Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, and facilitates the discovery and recovery of meaning across fields. It comprises: Volume 1: History and Semiosis Volume 2: Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences Volume 3: Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences Volume 4: Semiotic Movements Written by leading international experts, the chapters provide comprehensive overviews of the history and status of semiotic inquiry across a diverse range of traditions and disciplines. Together, they highlight key contemporary developments and debates along with ongoing research priorities. Providing the most comprehensive and united overview of the field, Bloomsbury Semiotics enables anyone, from students to seasoned practitioners, to better understand and benefit from semiotic insight and how it relates to their own area of study or research. Volume 4: Semiotic Movements explores relationships between semiotics and closely related contemporary movements, strengthening the dialogue and collaboration between them. The movements examined include communication theory, systems theory, digital humanities, phenomenology, translation studies, multimodality studies, cognitive linguistics, and cognitive science.

Contributions in this book illustrate the many methods available for researching language in context and for the analysis of everyday text types. Each chapter highlights language as a resource for the expression of meanings-a social semiotic resource. Text analysis is used to reveal our capacity to formulate multiple meanings for participation in different social practices-in relationships, in work, in education and in leisure. The approach is applied in text-based teaching and in the critical analysis of public discourses. The texts come from different social spheres including banking, language classes, senate hearings, national tests and textbooks, and interior architecture. Text-based research makes a major contribution to Critical Discourse Analysis. The editors and authors of this book demonstrate the value of text analysis for awareness of the role of language for accountable citizenship and for teaching and learning. This book will be of interest to anyone researching in the fields of language learning and teaching, functional linguistics, multimodality, social semiotics, systemic functional linguistics, text-based teaching, and genre analysis, as well as literacy teachers and undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics, media and education.

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.

In "A Not So Foreign Affair" Andrea Slane investigates the influence of images of Nazism on debates about sexuality that are central to contemporary American political rhetoric. By analyzing an array of films, journalism, scholarly theories, melodrama, video, and propaganda literature, Slane describes a common rhetoric that emerged during the 1930s and 1940s as a means of distinguishing "democratic sexuality" from that ascribed to Nazi Germany.
World War II marked a turning point in the cultural rhetoric of democracy, Slane claims, because it intensified a preoccupation with the political role of private life and pushed sexuality to the center of democratic discourse. Having created tremendous anxiety--and fascination--in American culture, Nazism became associated with promiscuity, sexual perversionand the destruction of the family. Slane reveals how this particular imprint of fascism is used in progressive as well as conservative imagery and language to further their domestic agendas and shows how our cultural engagement with Nazism reflects the inherent tension in democracy between the value of diversity, individual freedoms national identity, and notions of the common good. Finally, she applies her analysis of wartime narratives to contemporary texts, examining anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti-federal rhetoric, as well as the psychic life of skinheads, censorship debates, and the contemporary fascination with incest.
An invaluable resource for understanding the language we use--both visual and narrative--to describe and debate democracy in the United States today, "A Not So Foreign Affair" will appeal to those interested in cultural studies, film and video studies, American studies, twentieth century history, German studies, rhetoric, and sexuality studies.

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.

Explores the origins of key concepts in semantics and semioticsThis book explores the influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889 1957). Ogden was connected to several of the most significant figures of the modernist period, including Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Victoria Lady Welby, Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. In investigating these connections, this book reveals links between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics in a crucial period of their respective histories and in turn sheds light on the intellectual history of the early twentieth century.Readers are introduced to the important interaction between Ogden's thought and Victoria Lady Welby's 'significs', Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'logical atomism' in its various forms, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle. McElvenny also examines the background to the ideas espoused in Ogden's book 'The Meaning of Meaning', co-authored with I. A. Richards, along with the application of these ideas in Ogden's international language project 'Basic English'.Provides a detailed study of the historical origin of key concepts in semantics and semiotics Reveals links between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics in a crucial period of their respective histories Makes extensive use of previously unexplored sources, including Ogden's articles in the journal 'Psyche' and unpublished correspondenceIncludes a detailed examination of 'The Meaning of Meaning', 1923 and 'Basic English', 1930

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.

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.

For at least a decade, university foreign language programs have been in decline throughout the English-speaking world. As programs close or are merged into large multi-language departments, disciplines such as German studies find themselves struggling to survive. Transverse Disciplines offers an overview of the current research on the humanities and the academy at large and proposes creative and courageous ideas for the university of the future. Using German studies as a case study, the book examines localized academic work in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States in order to model new ideas for invigorated thinking beyond disciplinary specificity, university communities, and entrenched academic practices. In essays that are theoretical, speculative, experimental, and deeply personal, contributors suggest that German studies might do better to stop trying to protect existing national and disciplinary arrangements. Instead, the discipline should embrace feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial academic practices and commitments, including community-based work, research-creation, and scholar activism. Interrogating the position of researchers, teachers, and administrators inside and outside academia, Transverse Disciplines takes stock of the increasingly tenuous position of the humanities and stakes a claim for the importance of imagining new disciplinary futures within the often restrictive and harmful structures of the academy.

