Among the most prominent scholars of language and law is Peter Tiersma, a law professor at Loyola Law School with a doctorate in linguistics (co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law). Tiersma's significant body of work traverses a variety of legal and linguistic fields. This book offers a selection of twelve of Tiersma's most influential publications, divided into five thematic areas that are critical to both law and linguistics: Language and Law as a Field of Inquiry, Legal Language and its History, Language and Civil Liability, Language and Criminal Justice, and Jury Instructions. Each paper is accompanied by a brief commentary from a leading scholar in the field, offering a substantive conversation about the ramifications of Tiersma's work and the disagreements that have often surrounded it.

This book provides an extended exploration of the multimodal analysis of spatial (three-dimensional) texts of the built environment, culminating in a holistic approach termed Spatial Discourse Analysis (SpDA). Based on existing frameworks of multimodal analysis, this book applies, adapts, and extends these frameworks to spatial texts. The authors argue that choices in spatial design create meanings about what we perceive and how we can or should behave within spatial texts, influence how we feel in and about those spaces, and enable these texts to function as coherent wholes. Importantly, a spatial text, once built, is also a resource which is then used, and an essential aspect of understanding these texts is to consider what users themselves contribute to the meaning potential of these texts. The book takes the metafunctional approach familiar from Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) and foregrounds each metafunction in turn (textual, interpersonal, experiential, and logical), in relation to the detailed analysis of a particular spatial text.

Social semiotics reveals language's social meaning its structures, processes, conditions and effects in all social contexts, across all media and modes of discourse. This important new book uses social semiotics as a one-stop shop to analyse language and social meaning, enhancing linguistics with a sociological imagination. Social Semiotics for a Complex World develops ideas, frameworks and strategies for better understanding key problems and issues involving language and social action in today's hyper-complex world driven by globalization and new media. Its semiotic basis incorporates insights from various schools of linguistics (such as cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistics) as well as from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and literary studies. It employs a multi-modal perspective to follow meaning across all modes of language and media, and a multi-scalar approach that ranges between databases and one-word slogans, the local and global, with examples from English, Chinese and Spanish. Social semiotics analyses twists and turns of meanings big and small in complex contexts. This book uses semiotic principles to build a powerful, flexible analytic toolkit which will be invaluable for students across the humanities and social sciences.

This book presents developments of discourse analysis in France and applies its tools to key texts from five theorists of structuralism: Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida and Sollers. It pays special attention to enunciative pragmatics as a poststructuralist approach which analyzes the discursive construction of subjectivity.

Everyday consumers buy into the concept of brands and their associated meanings - the perception of quality, a symbolic relationship, a vicarious experience, or even a sense of identity. Marketing Semiotics suggests that the extent to which consumers recognize, internalize, and relate to brand meanings is not only an academic question. These meanings contribute to 'brand equity', the financial value of intangible brand benefits that exceed the use value of goods, and impacts upon a firm's financial performance. Therefore, the management of brand equity demands first and foremost the management of brand meanings, or semiotics.
The book uses structural semiotics, a discipline that extends the laws of structural linguistics to the analysis of verbal, visual, and spatial sign systems, to shed light on the cultural codes and discourse of brands. It proposes that semiotic research should form the cornerstone of brand equity management, since brands rely so heavily on sign systems that contribute to profitability by distinguishing brands from simple commodities, from competitors, and engaging consumers in the brand world.
The book includes dozens of global business cases where semiotics has been used to refocus, reposition, or extend the brand to new products, customers, and markets. Drawing upon twenty years of academic and consulting experience, the book provides actionable direction for steering brands through technological and cultural change, differentiating brands in the competitive environment, and counteracting the natural depletion of brand meaning over time.

Since the 1980's, Marilena Chaui's writing has had a profound impact in Brazil, contributing to the academic conversation and resonating in popular culture. Here, in English for the first time, are ten of Chaui's most important essays, with an introduction by Maite Conde which situates the scholarship in the global context.

