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.

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.

Brilliantly articulating the potent intersections of semiotic and linguistic anthropology, Signs and Society demonstrates how a keen appreciation of signs helps us better understand human agency, meaning, and creativity. Inspired by the foundational contributions of C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, and drawing upon key insights from neighboring scholarly fields, noted anthropologist Richard J. Parmentier develops an array of innovative conceptual tools for ethnographic, historical, and literary research. His concepts of "transactional value," "metapragmatic interpretant," and "circle of semiosis," for example, illuminate the foundations and effects of such diverse cultural forms and practices as economic exchanges on the Pacific island of Palau, Pindar's Victory Odes in ancient Greece, and material representations of transcendence in ancient Egypt and medieval Christianity. Other studies complicate the separation of emic and etic analytical models for such cultural domains as religion, economic value, and semiotic ideology. Provocative and absorbing, these fifteen pioneering essays blaze a trail into anthropology's future while remaining firmly rooted in its celebrated past.

Brilliantly articulating the potent intersections of semiotic and linguistic anthropology, Signs and Society demonstrates how a keen appreciation of signs helps us better understand human agency, meaning, and creativity. Inspired by the foundational contributions of C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, and drawing upon key insights from neighboring scholarly fields, noted anthropologist Richard J. Parmentier develops an array of innovative conceptual tools for ethnographic, historical, and literary research. His concepts of "transactional value," "metapragmatic interpretant," and "circle of semiosis," for example, illuminate the foundations and effects of such diverse cultural forms and practices as economic exchanges on the Pacific island of Palau, Pindar's Victory Odes in ancient Greece, and material representations of transcendence in ancient Egypt and medieval Christianity. Other studies complicate the separation of emic and etic analytical models for such cultural domains as religion, economic value, and semiotic ideology. Provocative and absorbing, these fifteen pioneering essays blaze a trail into anthropology's future while remaining firmly rooted in its celebrated past.

This book analyses war monuments by developing a multimodal social-semiotic approach to understand how they communicate as three-dimensional objects. The book provides a practical tool-kit approach to how critical multimodal social semiotics should be done through visual, textual and material analysis. It ties this material analysis into the social and political contexts of production. Using examples across the 20th and 21st century the book's chapters offer a way of analysing the way that monument designers have used specific semiotic choices in terms of things like iconography, objects, shape, form, angularity, height, materials and surface realisation to place representations of war in public places across Britain. This social-semiotic approach to the study of war monuments serves three innovative purposes. First, it provides a contribution to the work on the ideological representations of war in Media and Cultural Studies and in Critical Discourse Analysis applied specifically to more banal realisations of discourse. Second, it responds to calls by historians for innovative ways to study war commemoration by providing an approach that offers both specific analysis of the objects and attends to matters of design. Thirdly, following in the relatively recent tradition of multimodal analysis, the arguments draw on the ideas of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001), adapting and extending their theories and models to the analysis of British commemorative war monuments, in order to develop a multimodal framework for the analysis of three dimensional objects.

Cassirer thought of culture anthropologically as the entire complex of human modes of meaning and existence: it encompassed science, technology, language, and social life in addition to art, religion, and philosophy. This conception of culture and Cassirer's theory of symbolism anticipated much of later cultural theory. In this collection of essays, eminent Cassirer scholars examine the many different aspects of his thinking on this subject and demonstrate how pioneering and important it is to cultural studies.

The ways in which we represent animals say much about who we are, who we strive to be, and our often conflicting ideas about our relationships with nonhuman species. Whether the animal is seen as someone with whom we can relate and feel kinship or conceived of as the radical other, popular cultural descriptions of animals are often - if not always - indirect descriptions of ourselves. The contributions to this volume offer a unique panorama of academic and literary approaches, demonstrating that an analysis of cultural representations and constructions of animals is indispensable for a better understanding of the interface of human culture and the so-called animal world.

This volume presents an overview of new developments and applications of social semiotic theory. Pioneered by M.A.K. Halliday, social semiotic theory sees meaning as created through the interaction of texts (including writing, images, sound and space) within a given context. Divided into five sections, the contributors use social semiotic theory to analyse a range of contexts, including the classroom, the museum and cinema. The case studies show the range and scope of this method of analysis, and include: the school curriculum; literacy; print media; online resources; film; and advertising. Multimodal Semiotics will be of interest to academics researching social semiotic theory, systemic functional linguistics and applied linguistics.

In an age where the use of electronic media is expanding and the nature of traditional texts and text-based learning is changing, new literacies are becoming increasingly important in the school classroom. This volume examines how new literacies can be used in the English curriculum, and presents a series of research-based studies applied to every level of school-age education. The chapters examine: early literacy; picture books; the internet; secondary school English; and the problems of assessment in the new literacy age.
This forward-thinking volume will be of interest to teachers and academics researching education, literacy, applied linguistics, and social semiotic theory.