The body is a site bearing multiple signs of cultural inscriptions. People's postures, use of space, dress codes, speech particularities, facial expressions, tone qualities, gaze, and gestures are codes that send messages to observers. These messages differ across cultures and times. Some of these non-verbal messages are taken to be conscious or subconscious projection of a sense of personal or collective identity. The various forms of "body talk" may flag personal distinction, style, uniqueness or politics, in which case, the body and its presentations become stances of the self. Different from this, body talk may exhibit a society's or culture's standardized norms of valuation with respect to what conforms or deviates from expectations.The subject of this anthology is non-verbal communication signals with contributing studies from societies and cultures of Africa and African Diapora. The goals are to document popular gestures, explore their meanings, and understand how they frame interactions and colour perception.The anthology is also aimed at offering interdisciplinary perspectives on the problematics of non-verbal communication by making sense of the various ways that different cultures speak without "voice", and to examine how people and groups make their presence felt as social, cultural and political actors. Some of the contributions include case studies, descriptive codification, theoretical analyses and performative studies. The issues highlighted range from film and literature studies, gender studies, history, religion, popular cultural, and extends to the virtual space. Other studies provide a linguistic treatment of non-verbal communication and use it as means of explicating perception and stereotyping.

Drawing on a range of disciplines from within the humanities and social sciences, Multilingual Memories addresses questions of remembering and forgetting from an explicitly multilingual perspective. From a museum at Victoria Falls in Zambia to a Japanese-American internment in Arkansas, this book probes how the medium of the communication of memories affirms social orders across the globe. Applying linguistic landscape approaches to a wide variety of monuments and memorials from around the world, this book identifies how multilingualism (and its absence) contributes to the inevitable partiality of public memorials. Using a number of different methods, including multimodal discourse analysis, code preferences, interaction orders, and indexicality, the chapters explore how memorials have the potential to erase linguistic diversity as much as they can entextualize multilingualism. With examples from Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and North and South America, this volume also examines the extent to which multilingual memories legitimize not only specific discourses but also individuals, particular communities, and ethno-linguistic groups - often to the detriment of others.

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars in Systemic Functional Linguistics, this book explores the contributions made to SFL theory by James Robert Martin. A leading light in the field for 40 years, this book reviews, explores and develops the theoretical agendas set out in his momentous body of work. Focussed around the four themes of systemic functional theory, linguistic typology, educational linguistics and (positive) discourse analysis, chapters debate and develop the key concepts of Martin's work. Engaging with cutting edge theoretical debates in areas such as discourse-semantics, register and genre and affiliation, Discourses of Hope and Reconciliation examines Martin's lasting impact on the field, developing his momentous contributions to point the way to exciting future research directions in SFL.

Interrogating the relatively new field of cognitive semiotics, this book explores shared issues in cognitive science and semiotics. Building on research from recent decades, Per Aage Brandt investigates the potential of a cognitive semiotic approach to enhance our understanding of language, thought and semiosis in general. Introducing a critical, non-standard approach both to cognitive science and to semiotics, this book discusses the understanding of meaning and mind through four major dimensions; mental architecture, mental spaces, discourse coherence and eco-organization. Encompassing a rich variety of topics and debates, Cognitive Semiotics outlines several bridges between 'continental' and 'analytic' thinking in the study of semantics, pragmatics, discourse and the philosophy of language and mind.

Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the pre-eminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sell-out lectures.

Now, in Understanding Power, Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky's talks on the past, present and future of the politics of power. In a series of enlightening and wide-ranging discussions - published here for the first time - Chomsky radically reinterprets the events of the past three decades, covering topics from foreign policy during the Vietnam War to the decline of welfare under the Clinton administration. And as he elucidates the connection between America's imperialistic foreign policy and social inequalities at home, Chomsky also discerns the necessary steps to take toward social change. With an eye to political activism and the media's role in popular struggle, as well as US foreign and domestic policy, Understanding Power is definitive Chomsky.

