Extending the embodied semiotic square: A cultural-semantic analysis of “Follow your Arrow”

Daniel Candel

doi:10.1515/sem-2018-0144

Abstract

AbstractPelkey’s anchoring of the semiotic square in embodiment is excellent news for cognitive literary theory, a dynamic field still in search of itself. However, his validation of the square, though theoretically unexceptionable, suffers in the execution, for his interpretation of the country song “Follow your Arrow” is less successful. The present article benefits from Pelkey’s validation as it organizes a tool of cultural-semantic analysis (CS-tool) as a ‘deviant’ semiotic square. The article then shows how this particular semiotic square allows us to analyze the song in terms which build on Pelkey’s analysis, but also arrive at more satisfying results. Where Pelkey sees liberation in the song and the square, the tool uncovers manipulation in the former and closure in the latter. The article then assesses the complementarity of and differences between the two squares: Pelkey works on a local sentence-level through direct implicature, thus following the narrative/authorial voice of the poem. The CS-tool starts from a position of higher abstraction requiring a less defined, but still sufficient and more wide-ranging, three-step implicature. This allows the tool to step back from the song’s authorial voice and uncover its manipulations. The article closes by discussing the deviant features of the present square.

Highlights

Cognitive literary studies is proving a fascinating battlefield (Baumbach et al 2017)
In any case, sharpen their pens, lambasting it for offering pre- or a-narrative in lieu of ‘narrative’ cognitive findings (Sternberg 2003, 2009), for being unable to define embodiment, cognitivism’s most basic category, refusing to use scientific data drawn from mainstream cognitivism, and failing to establish cognitive/natural invariants which might limit the field of enquiry (Müller-Wood 2017), or for not being able to bridge the gap between cognition and culture (Hartner 2017)
In view of the results offered here, applying the cultural-semantic tool (CS-tool) as a semiotic square offers results which differ from Pelkey’s more standard use of the square

Summary

Introduction

Cognitive literary studies is proving a fascinating battlefield (Baumbach et al 2017). In any case, sharpen their pens, lambasting it for offering pre- or a-narrative in lieu of ‘narrative’ cognitive findings (Sternberg 2003, 2009), for being unable to define embodiment, cognitivism’s most basic category, refusing to use scientific data drawn from mainstream cognitivism, and failing to establish cognitive/natural invariants which might limit the field of enquiry (Müller-Wood 2017), or for not being able to bridge the gap between cognition and culture (Hartner 2017) In such a scenario, anchoring Greimas’ semiotic square in embodiment, as Pelkey (2017) has done, is no mean milestone for cognitivists, literary and otherwise. I will provide a brief summary of Pelkey’s validation of the semiotic square as an embodied structure, and its significance for ideological analysis (Section 2)

Pelkey’s embodied semiotic square

Using Pelkey’s account of embodiment to structure a CS-tool

Pelkey’s analysis of “Follow your Arrow”

Applying the CS-tool as a semiotic square to “Follow your Arrow”

Conclusion