Iconic Signs Research Articles

Signs of Life and Death: The Semiotic Self-Destruction of the Biosphere

This article applies some conceptual tools from semiotics to better understand the disastrous impacts of the world economy on global ecology. It traces the accelerating production of material disorder and waste to the logic of the money sign, as economic production processes simultaneously increase exchange-values and entropy. The exchange of indexical and iconic signs is essential to the dynamics of ecological systems and the proliferation of biological diversity. The human species has added a third kind of sign, the symbol, and more recently a fourth: all-purpose money. Money does not refer to any referent either through contiguity, similarity, or convention. It is an empty sign, capable of assuming any significance that its owner attributes to it. The article argues that the concept of symbolic reference should be restricted to cultural and linguistic phenomena. Money qualifies as a new species of sign based on its exceedingly open mode of reference. It does not refer to any object by social convention but owes its specific properties precisely to the absence of such conventions. The logic of money pivots on decontextualisation: it presupposes and encourages the detachment of exchange values, people, and concepts from the particular and the local. Selective advantage is no longer primarily about calibration within local contexts, but increasingly a matter of transcending or emancipating oneself from the specific. This drift toward decontextualisation reverses the evolution of complexity and diversity throughout the planetary biosphere.

Iconicity in the emergence of a phonological system?

AbstractIconicity has been described as an impetus for creating sign forms in emerging sign languages and forming signs in established sign languages. Iconic signs are defined as spontaneous or stable signs that directly reflect the representation of their referent. In established sign languages, iconic signs have phonological features. Regarding the link between the motivation for iconic signs and phonological features, we aim to investigate how iconicity might influence the emergence of a phonological system along with the evolution of a new sign language by observing how the rise of a phonological system might be revealed by the evolution of emerging iconic gestures and signs in a new sign language. For this purpose, we inventoried and coded the iconicity nature and phonological structure of 200 signed lexical items collected in two moments of Sao Tome and Principe Sign Language (LGSTP) emergence: at T1 (after 2 years since the deaf habitants initiated their social meetings) and T2 (8 years subsequent to T1 data collection). In the 8 years of LGSTP’s emergence, we found a dominance of iconic signs in tandem with changes in the signs’ internal structure. The handshape is revealed to be the phonological parameter with the greatest development, presenting itself as more complex. The LGSTP lexicon reveals that iconicity seems to prompt the emergence of sign forms. However, iconic strategies remain stable across the evolution of the emergent signs and are independent of the internal structure change of the sign.

Icons and metaphors in visual communication: The relevance of Peirce’s theory of iconicity for the analysis of visual communication

In this paper we adopt Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of iconicity to analyse pictural communication. While visual semiotics has a well-developed structural school, the concepts of visual semiotics stemming from Peirce’s pragmatic sign theory are often overlooked. The specific purpose of this study is to explore the semiotics of visual signs, exemplified by two prominent pictures of former US President Donald Trump. We argue that Peirce’s semiotic framework for iconicity in visual signs (the image, the diagram, and the metaphor) offers a useful framework for discussing how the meaning of visual signs is motivated. On this basis, we propose that Peirce’s concept of hypoicons provides us with a richer understanding of how visual signs acquire meaning and how their interpretation varies across cultural habits, and collateral experience.

The autistic pseudosignifier: Imaginary dialectization of signs in the clinic of autism

Specificities in language and speech development are a defining feature of autism. Several psychoanalysts have hypothesized that these specificities originate in a unique mode of access to language that exclusively relies on signs rather than signifiers. Compared to the flexibility and dynamism of a language made of signifiers, a language made of signs is rigid, cumbersome, and poor in its capacity to encode complex concepts. This article investigates the supplementary methods that autistic subjects adopt to compensate for these setbacks, methods that enable them to encode complex concepts into their vocabulary using iconic signs. These methods are then developed into a psychoanalytic theory on the use of iconic signs in the strengthening of autistic language in the context of art therapy. A variety of case studies are then used to illustrate how newly gained access to a level of conceptual complexity can also bring dramatic changes to their lives.

Notes toward a Semeiotic of Art

Although Charles Peirce only rarely applied his semeiotic principles to art, his ideas are highly informative for contemplating the exchange of qualitative meaningin the iconic signs constitutive of art. Reflecting on Peirce’s theory of the icon, three hypo-iconic sub-types, the formative role of the sign-interpretant, and the metaphysical “qualisignificance” of a universe “perfused with signs”, I provide some theoretical notes toward sketching a semeiotic of art. Further illustrative of a Peircean semeiotic of art is the American painting of the Hudson River School and the modern poetry of Wallace Stevens that progressively advance its insights in their own beautiful signs. These philosophers and artists have intellectual roots in Emerson’s transcendentalism with its Neoplatonic legacy, and together form a unique American strand of aesthetics.