A ground-breaking study of the roles played by foreign languages in film and television and their relationship to translation. The book covers areas such as subtitling and the homogenising use of English, and asks what are the devices used to represent foreign languages on screen?

This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a "five-pound note" with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch.

Positioned within the field of linguistics and multisemiotic discourse analysis, the theme of this book is the multifaceted interaction between text and image in different discourse genres, and it offers critical views on how we talk and show our experience of the world around us.

Signs of War and Peace focuses on the role public display plays in the conflict in Northern Ireland. In doing so, it ranges freely over other times, places, and events that shed light on the social and political processes and dynamics involved in public display traditions, such as the Saint Patrick's Day parades in Boston, Massachusetts, and the popular spontaneous shrines to Lady Diana in London. The book is about the nature of public display, its relationships to class-based aesthetics, tradition, and popular style. It is also about contest, conflict, and civil war, and the ways the former are intimately intertwined with the latter, both in Northern Ireland and elsewhere throughout the world. The work is interdisciplinary, combining ethnographic, anthropological, folkloristic, and performance studies approaches. The manuscript benefits from large amount of field work in Ireland, and as a result contains both ethnographic data and revealing interviews with many people in Northern Ireland who have participated in the display events Santino seeks to analyze. The perspective that Santino offers helps to explain the intensity of the conflict as well as the origination, motivations, and justifications of bonfires, murals, commemorative displays, parades, etc. that symbolically articulate what he terms the 'dual master narratives' that underlie and in many ways help to articulate the parameters of that conflict.

Roland Barthes was the leading figure of French Structuralism, the theoretical movement of the 1960s which revolutionized the study of literature and culture, as well as history and psychoanalysis. But Barthes was a man who disliked orthodoxies. His shifting positions and theoretical interests make him hard to grasp and assess. This book surveys Barthes' work in clear, accessible prose, highlighting what is most interesting and important in his work today.

Integrating strategic problem-solving, and emphasis on stories and the cultural context of meaning, this book introduces the theoretical stance of semiotic constructivism. Its main argument, illustrated in engaging cases, is that all experience is a construction of signs, and that symbolic forms such as language, myth, ritual and drama create and shape our realities, and provide useful tools for encouraging therapeutic change.

The semiotics discipline - a hybrid of communication science and anthropology - accounts for the deep cultural codes that structure communication and sociality, endow things with value, move us through constructed space, and moderate our encounters with change. Doing Semiotics shows readers how to leverage these codes to solve business problems, foster innovation, and create meaningful experiences for consumers. In addition to the key principles and methods of applied semiotics, it introduces the basics of branding, strategic decision-making, and cross-cultural marketing management. Through practical exercises, examples, extended team projects, and evaluation criteria, this book guides students through the application of learning to all phases of semiotics-based projects for communications, brand equity management, design strategy, new product development, and public policy management. In addition to tools for sorting data and mapping cultural dimensions of a market, it includes useful interview protocols for use in focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic studies, as well as expert case studies that will enable readers to apply semiotics to consumer research.

What is the relationship between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the culture and ideology of the French Revolution? This book takes up that classic question by concentrating on changing conceptions of language and, especially, signs during the second half of the eighteenth century. The author traces, first, the emergence of a new interest in the possibility of gestural communication within the philosophy, theater, and pedagogy of the last decades of the Old Regime. She then explores the varied uses and significance of a variety of semiotic experiments, including the development of a sign language for the deaf, within the language politics of the Revolution. A Revolution in Language shows not only that many key revolutionary thinkers were unusually preoccupied by questions of language, but also that prevailing assumptions about words and other signs profoundly shaped revolutionaries' efforts to imagine and to institute an ideal polity between 1789 and the start of the new century. This book reveals the links between Enlightenment epistemology and the development of modern French political culture.

This is a festscrift made to honour the great scholarly work of Professor Soren Brier The festschrift contains articles written by international scholars within academic fields such as: semiotics, library and information science, 2. order cybernetics, ethics in science, metaphysics. All these different yet related topics show the diversity and depth of Briers research.