A multimodal ethnography of language as living process, this book demonstrates methods for the integrated analysis of talk, gesture, and material culture, developing a fresh way to understand human language through a focus on jointly achieved social actions to which it is part. Based on findings from a participatory, multimedia language documentation project in a highland Zapotec community of Oaxaca, Mexico, Mark A. Sicoli brings together goals of documentary linguistics and anthropological concern with the everyday means and ends of human social life with theoretical consequences for the analysis of linguistic and cultural reproduction and change. This book argues that resonances emergent in the whole of multiparticipant, multimodal interaction, are organizational of human social-cognitive process important for understanding both the shape linguistic utterances take in interaction (dialogic resonance) and the relationships built between distinct sign modes (intermodal resonance). In this way, Saying and Doing in Zapotec develops a new theory, characterizing the logic of resonance in human interaction as semiotic process that connects and juxtaposes interactional moves into assemblages of relations, resonances and collaborations that build an emergent lifeworld for a language.

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.

Lighting and shadows are used within a range of art forms to create aesthetic effects. Piotr Sadowski's study of light and shadow in Weimar cinema and contemporaneous visual arts is underpinned by the evolutionary semiotic theories of indexicality and iconicity. These theories explain the unique communicative and emotive power of light and shadow when used in contemporary indexical media including the shadow theatre, silhouette portraits, camera obscura, photography and film. In particular, Sadowski highlights the aesthetic and emotional significance of shadows. The 'cast shadow', as an indexical sign, maintains a physical connection with its near-present referent, such as a hidden person, stimulating a viewer's imagination and provoking responses including anxiety or curiosity. The 'cinematic shadow' plays a stylistic role, by enhancing image texture, depth of field, and tonal contrast of cinematic moments. Such enhancements are especially important in monochromatic films, and Sadowski interweaves the book with accounts of seminal Weimar cinema moments. Sadowski's book is distinctive for combining historical materials and theoretical approaches to develop a deeper understanding of Weimar cinema and other contemporary art forms. The Semiotics of Light and Shadows is an ideal resource for both scholars and students working in linguistics, semiotics, film, media, and visual arts.

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.

The X figure is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, but attempts to explain our fixation with X are rare. This book argues that the origins and meanings of X go far beyond alphabets and archetypes to remembered feelings of body movements - movements best typified in the performance of "spread-eagle" as a posture or gesture. These body memories are then projected onto other patterns and dynamics to help us make sense of the world. The argument is accomplished using a blend of insights from linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics, rhetoric culture and process semiotics to bring together revealing clues from languages, cultures and thinkers around the world. Chief among the uses and experiences of X are its tendencies to involve us in surprising reversals and blends. In ancient times the X-pattern was discussed as "chiasmus", a figure which, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, informs the most basic elements of our bodily experience, calling into question polarized dichotomies such as subject versus object. Pushed to extremes, presumed opposites like these tend to reverse suddenly. Likewise, blended experiences of our bodily extremities - arms and legs, toes and fingers, hands and feet - provide a plausible source of grounding for unique human abilities like analogy and double-scope conceptual integration. The book illustrates these dynamics by drawing attention to uses of X in history, prehistory and daily life, from sports and advertising to world mythology and languages around the world. The Semiotics of X is the first step towards developing a larger argument on the important but neglected role that chiasmus plays in cognition. It aims to inspire continued exploration on the figure, with the full expectation that chiasmus will become for the 21st century what metaphor became for the 20th century: a revolution in thinking about the way we think.

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.

The Effects of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Effects tackles one of the thorniest and longest-standing issues in the discipline of rhetoric - the issue of effects. While the field's founders valued the assessment of a speech's effects, later scholars moved away from it, privileging textual analysis, symbols, and meaning. Though situated and strategic oral rhetoric is created for instrumental ends, its study has been limited in recent decades. Editors Amos Kiewe and Davis W. Houck seek to resurrect the study of effects and consider it as the cornerstone of the rhetorical critic's enterprise - what rhetoric actually does. In 1925, when Herbert Wichelns essentially created the field of rhetorical criticism, he founded it on the cornerstone of effect: what did oral rhetoric do to an observable audience? Wichelns's founding statement held sway for decades, even as rhetorical critics struggled doggedly to determine "causes" to rhetoric's effects. As the speech discipline matured and cast off the ghost of Aristotelian criticism and its seeming obsession with effect, critics eventually adopted the study of symbol systems as a guiding thematic. That thematic, while enormously productive, never resolved larger questions of what these symbol systems might be doing - beyond their incipient meaning. In this volume scholars across several subfields of rhetorical criticism return to the study of effect in a world impossibly different from pre-World War II era scholarship. With the rhetorical revolution and the linguistic turn across the humanities and social sciences, effects can and should be reconceptualized to engage the myriad ways that rhetoric matters to audiences - whether in the form of listening to a speech or reading an online script for a documentary. Rhetoricians have always known that rhetoric matters; this volume asks how and how we might demonstrate that.