Indexical Signs Research Articles

Semiotic Analysis Of The Index In Revealing RomanticismOn Poetry By Joko Pinurbo

This research aims to examine the concept of romanticism as understood by Russell Noyes in the poetry of Joko Pinurbo, utilizing Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory with a focus on the index as a key object. The study is conducted using a qualitative descriptive method, analyzing ten data points extracted from five of Joko Pinurbo's poems: "Kosmetik," "Salam Sembuh," "Kisah Natal," "Ramadan di Rantau," and "Ngabuburit." The research methods employed include close reading and note-taking to identify and interpret the presence of index signs within these poems. Through the analysis of these index signs, the study identifies three distinct schools of romanticism as they manifest in the works of Joko Pinurbo. The focus of the research is on interpreting the indexes to uncover the underlying romantic elements within the poetry. This involves a detailed examination of how the indexical signs contribute to the overall theme and emotional resonance of the poems, aligning with the broader genre of romanticism. The findings provide insights into the unique way Joko Pinurbo's poetry embodies romantic themes, as seen through the lens of semiotic analysis, thereby

Semiotics of the Chinese Hieroglyph: From Iconic and Indexical Sign to Symbolic

Semiotics of the Chinese Hieroglyph: From Iconic and Indexical Sign to Symbolic

An edusemiotic approach to teaching intonation in the context of English language teacher education

Abstract Employing manifold symbolic, iconic, and indexical signs – whether linguistic or extralinguistic – along with their polysemic and multimodular features, edusemiotics is an integrative and interdisciplinary conceptual framework that surmounts learning processes where learners find significance and meaning under the assumed responsibility of English language teachers for the provision of such a participative environment. Allowing for the salience of intonation despite its intricate nature, thus its inevitable underrepresentation in course books and teaching practices, this article intends to propose a novel means of intonation instruction as well as its components (i.e., stress, pitch, and juncture) for English language teacher education (henceforth ELTE) contexts within the edusemiotic framework. Promoting the importance of edusemiotic teaching of intonation, this article further aims to add to our understanding of how signs and sign systems can be benefitted in ELTE settings and their potential exploitation across various other disciplines. It concludes with suggestions for future research on more practical aspects of edusemiotic tools and learner and teacher attitudes toward integrating them within the teaching program.

(Un)doing regimentation in reflexive practices: on-site processes of sociolinguistic differentiation – a commentary

Abstract This article discusses Volume 42(6) where the editors (Gilles Merminod and Raymund Vitorio) push for a metapragmatic approach to reflexive practices of sociolinguistic differentiation. With reference to my own trajectory, I review this lens as suitable to accounting for how people affectively take part in the making of difference and similarities between signs, social situations and positions in daily meaning-making practices and the larger inequalities that these practices may contribute to sustain and interrogate. In doing so, I focus on story-telling templates in professional communication, citizenship narratives in research interviews, English-oriented forms of self-evaluation in the workplace and ritualised instances of self-presentation in interaction and evaluations of others’ self-presentation in networking events as indexical signs that articulate a range of moralised meanings and categories of “ideal” versus “non-ideal” social persona upon which arrangements of social life and work get (re)instituted. I also discuss the socioeconomic hierarchies and forms of distinction that such arrangements (re)produce in different settings. Finally, I suggest further epistemological avenues for research exploring linkages across events and for following more closely the consequences that such events have for certain people, with attention to existing disciplinary synergies (and social theories) within and beyond the language disciplines.

Fauna-inspired fashion through the English language glass

The article deals with representation of animal-inspired fashion highlights in the English fashion discourse with the focus on evolution of naming systems, categorization, multimodality, advertising and marketing strategies valid for online commerce. Animalistic motifs are considered on the basis of language-naming practices for clothes, footwear, accessories, jewelry and make-up. Fashion has become an important field of communication in modern world. Now it generates multimodal fashion discourse and refined fashion narrative with countless articles and innumerable posts on social media, Instagrammable looks of celebrities and influeuncers imitated by thousands of fashion fans. Glamorous fashion events are prominent social gatherings, which entail extensive international media coverage making a noticeable domain of online landscape. In the 21st century, radical changes in fashion were triggered by ecology movement and animal advocacy movement. Wild and domestic animals were used for clothes making for centuries but in the 21st century due to animal personhood movement and vegan fashion animals are likely to turn into a mere source of inspiration for designers. The shift in world vision and values triggers changes in customers' mentality and promotes creativity of fashion designers. Animal-inspired prints, gowns, footwear, accessories become means of self-expression and personification. Modern designers reinterpret the iconic images of the past bringing fashion to a new level what results into new word coinages in English, new distribution of fashion lexemes. Ergonyms – names of fashion items – contain indexical signs and might get associative meaning and emotional meaning being connected with famous people and celebrities. The list of animalistic fashion terms with indexal names is getting longer in the wake of the attempts to introduce new prints into fashion industry. Online business dictates advertising and marketing strategies with catchy names, slogans and detailed linguistic description of goods. Naming conventions are being changed as animal-prints get connotations, associations; lexical units acquire occasional intensifiers and determiners. Playfulness of animal-inspired fashion items is conveyed via humorous names and naming components. Zoomorphic accessories give rise to new portmanteau words. Modern fashion discourse proves linguistic practices and naming conventions are becoming more sophisticated and intricate.