Bogdan sets forth criteria and methods of a structural analysis of the pictorial language as a first step toward a more adequate understanding of the semiotic system of visual arts. A structural approach to this pictorial language is presented along with a discussion of an information-processing model applied to optical illusions and computer simulations, and treatment of specifically paradigmatic case studies. Bogdan also discusses the Funeral Monument of Targu Jiu by Constantin Brancusi, one of the most important innovators in modern art.

The semiotics discipline - a hybrid of communication science and anthropology - accounts for the deep cultural codes that structure communication and sociality, endow things with value, move us through constructed space, and moderate our encounters with change. Doing Semiotics shows readers how to leverage these codes to solve business problems, foster innovation, and create meaningful experiences for consumers. In addition to the key principles and methods of applied semiotics, it introduces the basics of branding, strategic decision-making, and cross-cultural marketing management. Through practical exercises, examples, extended team projects, and evaluation criteria, this book guides students through the application of learning to all phases of semiotics-based projects for communications, brand equity management, design strategy, new product development, and public policy management. In addition to tools for sorting data and mapping cultural dimensions of a market, it includes useful interview protocols for use in focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic studies, as well as expert case studies that will enable readers to apply semiotics to consumer research.

In global consumer culture, brands structure an economy of symbolic exchange that gives value to the meanings consumers attach to the brand name, logo, and product category. Brand meaning is not just a value added to the financial value of goods, but has material impact on financial markets themselves. Strong brands leverage consumer investments in the cultural myths, social networks, and ineffable experiences they associate with marketing signs and rituals. Creating Value: The Theory and Practice of Marketing Semiotic Research is a guide to managing these investments by managing the cultural codes that define value in a market or consumer segment. The book extends the discussion beyond the basics of semiotics to post-structural debates related to ethnographic performance, multicultural consumer identity, the digitalized consumer, and heterotopic experiences of consumer space. The book invites readers to challenge the current thinking on topics ranging from cultural branding and brand rhetoric to digital media management and service site design. It also emphasizes the role of product category codes and cultural trends in the production of perceived value. Creating Value explains theory in language that is accessible to academics and students, as well as research practitioners and marketers. By applying semiotics to the everyday world of the marketplace, the book makes sense of the semiotics discipline, which is often mystified by technical jargon and hair-splitting debate in the academic literature. The book also provides practitioners and professors with a practical guide to the methods used in semiotic research across the marketing mix.

This book is about the representations - both visual and linguistic - which people give of their own places of origin. It examines the drawings of interviewees who were asked to draw their own place of origin on a white A3 sheet, using pencil or colour, according to their choice. If they were born in a place they did not remember because they moved in when they were very small, they could draw the place they did remember as the scenario of their early childhood. The drawings are examined from three different perspectives: semiotics, cognitive psychology and geography. The semiotic instruments are used to describe how each person reconstructs a complex image of his/her childhood place, and how they translate their own memories from one language to another, e.g. from drawing to verbal story, trying to approach what they want to express in the best possible way. The cognitive-psychological point of view helps clarify the emotional world of the interviewees and their motivations during the process of reconstruction and expression of their childhood experiences. The geographical conceptualizations concern a cultural level and provide insight into the cartographic models that inspire the maps people drew. One of the main findings was the influence from cultural codes as demonstrated in the fact that most of the US students interviewed drew their maps showing considerable cartographic expertise in comparison to their European counterparts.

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.

An ambitious look at the African novel and its connections to African philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries The African Novel of Ideas focuses on the role of the philosophical novel and the place of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent, from the early twentieth century to today. Examining works from the Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and tracing how such writers as J. E. Casely Hayford, Imraan Coovadia, Tendai Huchu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Stanlake Samkange reconcile deep contemplation with their social situations, Jeanne-Marie Jackson offers a new way of reading and understanding African literature. Jackson begins with Fante anticolonial worldliness in prenationalist Ghana, moves through efforts to systematize Shona philosophy in 1970s Zimbabwe, looks at the Ugandan novel Kintu as a treatise on pluralistic rationality, and arrives at the treatment of "philosophical suicide" by current southern African writers. As Jackson charts philosophy's evolution from a dominant to marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, she assesses the push and pull of subjective experience and abstract thought. The first major transnational exploration of African literature in conversation with philosophy, The African Novel of Ideas redefines the place of the African experience within literary history.