Iconicity in Georgian Sign Language (GESL)

In sign languages, there are the signs reflecting some characteristic features of the semantics of a given part of speech (mostly nouns or verbs). This circumstance shows the proven connection between the sign and the signifier in sign languages. These types of signs are called iconic. They are easy to recognize, and thanks to these iconic signs, the rate of mutual understanding in the communication of Deaf and hard of hearing people who do not have knowledge of a common sign language is quite high. Thus, the iconicity of signs reflects the fact that two deaf people can understand each other more easily than two speaking people if they do not have the knowledge of a common spoken language for communication. Different sign languages ​​can have different number of iconic signs. In Georgian sign language (GESL), according to the GESL dictionary, iconicity is 75-80%. In general, the higher the level of education of the Deaf community, the more metaphorical and abstract gestures are used. It should also be noted that due to non-professional activities, unfortunately, in the last period the vocabulary of GESL is filled mainly with iconic forms. I have developed a formula by which we can calculate the iconicity rate in sign texts (signing communication): N mean a coefficient of iconicity, T is the duration of the sign text, IS - is the number of iconic forms in the given signing text. Iconicity coefficient is equal to the number of iconic forms in a given text divided by the duration of this text. &nbsp

Particular features of a semiotic approach in transmedia franchises study

The article is devoted to the revealing of semiotic approach specificity in the study of media franchises as the results of transmedia storytelling. The transmedia franchises’ research needs a certain revision of some semiotic notions. In particular, the present article deals with the study of iconic signs’ functioning in the media franchises. The classic definition of iconic sign proposed by Ch. S. Peirce and based on some similarity of icon and its object, seems to contradict to the fictional text characteristics as “denotation without denotate” made by G. Gennette, which means that signs of a fiction work don’t have referents in the extratextual reality. In the article the attempt was made to eliminate this collision, using the understanding of the iconic sign by Umberto Eco, on the one hand, and the principle of “minimal departure” by M.-L. Ryan, on the other. The article concludes that the products of fiction are often nothing more than a result of combination of existing objects or of their parts that creates the illusion of a realism of the fictional world’ characters and locations and retains the credibility of the audience members. The article also deals with the specificity of the notion “semiosis” in the transmedia franchises study. In the case of a fictional world that is constantly expanding and detailing thanks to transmedia storytelling, we are dealing with a specific, transmedia semiosis, in which each new work of the franchise is a kind of interpretant for the other texts included in it.

The Knowledge Hearing Impairment Children Have About Common Public Signs

This study aimed to examine sign recognition in children with hearing impairment ages 6 - 9 years old from Al-Zarqa city in Jordan. Public signs were shown to the children and they were asked to say what the sign represented. Results were that children have difficulty recognizing a sign’s meaning, as reflected in their answers. Results also showed that children can identify iconic signs like a mosque the most, and the index of a skull for danger or symbol such as the letter H to indicate a hospital the least. For signs they did not correctly identify, they viewed the sign as a picture, not a sign that has meaning. The study shows hearing impaired children’s familiarity with signs in public spaces.
 
 Received: 15 November 2022 / Accepted: 16 February 2023 / Published: 5 March 2023

Representasi Nilai Budaya Suku Batak Pada Film Ngeri- Ngeri Sedap Karya Bene Dionysius Rajagukguk

