The French mathematician Rene Thom (Fields medal 1958) died in 2002. In this volume his contributions to biology, semiotics and linguistics are discussed by a group of scholars who have continued his work and have shaped the new paradigm of dynamic semiotics and linguistics. Thom's heritage is full of revolutionary ideas and deep insights which stem from a rich intuition and a sharp awareness of the current state of the sciences, including their potentials and risks. The contributions to this volume are elaborations of papers given at a colloquium at the International Center for Semiotics and Linguistics of the University of Urbino (Italy), in 2005. The central concern of this volume is semiogenesis, i.e. the evolution and differentiation of meaningful ("pregnant") forms in the field of symbolic systems - from bio-communication to language and cultural forms like music, art, architecture or urban forms. The basic questions are: How are meanings created and further differentiated? Where do they come from? What kind of forces drive their unfolding? How can complex cultural forms be understood based on simple morphodynamic principles? Applications concern the perception of forms by animals and humans, the categorization of forms e.g. in a lexicon, and predication or other complex symbolic behaviors which show up in grammar or in cultural artifacts like the unfolding of urban centers.

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.

Partendo dai temi cari e mai completamente risolti della traduttologia, che si potrebbero esemplificare nell'affermazione per cui la pratica traduttiva e da sempre alla ricerca di una teoria che la spieghi, la modelli e le dia un fondamento scientifico, questo lavoro ha l'ambizione di fornire, adottando l'approccio semiotico della scuola di Parigi, una nuova sistematizzazione della traduzione in quanto concetto, pratica e testo. Le relazioni identitarie e veridittive, articolate nel quadrato semiotico, determinano le condizioni ontologiche della traduzione; la schematizzazione narrativa modellizza la pratica traduttiva ed esplicita le competenze del traduttore, gli aspetti manipolativi e le condizioni aletiche ed etiche insiti nella traduzione. L'analisi si sposta poi su terreni piu empirici e la proposta teorica si misura con il testo tradotto; su quest'ultimo si identificano i rapporti identita-alterita, la dimensione assiologica e la prensione timica del traduttore. La prospettiva generativa permette di situarsi in una dimensione epistemica e metodologica piu ampia, che al contempo impone una riflessione sulle condizioni di felicita specifiche della traduttologia.

Cognitive Semiotics is a new discipline dedicated to the analysis of meaning. It combines cognitive linguistics and semantics with structural and dynamic semiotics, and seeks to elaborate a coherent framework for the study of language and thought, gesture and culture, discourse and text, art and symbolization in general. The essays of this book develop a semiotic elaboration of the theory of mental spaces, a grounding hypothesis of semantic domains, and the methodologically necessary idea of a mental architecture corresponding to the neural organization of our brain, and compatible with the basic facts of human phenomenology. This volume presents the author's recent research, carried out at the Aarhus center, where American and European approaches to language-based semantics have been meeting for a particularly inspiring decade.