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1. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Peeter Torop, Mihhail Lolman, Kalevi Kull Intercommunication: Editors' comments
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general semiotics
2. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
John Deely Semiotics as a postmodem recovery of the cultural unconscious
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This essay explores the terminology of semiotics with an eye to the historical layers of human experience and understanding that have gone into making the doctrine of signs possible as a contemporary intellectual movement. Using an essentially Heideggerian view of language as a heuristic hypothesis, the name semiotics is examined in light of the realization that only with Augustine's Latin signum was the possibility of a general doctrine of signs introduced, and that first among the later Latins was the idea of sign as a general mode of being specifically verifiable both in nature and in culture in establishing the texture of human experience vindicated according to an explanation of how such a general mode of being is possible. The contemporary resumption through Charles Peirceof the Latin line of vindication completed especially by Poinsot is explored along these same lines in terms of considerations of why the term semiotics has emerged as, so to speak, the logically proper name of the global interest in signs.
3. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
John Deely Semiootika kui kultuuri mitteteadvuse uuestiavastamine postmodernistlikul ajajärgul. Kokkuvõte
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4. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Winfried Nöth Umberto Eco's semiotic threshold
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The "semiotic threshold" is U. Eco's metaphor of the borderline between the world of semiosis and the nonsemiotic world and hence also between semiotics and its neighboring disciplines. The paper examines Eco's threshold in comparison to the views of semiosis and semiotics of C. S. Peirce. While Eco follows the structuralist tradition, postulating the conventionality of signs as the main criterion of semiosis, Peirce has a much broader concept of semiosis, which is not restricted to phenomena of culture but includes many processes in nature. Whereas Eco arrives at the conclusion that biological processes, such as the ones within the immune system, cannot be included in the program of semiotic research, Peirce's broader defmition of semiosis has meanwhile become thefoundation of semiotic studies in biology and medicine and hence in biosemiotics and medical semiotics.
5. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Winfried Nöth Umberto Eco "semiootiline lävi". Kokkuvõte
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6. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Jaakko Hintikka Language as a "mirror of nature"
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How does language represent ("mirror") the world it can be used to talk about? Or does it? A negative answer is maintained by one of the main traditions in language theory that includes Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine and Rorty. A test case is offered by the question whether the critical ''mirroring'' relations, especially the notion of truth, are themselves expressible in language. Tarski's negative thesis seemed to close the issue, but dramatic recent developments have decided the issue in favour of the expressibility of truth. At the same time, the "mirroring" relations are not natural ones, but constituted by rule-governed human activities a la Wittgenstein's language games. These relations are nevertheless objective, because they depend only on the rules of these "games", not on the idiosyncrasies of the players. It also turns out that the "truth games" for a language are the same as the language games that give it its meaning in the first place. Thus truth and meaning are intrinsically intertwined.
7. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Jaakko Hintikka Keel kui "looduse peegel". Kokkuvõte
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8. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Frederik Stjernfelt Mereology and semiotics
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This paper gives a fIrst overview over the role of mereology the theory of parts and wholes - in semiotics. The mereology of four major semioticians - Husserl, Jakobson, Hjelmslev, and Peirce is presented briefly and its role in the overall architecture of each of their theories is outlined - with Brentano tradition as reference. Finally, an evaluation of the strength and weaknesses of the four is undertaken, and some guidelines for further research is proposed.
9. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Frederik Stjernfelt Mereoloogia ja semiootika. Kokkuvõte
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semiotics of culture
10. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Marcel Danesi A note on Vico and Lotman: Semiotics as a "science of the imagination"
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The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico foreshadowed many of the ideas currently being entertained by the modem cognitive and human sciences. By emphasizing the role of the imagination in the production of meaning, Vico showed how truly ingenious the fIrst forms of representation were. His view that these forms were "poetic" is only now being given serious attention, as more and more linguists and psychologists come to realize the role of metaphor in the generation of abstract systems of representation. The Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman espoused a basically similar view, highlighting the role of the poetic imagination in the generation of the textuality that holds cultures together in meaningful ways. A comparison of these two exceptional thinkers has never been entertained. This note aims to do exactly that. Specifically, it takes a first glimpse at the parallels of thought and method that inhere in the main works of these two ground-breaking thinkers. Such a comparison will establish a theoretical framework to make semiotics a true "science of the imagination". It will show that semiosis and representation are not tied to any innate neural mechanisms, but rather to a creative tendency in the human species to literally "invent itself'.
11. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Marcel Danesi Vico ja Lolman: semiootika kui "kujutlusteadus". Kokkuvote
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12. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Peeter Torop The intersemiotic space: Adrianopol in F. Dostoevsky's "Crime and punishment" St. Petersburg
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The intersemiotic space: Adrianopol in F. Dostoevsky's "Crime and punishment" St. Petersburg. The article focuses on the peculiarities of the intertextual space of culture and the means of its analysis. Level analysis, compositional analysis and chronotopical analysis are juxtaposed in the paper. Textual and intertextual chronotopical analyses are considered separately. Two aspects of textual processuality are juxtaposed: the history of text production and the role of the manuscript page structure as a reflection of the writer's style and mode of thinking (especially in the interserniotic relationship between picture, drawing andword); the history of text reception, its intersemiotic translation into different sign systems and its existence in culture in a scattered state. In this connection the notions of the individual and mental text are juxtaposed. As an example a page of F.Dostoevsky's notebook is taken, where an intricate combination of picture, calligraphy and text offers an interesting infonnation on the methods of formation of text conception.
13. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Peeter Torop Intersemiootiline ruum: Adrianopol F. Dostojevski "Kuritöö ja karistuse" Peterburis. Kokkuvõte
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14. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Dinda L. Gorlée Text semiotics: Textology as survival-machine
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Signifying practices by which living creatures communicate, are, according to Sebeok, the survival-machines. Accordingly, as represented by the semiotic text analysis or Bakhtin's textology, one can speak about a human survival-machine. This has been studied by different semiotic schools (including the Moscow-Tartu school) referring to language, culture, genre and, importantly, text ideology. In this article, the aspects of textology in Peirce's generalized theory of signs become analysed. After a discussion of the concept of text in Peirce's (published and unpublished) writings, its relationship with semiosis and other Peircean categories isshown. The project of elaborating Peirce-based text-semiotics expects that it must be dramatically different from other sign-theoretical text-theories. This may be a path towards more inter-subjective and creative textology.
15. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Dinda L. Gorlée Teksti semiootika: tekstoloogia kui ellujäämismasin. Kokkuvõte
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16. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Thomas G. Winner Czech and Tartu-Moscow Semiotics: The Cultural Semiotics of Vladimir Macura (1945-1999)
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Among the national scientific groups, it was the Prague Linguistic Circle that had the most decisive affinity to the work of the Moscow-Tartu school. This paper examines the work of one of the most tireless contemporary Czech interpreters of the Lutman school, Vladimir Macura (1945-1999), whose work on Czech literary and historical texts are outstanding examples of the reverberation of Lotmanian semiotics of culture in the Czech Republic. This is particularly the case in Macura's reevaluations of the texts of the Czech National Revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in two books, Znamení zrodu (Signs of Birth) (1995) and Český sen (The Czech Dream) (1998). In these works Macura looked at this critical period in Czech national history as a multi-layered semiotic text in both the verbal and visual spheres. The present paper is an attempt at an exploration of Macura's treatment in this manner of the following: the Czech language, the city of Prague, the question of Czech national self-identification in general and as part of a larger category, the world of the Slavs. An important aspect of this project is an examination of Macura's exploration of the value functions of symbolic animals and plants in Czech Revival culture, and its relation to the axiology of Czech (Slavic) cultural identity. The paper is dedicated to Macura's memory.
17. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Thomas G. Winner Tšehhi ja Tartu-Moskva koolkonna semiootika: Vladimír Macura (1945-1999) kultuurisemiootika. Kokkuvõte
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18. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Tomi Huttunen From "word-images" to "chapter-shots": The imaginist montage of Anatolij Mariengof
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From "word-images' to "chapter-shots: The irnagiuist montage of Anatolij Mariengof. The article discusses the three dominant imaginist principles of Anatolij Mariengofs (1897-1962) poetic technique, as they are translated into prose in his first fictional novel Cynics (1928). These principles include the "catalogue of images", a genre introduced by Vadim Shershenevich, i.e. poetry formed of nouns, which Mariengof makes use of in his longer imaginist poems. Another dominant imaginist principle, to which Mariengof referred in his theoretic articles and poetic texts, is similar to the creating of shocking images typical of Russian futurism. Mariengofs application is the juxtaposition of "pure" (chistyj) and "impure" (nechistyj), either a conflict between the vehicle and the object within a metaphor or a conflict between metaphors. This is an essential poetic feature in both Mariengofs poetry and prose. The third, maybe the most Mariengofian imaginist principle, relevant to the study of Cynics, is the poetics of transition (poetika sdviga), i.e. a certain fragmented structure of the text, which is related to Mariengors use of heteroaccentual rhyme. All these principles can be treated as fundamental elements in Mariengofs use of montage technique in his fictional prose.
19. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Tomi Huttunen "Sõnakujunditelt" "peatükikaadriteni": Anatoli Mariengofi imažinistlik montaaž. Kokkuvõte
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20. Sign Systems Studies: Volume > 28
Irina Avramets On the definition of genre of Dostoevsky's works
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On the definition of genre of Dostoevsky's works. The article mostly addresses Dostoevsk's own definitions of genres of his works, either explicated in the texts (subtitles, prefaces) or contained in the writer's letters; or rather the relationship between the scholarly strategies of defining genres and the writer's own view, as evidenced. by subtitles which, in some sense, are part of the text (in nearly, but not precisely, the same way as the titles themselves are). The writer's own definitions, then, can be regarded as possible objects of the scholarly interpretation. Agreement, or lack thereof, between the author's and the scholars' definitions may be due both to similarity vs dissimilarity between the definition standards inherent in the respective epochs and to specific interpretation aspects. In the latter case, agreement is more cornman in studies focusing on vastly different problems unrelated to genre, whereas disagreement is more frequent in studies concerned with the genres of Dostoevsky's works. One of the reasons why his own definitions must be critically revisited is that certain titles of his workscan be basically viewed as subtitles or genre definitions insofar as they in some way define the variety of the text regardless of the underlying criterion: narrative, "discourse", type of source, genre, or genre variety. Indeed, both these subtitles and, sometimes, the writer's own genre definitions tum out to be pretense, an imitation of "standard" subtitles or genre definitions, respectively. Titles themselves sometimes look like subtitles, thus "exposing the device" and demonstrating this mimicry not merely by violating semantic and syntactic relations in the case of subtitles (sign/name/title/ subtitle and virtual reference/"reality" of text - and relationships such as those between title and subtitle; title and the principal text; and subtitle and principal text), but also by the fact that their position is "marked". Dostoevsky not just failed to follow his own "final genre definitions" within the text, as reflected in the subtitles, and not just changed them repeatedly in his letters, but in the official documents, too, he sometimes defined genres in a way which did not agree with either the subtitles or his own definitions given in his letters.Dostoevsky frequently changed the genre definitions not merely during his work on a text, which would be only natural, and not merely many years after it had been completed, published, revised, and republished (which might be ascribed to memory errors), but also shortly after the completed manuscript had been shipped to the publishers or after the text had been published or republished. While the logic underlying these changes must be studied and interpreted, it is evident that the scholars are often unable to accept the author's own "final genre definitions" both because these are often unavailable in subtitles, and because of the "Proteic" nature of their use by the writer in various contexts.