Film is a means of mass communication that is in demand by many people, besides that, film is able to provide information that is easily accepted by all walks of life. This study aims to determine the Representation of the Cultural Values of the Batak Tribe in the film Ngeri-Ngeri Sedap by Bene Dionysius Rajagukguk. As for this study, the researcher formulates the problem in this thesis into two, namely: (1) What are the iconic signs, indexes and redaction symbols in Bene Dionysius Rajagukguk's Ngeri-Ngeri Sedap film. (2) How is the representation of the cultural values of the Batak tribe in the film Ngeri-Ngeri Sedap by Bene Dionysius Rajagukguk. To answer the two formulations of the problem, the researcher conducted a study using Charles Sanders Pierce's Semiotics theory. This research is a non-stakeholder qualitative research. The form of analysis used is Charles Sanders Pierce's Semiotic theory using three types of signs, namely icons, indexes and symbols. The data for this study were collected through an analysis of each scene or scene in the Ngeri-Ngeri Sedap film. The results of this study indicate that the representation of the cultural values of the Batak people in the film Ngeri-Ngeri Sedap is shown through everyday scenes carried out by the characters Pak Domu, Mak Domu, Domu, Sarma, Gabe and Sahat. Symbols of cultural values of the Batak tribe are manifested through the use of language, clothing and customs. the meaning of the cultural symbol depicted in the film Ngeri-Ngeri Sedap is the culture of the Batak tribe which is very thick with its cultural values that have been passed down from generation to generation, so that it is able to become a guideline in carrying out social life. Keyword: Representation, Cultural Values, Batak Tribe, Semiotic Analysis, Ngeri-Ngeri Sedap Films.

How (and why) does iconicity effect lexical access: An electrophysiological study of American sign language

Prior research has found that iconicity facilitates sign production in picture-naming paradigms and has effects on ERP components. These findings may be explained by two separate hypotheses: (1) a task-specific hypothesis that suggests these effects occur because visual features of the iconic sign form can map onto the visual features of the pictures, and (2) a semantic feature hypothesis that suggests that the retrieval of iconic signs results in greater semantic activation due to the robust representation of sensory-motor semantic features compared to non-iconic signs. To test these two hypotheses, iconic and non-iconic American Sign Language (ASL) signs were elicited from deaf native/early signers using a picture-naming task and an English-to-ASL translation task, while electrophysiological recordings were made. Behavioral facilitation (faster response times) and reduced negativities were observed for iconic signs (both prior to and within the N400 time window), but only in the picture-naming task. No ERP or behavioral differences were found between iconic and non-iconic signs in the translation task. This pattern of results supports the task-specific hypothesis and provides evidence that iconicity only facilitates sign production when the eliciting stimulus and the form of the sign can visually overlap (a picture-sign alignment effect).

Особенности образного компонента в современном медиадискурсе (на примере англоязычной комедии “The Joneses” (Семейка Джонсов))

The aim of the article is the search of the answer to the question of efficiency of the persuasive impact of the iconic sign on the consumer. The object of the study is the linguistic material of the script of the film about advertising titled “The Joneses” on the subject of the description of the imagery component of the advertising activity in the film characters performance. A number of ways of products presentation are described in the article: the direct “product placement” that is the demonstration of trademarks and trade names in frame and characters’ speech, as well as the metaphoric description of the high life with the help of “stealth marketing” built in the image schemes like CAREER > BUILDING и SUCCESS > SALE. The scientific novelty of the study is in the address to the modern cognitive-psychological paradigm of the creativity, which is present in the advertising and activates the image component demonstrating visibly the upsides of products and services. Never before new technologies of the impact on the subconscious were used in films with such directness. The results obtained demonstrate that a very productive method of advertising is the use of image nomination of advertised products within the bounds of the image scheme MAN > PART OF NATURE in order to elevate the artistic value and stealthily promote things in question.

КИНО КАК КУЛЬТУРНАЯ ИНДУСТРИЯ: СОВРЕМЕННОЕ МИФОТВОРЧЕСТВО

This article analyzes the possibilities of using cinema to create and disseminate myths (political, social, cultural). At the same time, the role of cinema as a cultural industry is noted, where the creation of screen reality acts as a special type of myth-making, which is evaluated not only in terms of economic effect, but, above all, as a mechanism for creating new original images of social and therapeutic value. A film work is considered as a sign ensemble, while it is determined that the level of saturation with signs and the choice of sign systems are subject to the author's intention, accordingly, the question naturally arises: what is the author's intention “subject to”. At the same time, mass cinema builds its influence in such a way that the addressee receives the maximum possible emotional impression with guaranteed pleasure. Therefore, it is “tuned” to the “general” public with the maximum average degree of perception, with the most famous iconic signs. The paper provides an analysis of the mythology of Soviet cinema, Hollywood myth-making. According to the author of the article, the creators of modern myths, without ignoring the terms and concepts of "myth-making" and "mythologization", operate with a new concept - "mythotechnologies", which, depending on the goals, differ for cinema in that in the process a "new mythological image" or an existing one will be used.

