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.

Many attack pop culture as a crude 'sexual' and 'celebrity-based' culture that is purportedly bringing about the end of moral values. Renowned semiotician Marcel Danesi adds his signature insight to the debate by delving deep into pop culture through a consideration of symbols. Danesi's treatment of letters, such as the X in 'X-Rated,' the 'i' in 'iPod,' and other such symbols, reveals an ancient mythic structure that blends the sacred and profane dimensions of human psychic life. Danesi takes the reader on a remarkable exploration of the radical turns in American society, a society in which the search for pleasure and sexual expression often reign supreme. X-Rated! is a fascinating trip through what gives pop culture its secret appeal.

Musical semiotics is a new discipline and paradigm of both semiotics and musicology. In its tradition, the current volume constitutes a radically new solution to the theoretical problem of how musical meanings emerge and how they are transmitted by musical signs even in most "absolute" and abstract musical works of Western classical heritage. Works from symphonies, lied, chamber music to opera are approached and studied here with methods of semiotic inspiration. Its analyses stem from systematic methods in the author's previous work, yet totally new analytic concepts are also launched in order to elucidate profound musical significations verbally. The book reflects the new phase in the author's semiotic approach, the one characterized by the so-called "existential semiotics" elaborated on the basis of philosophers from Kant , Hegel and Kierkegaard to Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre and Marcel. The key notions like musical subject, Schein, becoming, temporality, modalities, Dasein, transcendence put musical facts in a completely new light and perspectives of interpretation. The volume attempts to make explicit what is implicit in every musical interpretation, intuition and understanding: to explain how compositions and composers "talk" to us. Its analyses are accessible due to the book's universal approach. Music is experienced as a language, communicating from one subject to another.

The book is an in-depth presentation of the European branch of semiotic theory, originating in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. It has four parts: a historical introduction, the analysis of langue, narrative theory and communication theory. Part I briefly presents all the semiotic schools and their main points of reference. Although this material is accessible in many other Anglophone publications, the presentation is marked by specific choices aiming to display similarities and differences. The analysis of langue in Part II is also available in Anglophone bibliography, but the book presents Saussurean theory according to a new theoretical rationale and enriched with later developments. In addition, it is orientated so as to offer the foundation for the part that follows. Part III is a presentation of Greimasian narrative theory, well documented in Francophone bibliography but poorly represented in Anglophone publications. The presentation extends the theory in both a qualitative and a new quantitative direction, and includes a great number of examples and two extended textual analyses to help the reader understand and apply it. Part IV, communication theory, combines an extension of Greimasian sociosemiotics with other schools of thought. This original theoretical section discusses fourteen consecutive communication models, the synthesis of which results in a holistic, social semiotic theory of communication.

Using both verbal and nonverbal techniques to make its messages as persuasive as possible, advertising has become an integral component of modern-day social discourse designed to influence attitudes and lifestyle behaviors by covertly suggesting how we can best satisfy our innermost urges and aspirations through consumption. This book looks at the categories of this form of discourse from the standpoint of semiotic analysis. It deals with the signifying processes that underlie advertising messages in print, electronic, and digital form.

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.

The insight that institutions, and the communicative practices that create, sustain, and challenge them, are multimodal accomplishments has garnered increasing attention from scholars in organization and management research over the last decade. Traditional understanding of social knowledge and meaning as being constituted primarily through verbal discourse has been challenged and extended by work that has promoted the centrality of visual, material, and other sign systems (e.g., audio, gestures, layout) for constructing social reality. While some discursive approaches to organizations and institutions have acknowledged the existence and relevance of modes other than the verbal for some time, systematic research on multimodality has remained rather sparse. In particular, the interaction and orchestration of multiple modes remains terra incognita with considerable empirical, methodological, and theoretical stakes. Together, 54A and 54B of Research in the Sociology of Organizations investigate these issues with innovative research that focuses on the relationship between different modes in the emergence, diffusion, maintenance, and challenge of social meanings and institutions. Individual contributions demonstrate the potential of multimodal approaches to rejuvenate and extend the study of institutions, they revisit research on classic phenomena in organization theory through a multimodal lens, and advance the design of relevant and rigorous methods of analysis for the study of multimodal communicative practices.

