wave feminist analysis for linguistics.