«ДАВИД САСУНСКИЙ» ОВАНЕСА ТУМАНЯНА: ОТ ТЕКСТА К ВИЗУАЛИЗАЦИИ

The article analyses the cultural context of the poem "David of Sasun". On the basis of critical discourse analysis, semiotics (C. S. Pearce) and reconstruction of historical memory the perception of the city of Sasun is studied, the peculiarities of historical memory and images of the enemy are reconstructed. Using the example of the poem "David of Sasun" by H. Tumanyan, the semiotic translation from sign-symbols (Tumanyan’s text) to the language of iconic signs (children’s illustrations) is analysed. The analysis of the empirical text showed that Tumanyan created his storyline without additional spatio-temporal details. Some motifs (the part of Sansara and Baghdasara) were omitted in his text because plot entanglements would have appeared. Tumanyan adhered to the "Homeric approach" and touched only one line of the epic, the third branch, dedicated to David of Sasun. The analysis of separate episodes, motifs, plots showed that Tumanyan reproduced the main scheme of the epic’s construction on the opposition of us vs. them, Armenians vs. Arabs, David vs. Msra Melik. The second part of the article presents the results of the study of a modern children’s illustrative project dedicated to H. Tumanyan’s poem. The composition of the children’s drawings is made according to the age peculiarities of the young artists, but the influence of adult project leaders (Sona Badoyan and others) is also noticeable. The analysis also showed that the image of the enemy Msra Melik is represented by Turkic facial features, which reflects the preserved national stereotypes.

РОЛЬ ИКОНИЧЕСКИХ СРЕДСТВ В МОДАЛЬНОЙ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКЕ КРЕОЛИЗОВАННОГО ТЕКСТА (НА ПРИМЕРЕ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННЫХ ПРОИЗВЕДЕНИЙ)

The relevance of this article is determined by the following fact that in relation to the text, the concept of "modality" has not yet received its generally accepted interpretation and its boundaries in the linguistic literature remain rather vague. Despite the fact that one of the most significant signs of modality is the evaluation of the facts described, the vast majority of grammarians consider the category of modality as an expression of the reality/unreality of the utterance. Modality is understood by them as a kind of epistemological concept, unrelated to the personal assessment of the subject of thought. However, others believe that modality cannot be limited only to indicating the speaker's attitude to the subject of the statement from the point of view of reality/unreality. The article also examines the problem of the implementation and ways of expressing subjective modality in the structure of a creolized text, gives a number of definitions to the very concept of modality as a textual category, identifies its types, and indicates various approaches and ways to solve this problem, as a result, various types of relations are distinguished between verbal and iconic signs of the text in the modal aspect.

Music videos as cultural artefacts of the eighties

A overview of the development of movements in art and music during the twentieth century is given to place music videos in perspective as cutural phenomena reflecting certain artistic, philosophical and social tendencies of the present. Music videos, are seen against the back ground of the semiological view that a cultural artefact does not simply reflect society, it also acts as a "signifying practice with its own determinate product: meaning" (Hall 1980:30). A semiological approach Incorporating concepts from structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism and post-structuralism is used to construct a theoretical model for the analysis of meanings in the visual images of music videos. In the theoretical model three levels of meaning, namely denotative, connotative and mythical, are distinguished with certain qualititative elements defined on each level The denotative level or the level of reality contains iconic signs, indexical signs and symbolical signs. Other qualitative elements include characters, setting, and descriptions of primary movements. The connotative level or the level of representation includes television codes (non-filmic and filmic), narrative codes and intertextual codes The level of myth or the level of ideology includes stylistic or textual devices such as metaphors, allegories, fetishism, voyeurism and parody. This article is that music videos function as mod- ern artefacts which have the potential to express complex cultural meanings to signal a new Weltanschauung (Lorch 1988:143)

MULTIMODAL SIMULACRUM AND VISUAL SEMIOSIS

This article addresses the problem of mental imagery in the interpretation of iconic signifieds. It examines, with regard tothe iconic sign, François Rastier’s hypothesis that “mental images are constrained (but not entirely determined) by signifieds [in context]” (RASTIER, 1991, p. 242), it being understood that, in Rastier’s systematics, the signified, which belongs to the semioticsphere, is distinguished from the concept, which belongs to the cognitive sphere. More precisely, it is a matter of transposing to visual semiosis the concept of the multimodal simulacrum proposed by Rastier (1991), a kind of eidetic content that would be generated or at least solicited by the semantic structure of the message. In this hypothesis, the interpretation of the iconic sign would cognitively elicit presentations that potentially combine different represented sensory modalities, and also possibly abstract features. The conceptual transposition proposed in this article integrates the results of work in the field of cognitive psychology on mental imagery with Rastier’s proposals.