A corpus-assisted analysis of indexical signs for (im)politeness in Japanese apology-like behaviour

Abstract This study provides a corpus-assisted pragmatic investigation of three Japanese expressions: the adverb chotto ‘a little’, the verb-ending form -te shimau, conveying (formulaic) regret, and the conditional clause with -tara. These are deictic forms I refer to as indexical signs for (im)politeness because they can, under certain circumstances, trigger evaluations in terms of (im)politeness, potentially favouring an indirect interpretation of the utterance. They are investigated in co-occurrence with apology-like behaviour based on the assumption that, in this context, interactants are more likely to exploit linguistic strategies for conveying additional layers of pragmatic meaning. The main findings point to a wide range of possible interactional meanings the selected forms can acquire in naturally occurring data, from affecting the illocutionary force of the utterance, to conventionally matching interactants’ expectations, to conveying a potentially face-threatening act. These results support the assumption that seemingly polite speech acts will not necessarily be doing polite work (or not only) and highlight the relevance of the interactional context for retrieving communicative meanings.

Semiosis as a Source of Providing Empirical Phenomena with a New Type of Cohesion.

Embodying the indexical signs is vital to semiosis as a cohesive material agency mediating between consequents and antecedents. One unique factor of biology compared with standard physics and chemistry is the cohesion enabling the biological components, codes and organizations to accommodate themselves with a specific material embodiment. Every individual body is uniquely biological and requires a specific cohesion of material origin for its own sake that could not be found in the non-living material world. The relevant cohesion comes from the exchange interaction of the atomic quantum particles, such as the carbon atoms, which is far greater than the electrons as a common exchange mediator adopted for the spatial cohesion ubiquitous in physics and chemistry. What is specific to the temporal cohesion latent in the atomic exchange is the immutable identity of the individual quantum particle surviving only over a limited time, while being constantly alternated with the new ones of the same kinds in a successive manner. Semiosis is supported by the underlying teleonomic cohesion, such that the preceding temporal cohesion may constantly induce the succeeding similar one ad infinitum.

Pre-objective reality and the end of the world

Abstract In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, Haruki Murakami plays with the quantum idea of the Many Worlds theory, creating two universes that exist in a state of parallelism – one consisting of the main character’s objective/subjective reality, the other being a pre-objective reality that resides within the character’s inaccessible subconscious mind. These universes are linked within the purely objective, surreal world of the novel by a series of indexical signs and symbols that point the reader back and forth between the worlds, indicating that they are linked by certain shared subjectivities. What follows here is an exploration of how Murakami’s novel works from a semiotic point of view.

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)

Encounters at the Mound in Old Norse Literature: Dialogues between Landscape and Narrative

Encounters at the Mound in Old Norse Literature: Dialogues between Landscape and Narrative

“This Is What's Real”: The Pathology of Black Addiction in the Hood Films of the 1990s

“This Is What's Real”: The Pathology of Black Addiction in the Hood Films of the 1990s

The Bible as Relic, Fetish or Talisman in Nollywood Films: A Semiotic Perspective

Many Nollywood Christian films tap into a plurality of myths and idiosyncrasies prevailing in Nigeria in particular and the Christendom in general. Some of these myths and idiosyncrasies revolve around the perceived magical powers of the Bible, particularly the Holy Book’s ability to neutralize or prevent the designs of paranormal and satanic entities. In line with such Christian myths, many Nollywood Christianity-based films deploy various typologies of artifacts, signs and special effects to represent the Bible as an object which is more than a mere carrier of holy scriptures and the voice of God. In this paper, attention is given to the different indexical and symbolic signs used in Nollywood filmic productions to represent the Bible as a fetish or a relic. Using a critical review of secondary sources and relevant films, as well as semiotics, the paper identifies the use of visual and sound effects as one of the procedures deployed by Nollywood film directors to naturalize and popularize fetishist beliefs about the Bible. The effects popularly used by these film directors include radiating bibles, open pages of the Bible that generate dazzling light, ardent fire or meteoric energy with which pastors counter the attacks to satanic forces or deliver people in distress.