Probleme der Librettoubersetzung setzt den Fokus auf eine in der Forschung lange Zeit vernachlassigte Gattung, das Libretto. Auch die Librettoubersetzung nimmt wenig Raum ein in den Wissenschaften. Die Analyse dreier UEbersetzungen ins Deutsche zu Mozarts Oper Le nozze di Figaro veranschaulicht die besondere Schwierigkeit dieser UEbersetzungsart. Durch die enge Verzahnung des Librettos mit der Musik (Metrik, Reim, Rhythmus) muss der UEbersetzer stets Kompromisse eingehen. Musik und Sprache haben einige Beruhrungspunkte, beide koennen etwa nach semiotischen und suprasegmentalen Aspekten untersucht werden. Die Arbeit ist an der Schnittstelle von Sprach-, UEbersetzungs- und Musikwissenschaft zu verorten. Dank ihrer Funktion als nationale Kulturtrager sind Opernubersetzungen auch heute noch von grosser Bedeutung.

Dating back to antiquity, semiotics is both a "technique" and a "science" that aims to understand the nature of meaning. An academic discipline in its own right, semiotics uses signs, such as words and symbols, to think, communicate, reflect, transmit, and preserve knowledge. Since the initial publication of The Quest for Meaning in 2007, the world has changed dramatically with the advent of online culture, new technologies, and new ways of making signs and symbols. Updated to reflect these many changes, the second edition includes a comprehensive chapter on the use of semiotics in the Internet age. Written in a student-friendly style, featuring examples from everyday life, the book explains what semiotics is all about and why it is so important for gaining insights into our elusive and mysterious human nature.

Attempting to bridge the gap between specialised scholarship in the humanistic disciplines and an interdisciplinary project of cultural analysis, Mieke Bal has written an intellectual travel guide that charts the course 'beyond' cultural studies. As with any guide, it can be used in a number of ways and the reader can follow or willfully ignore any of the paths it maps or signposts.

Bal's focus for this book is the idea that interdisciplinarity in the humanities - necessary, exciting, serious - must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than its methods. Concepts are not grids to put over an object. The counterpart of any given concept is the cultural text or work or 'thing' that constitutes the object of analysis. No concept is meaningful for cultural analysis unless it helps us to understand the object better on its own terms.

Bal offers the reader a sustained theoretical reflection on how to 'do' cultural analysis through a tentative practice of doing just that. This offers a concrete practice to theoretical constructs, and allows the proposed method more accessibility.

Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, better known as Augustus, was the first Roman emperor and is one of the most iconic figures in world history. Two thousand years after his death, Augustus remains a strong presence in modern culture. The Semiotics of Caesar Augustus examines the meanings and significances of Augustus in Western literary and popular culture, from the 1960s until the turn of the millennium. Drawing on the theoretical background of semiotics and classical reception studies, Elina Pyy investigates the representation of Augustus in the postmodern novels of Kurt Vonnegut and Christoph Ransmayr, as well as in the genre of historical fiction, and in screen representations from both sides of the Atlantic. Scrutinizing what Caesar Augustus stood for in the postmodern world, and the main factors that influenced (and still influence) the modern reader's interpretation of him, this book is grounded on the premise that the past, being a system of signs based on our culturally shared understanding of them, is continuously created and reconstructed by the modern audience. Arguing that the 'many faces of the emperor' can be considered to be reactions to contemporary cultural, socio-political or emotional needs, The Semiotics of Caesar Augustus shows how his character was recurrently utilized to explain and understand the ways in which the discourses of power, liberty, oppression and humanity operated in the postmodern world.