The insight that institutions, and the communicative practices that create, sustain, and challenge them, are multimodal accomplishments has garnered increasing attention from scholars in organization and management research over the last decade. Traditional understanding of social knowledge and meaning as being constituted primarily through verbal discourse has been challenged and extended by work that has promoted the centrality of visual, material, and other sign systems (e.g., audio, gestures, layout) for constructing social reality. While some discursive approaches to organizations and institutions have acknowledged the existence and relevance of modes other than the verbal for some time, systematic research on multimodality has remained rather sparse. In particular, the interaction and orchestration of multiple modes remains terra incognita with considerable empirical, methodological, and theoretical stakes. Together, 54A and 54B of Research in the Sociology of Organizations investigate these issues with innovative research that focuses on the relationship between different modes in the emergence, diffusion, maintenance, and challenge of social meanings and institutions. Individual contributions demonstrate the potential of multimodal approaches to rejuvenate and extend the study of institutions, they revisit research on classic phenomena in organization theory through a multimodal lens, and advance the design of relevant and rigorous methods of analysis for the study of multimodal communicative practices.

We all have had the experience of being divided, of being in two minds about something. Subpersonalities is the first book to do justice to the phenomena as a normal feature of our psychological life.

Apart from the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not write whole manuscripts, but composed short fragments. The current volume reveals the depths of Wittgenstein's soul-searching writings - his "new" philosophy - by concentrating on ordinary language and using few technical terms. In so doing, Wittgenstein is finally given the accolade of a neglected figure in the history of semiotics. The volume applies Wittgenstein's methodological tools to the study of multilingual dialogue in philosophy, linguistics, theology, anthropology and literature. Translation shows how the translator's signatures are in conflict with personal or stylistic choices in linguistic form, but also in cultural content. This volume undertakes the "impossible task" of uncovering the reasoning of Wittgenstein's translated texts in order to construct, rather than paraphrase, the ideal of a terminological coherence.

Media semiotics is a valuable method of focusing on the hidden meanings within media texts. This new edition brings Understanding Media Semiotics fully up to date and is written for students of the media, of linguistics and those interested in studying the ever-changing media in more detail. Offering an in-depth guide to help students investigate and understand the media using semiotic theory, this book assumes little previous knowledge of semiotics or linguistics, avoiding jargon and explaining the issues step by step. With in-depth case studies, practical accounts and directed further reading, Understanding Media Semiotics provides students with all the tools they need to understand semiotic analysis in the context of the media. Semiotic analysis is sometimes seen as complicated and difficult to understand; Marcel Danesi shows that on the contrary it can be readily understood and can greatly enrich students' understanding of media texts, from print media right through to the internet and apps.

This original study examines Jean-Francois Lyotard's philosophical concept of the differend and details its unexplored implications for literature. it provides a new framework with which to understand the discourse itself, from its Homeric beginnings to postmodern works by authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Jonathan Safran Foer.

The semiotics of the Christian imagination describes the repository of signs and the logic of signification through which a community of faith envisions spiritual truths. This book analyses various examples in text, images, music, art and scientific treatise of the imaginative semiotisation of the fall of Man and the Church's semiotic perception of the Divine plan for Redemption. The book includes a chapter detailing the theory of signs, based on a close reading of primary sources, and has nine further chapters on the meaning-making inherent in ideas of the Fall and Redemption of mankind. These are filtered through and given material representation by the semiotic paradigms of various cultural fields, including philology, verbal arts and science. Central to this practice - and to the book's message - are two themes of theological semiotics fundamental to man's understanding of himself in the larger scheme of things. Two of these include the theology of the Fall and a sacramental theory of signs. The theory is grounded in the doctrine of analogy, and this is the only reliable cognitive link between the immanence of the thinking subject and the transcendence that is the object of thought.

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.

Semiotic Margins analyses the meaning making potential of not only language, but modalities like laughter, music, colour, and architectural spaces. By examiningresources often positioned on the side-line of mainstream semiotic accounts, this study raises the question of what counts as part of language and communication and why. Beginning with the more established nonverbal resources of communication, four major themes of modalities of meaning are covered. The investigation of music and space looks at how semiotic systems in classical music interact. Using children's books, the relationship between images and verbal meaning is then explored, presenting implications for student literacy as well as a methodology for supporting children excluded from mainstream literary practices. Finally new approaches to transcribing representations in screen-based technologies are presentedthrough an examination of television advertisements. Semiotic Margins will appealtolinguists and semioticians wishing to pursue research in systemic functional linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis.