Infants' Use of Iconicity in the Early Periods of Sign/Spoken Word-Learning.

The aim of this research was to analyze the use of iconicity during language acquisition of Israeli Sign language and spoken Hebrew. Two bilingual-bimodal infants were observed in a longitudinal study between the ages of 10-26months. I analyzed infants' production of iconic words, signs, and gestures. The results showed that infants' use of vocal iconicity reached its peak between the ages of 16-20months. The proportion of imagic iconic signs in the infants' lexicon was also high during that period. In contrast, the infants' use of iconic gestures gradually increased during the study period, as well as their co-production with lexical items. The results suggest that infants' use of lexical and gestural iconicity scaffold the learning of novel labels and fill the gap in their expressive repertoire. It was concluded that teachers/therapists should use iconicity and encourage their students to use it in pedagogical settings.

Digital Communication and Multimodal Features: Functioning of Emoji in Interpersonal Communication

Technical advances and digital means of communication have led to the development of digital semiotics which is characterised by its multimodality and abounds in paralinguistic elements such as emojis, emoticons, memes, etc. These extralinguistic elements serve as a compensatory mechanism in the new communication means. The increasing interest of users in various iconic signs and symbols generates the research interest in different fields of knowledge. The study aims to consider cognitive, semiotic and psycholinguistic features of emojis in interpersonal communication through analysing their functions in text messages and in social network messages. An attempt to reveal their persuasive mechanism is made. The research is based on a large scale dataset comprised of the private text messages as well as public posts on social networks which include verbal and nonverbal / iconic elements. The research data presents a multilingual bank of English, Russian and French sources. The research methods include context analysis, linguistic and pragmatic analysis and content analysis. The findings show that emojis in private interpersonal communication perform a number of functions, namely nonverbal, emotive, pragmatic, punctuation, substitutional, decorative and rhetorical functions. These iconic symbols incorporated in the interpersonal digital communication present a compensatory mechanism and the means of persuasion of a message addressee / recipient. The combination of verbal and iconic elements triggers a double focusing mechanism, and the perception is shaped by all cognitive mechanisms including rational and emotional, unconscious components.

Do parents modify child-directed signing to emphasize iconicity?

Iconic signs are overrepresented in the vocabularies of young deaf children, but it is unclear why. It is possible that iconic signs are easier for children to learn, but it is also possible that adults use iconic signs in child-directed signing in ways that make them more learnable, either by using them more often than less iconic signs or by lengthening them. We analyzed videos of naturalistic play sessions between parents and deaf children (n = 24 dyads) aged 9–60 months. To determine whether iconic signs are overrepresented during child-directed signing, we compared the iconicity of actual parent productions to the iconicity of simulated vocabularies designed to estimate chance levels of iconicity. For almost all dyads, parent sign types and tokens were not more iconic than the simulated vocabularies, suggesting that parents do not select more iconic signs during child-directed signing. To determine whether iconic signs are more likely to be lengthened, we ran a linear regression predicting sign duration, and found an interaction between age and iconicity: while parents of younger children produced non-iconic and iconic signs with similar durations, parents of older children produced non-iconic signs with shorter durations than iconic signs. Thus, parents sign more quickly with older children than younger children, and iconic signs appear to resist that reduction in sign length. It is possible that iconic signs are perceptually available longer, and their availability is a candidate hypothesis as to why iconic signs are overrepresented in children’s vocabularies.

The Effect of Iconicity on Weak Hand Drop in American Sign Language

The research community generally accepts that signed and spoken languages contain both iconicity and arbitrariness. Iconicity's impact on statistical distributions of motivated forms throughout signed language lexicons is clear (e.g. Occhino, 2016). However, there has been little work to determine whether the iconic links between form and meaning are relevant only to a sign's initial formation, or if these links are stored as part of lexical representations. In the present study, 40 Deaf signers of American Sign Language were asked to rate two-handed signs in their citation form and in one-handed (reduced) forms. Twelve signs were highly iconic. For each of these highly iconic sign, a less iconic but phonologically similar sign of the same grammatical category was also chosen. Signs were presented in carrier sentences and in isolation. Participants preferred one-handed forms of the highly iconic signs over one-handed forms of their phonolgogically similar but less iconic counterparts. Thus, iconicity impacted the application of a synchronic phonological process. This finding suggests that lexical representations retain iconic form-meaning links and that these links are accessible to the phonological grammar.