Cybernetics and human knowing: a journal of second-order cybernetics, autopoieses and cyber-semiotics.A quarterly international multi- and transdisciplinary journal devoted to the new understandings of the self-organizing processes of information in human knowing that have arisen through the cybernetics of cybernetics, or second order cybernetics, its relation and relevance to other interdisciplinary approaches such as C.S. Pierce's semiotics.

This book explores the strikingly similar ways in which information is encoded in nonverbal man-made signals (e.g., traffic lights and tornado sirens) and animal-evolved signals (e.g., color patterns and vocalizations). The book also considers some coding principles for reducing certain unwanted redundancies and explains how desirable redundancies enhance communication reliability.

Jack Hailman believes this work pioneers several aspects of analyzing human and animal communication. The book is the first to survey man-made signals as a class. It is also the first to compare such human-devised systems with signaling in animals by showing the highly similar ways in which the two encode information. A third innovation is generalizing principles of quantitative information theory to apply to a broad range of signaling systems. Finally, another first is distinguishing among types of redundancy and their separation into unwanted and desirable categories.

This remarkably novel book will be of interest to a wide readership. Appealing not only to specialists in semiotics, animal behavior, psychology, and allied fields but also to general readers, it serves as an introduction to animal signaling and to an important class of human communication.

Principled Headship equips you with the essential skills needed for a future in school leadership. Pioneering a programme of techniques and exercises using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and a combination of left and right brained approaches, it includes indirect suggestions, visual image associations and extensive work on personal beliefs. Written in a light and personal style, it will improve your ability to lead, communicate and motivate. The book covers a range of personal skills that are currently given insufficient prominence in teacher training. It provides you with practical ways of improving your awareness and your emotional, behavioural, linguistic and self-management skills. It also presents a fresh and practical approach to clarifying and consolidating a core of personal beliefs and values. If you are contemplating launching yourself into a teaching career, and especially if headship is your aim, Principled Headship is the book that will help you achieve your goals.

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.

At his death in 1945, the influential German philosopher Ernst Cassirer left manuscripts for the fourth and final volume of his magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene have edited these writings and translated them into English for the first time, bringing to completion Cassirer's major treatment of the concept of symbolic form. Ernst Cassirer believed that all the forms of representation that human beings use-language, myth, art, religion, history, science-are symbolic, and the concept of symbolic forms was the basis of his thinking on these subjects. In this volume, which contains one text written in 1928 and another in about 1940, Cassirer presents the metaphysics that is implicit in his epistemology and phenomenology of culture. The earlier text grounds the philosopher's conception of symbolic forms on a notion of human nature that makes a general distinction between Geist (mind) and life. In the later text, he discusses Basis Phenomena, an original concept not mentioned in any of his previous works, and he compares his own viewpoint with those of other modern philosophers, notably Bergson and Heidegger.

A companion volume to Art and Illusion, The Image & the Eye provides a comprehensive and intriguing overview of art and our perception of its different dimensions. In a series of landmark papers and lectures, Professor Gombrich presents his thoughts and arguments on subjects as diverse as the tricks of photography with perspective, the problems of expressing emotion through art and how pictorial representation can alter the way in which we see the world. Like any work from Gombrich's vast oeuvre, these masterly pieces display a lively curiosity and an infectious enthusiasm for understanding the challenges presented by art.

"S/Z "is the linguistic distillation of Barthes's system of semiology, a science of signs and symbols, in which Balzac's novella," Sarrasine," is dissected semantically to uncover layers of hidden meaning.

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.

The Symbolic Forms has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer's works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science-the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. "These three volumes alone (apart from Cassirer's other papers and books) make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if 'The Golden Bough' had been written in philosophical rather than in historical terms."-F.I.G. Rawlins, Nature

In the newly revised version of The Sourcebook of Magic you will discover afresh the basic 77 NLP patterns for transformational magic. What's new? A change from merely describing the patterns to presenting the key questions that allow you to guide a client. The newly revised version streamlines the patterns so that they are even more succinct and offers some new insights about how the patterns work, that is, the cognitive-behavioural mechanisms that make the neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic approach so powerful. The Sourcebook of Magic arose in 1997 from a desire to collect in one place the basic or core NLP Patterns. Today it remains an excellent resource for coaches, therapists, psychologists, trainers, and managers. The book uniquely sorts and separates the patterns in key categories, those that deal with Self, Emotions, Languaging, Thinking Patterns, Meaning, and Strategies. This Sourcebook of Magic also provides guidelines for knowing what to do when and why. An excellent gift for those interested in the cognitive-behavioural model called NLP.

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.