This book reflects the chronological changes in Chinese cultural values, social relations, economy and politics by critically analyzing the Chinese advertising discourse. The work is based on research into the ideological values portrayed in Chinese household appliance advertisements in the 1980s - 1990s. The analytical framework covers a variety of methods: critical discourse analysis, chronological analysis, visual and verbal analysis, and qualitative and quantitative analysis. The findings suggest that ideological values consciously or unconsciously manifested by the visual and verbal devices in the Chinese advertisements moved in a pattern from simplicity to diversity, from being politically-oriented to being economically and profit-oriented, from conservatism to globalization and westernization, in keeping with the progression of the Chinese economic reform. The findings further indicate that the ideological values in the Chinese household appliance advertisements are embedded in the advertising language and illustrations. Lastly, the work reveals the reality of Chinese politics, economy and society at a time when China experienced the growth of the market economy and evolution of Chinese mainstream ideologies, and demonstrates the impacts of these changes on the ideological meanings in advertisements. This book will help readers discover the more profound meanings behind the superficial content of Chinese advertisements.

Why is 'Why' Unique? Its Syntactic and Semantic Properties considers the behaviour of this peculiar wh-element across many different languages, including Ewe, Trevisan, Italian, Basque, German, Dutch, Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Hebrew. In ten original chapters, the authors explore various aspects of why-questions, such as the way why interacts with V2 constructions in Basque, with a subject clitic in Trevisan or how its morpho-syntactic make-up determines its merge position in Ewe, to mention but a few. Furthermore, a clear-cut distinction is established between high and low reason adverbials which are subsequently examined in why-stripping environments in Dutch. Beyond why proper, the book explores a special class of wh-expressions in some in-situ languages which give rise to unexpected why-construals with a touch of whining force. The objective is to explain the unusual syntactic position of these wh-expressions as well as their association with peculiar pragmatics. The questions are addressed for Cantonese: are what-initial sentences genuine questions? To what extent are Cantonese what-initial sentences similar to how-initial sentences in Mandarin? Beside these what-as-why questions, a special class of rhetorical questions, the doubly-marked interrogatives in Hebrew, come under scrutiny. Why is 'why' unique also concerns the interface with prosody and several experimental studies investigate precisely this aspect.

The age of gene-centrism and mechanism is slowly passing. In its place, the biological sciences increasingly recognise that life isn't simply a genetically determined programme but is centrally a matter of information and communication systems nested in larger communicative systems. The latter include both internal and external, and natural and cultural, environments. But 'information' is an under-unanalysed term in relation to living systems. Accordingly, a new interdiscipline, biosemiotics, has grown up to study the ontology of sign relations in biological, aesthetic and technological ecologies. From the Greek bios for life and semeion for sign, biosemiotics is the study of these intertwined natural and cultural sign systems of the living. Expecting the Earth draws on the semiotic philosophy of the American scientist and logician Charles Sanders Peirce, the semiotic ethology of Jakob von Uexkull's Umwelt Theory, Gregory Bateson's cybernetic ecology of mind, Jesper Hoffmeyer's development of biosemiotics, and briefly upon philosophical precursors such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Gilbert Simondon, as well as the growth of ecological developmental biology more widely. In this book, Wendy Wheeler formulates a history and theory of biosemiotic and proto-biosemiotic thinking in order to open up new possibilities of contemporary social, philosophical, aesthetic and technological engagement. This is essential reading for those interested in these groundbreaking new developments, and is relevant to the environmental humanities, social ecology and the life sciences more generally.

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.

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.

Semiotics - the study of the general principles of signs and sign systems - is crucial to an understanding of human nature, both social and psychological. The sign systems that we use for interaction with other living beings determine our potential for thought and social action, and language is central among them. It is the implicit claim of this two-volume work that linguistics has something very specific to give to semiotics, and many would further claim that relational network models of language in particular, i.e. systematic and stratificational linguistics, have a fundamental contribution to make.