Cultural Shifting And Non-Verbal Communication Reconstruction In Covid-19 Outbreak: Indonesia’S Insight

COVID 19 has had a multidisciplinary impact on health, economic, and socio-political emergencies. In the context of communal culture, the impact is increasingly felt. Various activities that prioritize collectivity become limited and even eliminated. In general, communal people used to handle certain messages with physical touch. During the pandemic, conversely, non-verbal activity are in a shifting mode. Therefore, this research attempt to identifies interaction patterns changes in collective society addressing the new habit in non-verbal communication perspectives. This research uses literature studies on journals, previous studies, and other textual documents that are relevant to the research objectives. The analysis results were discussed by the Birdwhistell kinesics theory and Hall's proxemics theory. The research obtained the discussion about non-verbal communication patterns shifting from the haptic tradition to mediated communication. Furthermore, the discussion also apply to physical distance in space and time theory outlook. Therefore, in collective society, the changes will not only generate a new culture but also deliver the way of thinking shifting. The communication barriers presence in indexical signs use then likely happened. Further research could emphasize on macro levels in language relativity perspective. The use of positivistic paradigms to explain correlations between population characteristics and changes in communication behavior patterns during a pandemic can also be explored.

Language norms in L2 education for adult migrants – translanguaging pedagogy in the age of mobility

Abstract International mobility has caused a need for language education where adults can learn the language(s) used in their new country. In Sweden, the language programme SFI (Swedish for immigrants) provides basic second language education for adult immigrants. For those learners who are not yet functionally literate, basic literacy education is included. This article aims to explore the concept translanguaging pedagogy in relation to the articulated and embodied language norms of one SFI teacher. The empirical data, produced by ethnographic methodology, consists of classroom observations and semi-structural interviews. The method of analysis comprises a set of sociolinguistic questions, three categories of language norms (double monolingualism, integrated bilingualism and polylingualism) and discourse analysis, centering on deictics, indexical signs and reported speech. Findings show that although the teacher does engage in translanguaging practices, her teaching practices cannot be referred to as translanguaging pedagogy because she has made no deliberate decision to include the students’ full linguistic repertoires and there are contradictions both within and between her articulated and embodied language norms. It is concluded that it is crucial for educational development in contexts characterised by mobility that teachers in linguistically heterogeneous classrooms increase their awareness of their language norms and the students’ linguistic resources.

From case to topology

Abstract The Scanian dialect of Middle Danish underwent a range of changes and reductions in its case system. I argue that these changes were caused neither by phonological developments nor by language contact as often assumed, but by multiple processes of grammaticalisation. The present paper focuses on one of these factors: that the relatively predictable constituent order within the Middle Danish noun phrase made case marking redundant in its function of marking noun-phrase internal agreement between head and modifier(s). This redundancy caused the case system to undergo a regrammation where the indexical sign relations changed so that the expression of morphological case no longer indicated this noun-phrase-internal agreement, leaving only topology (as well as morphologically marked number and gender agreement) as markers of this type of agreement. This factor contributed to the subsequent degrammation of the entire case system.

Subversive heteroglossia:

In the research on borderscapes, particularly in the Albanian-Greek borderland, explorations of identities and fluidity of socio-cultural boundaries play a key role. Based on several ethnographic interviews and participatory observation during short-term fieldwork in the Konitsa region of North-Western Greece, this study aims to explore the metalinguistic narratives of the local people coming from Albanian/Arvanitika-speaking families. We observe how Albanian and Greek language use is narrated across several generations of these families, shaping narratives of place-making and belonging. Drawing upon the theory of cultural intimacy, studies of linguistic ideologies, and discourse analysis, we examine the multiple controversies in our research participants’ metalinguistic narratives and indexical signs such as code-switching. Using an anthropological lens, we also trace how these people’s personal stories are affected by national discourses, and how the state’s discourses infiltrate local peoples’ metalinguistic narratives. As previous studies have shown, in a situation of heteroglossia, the low-prestige language is perceived “through the eyes” of the dominant language. Nonetheless, when subversive heteroglossiaoccurs, the dominant linguistic ideology is also internalized by the speakers, but it is deviated and reassessed in the attempt to build spaces of cultural intimacy.

The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”

Abstract Conventional indexicality is semiotically effective when regimented by its meta-indexical (or “metapragmatic”) interpretant, a conceptual scheme presumed upon by participants in communication that determines the categories of possibility for a relevant “here-and-now” of indexically signaled co-presence, just as, conversely, such an interpretant is an emergent consequence of the sign’s pointing to its object. In the more general case of non-denotational indexicality – forms indicating everything from perduring demographic characteristics of participants in interaction to their role incumbencies, voicings of identity, and momentary relational attitudes and affects (loosely termed “stances”) – the culture – and thus group-specific metapragmatics (or “ethno-metapragmatics”) is central to how indexicals entail the mutual (il)legibility of interlocutors and the (in)coherence of interactional projects in which they are engaged, the “interactional text” of what is happening. This inherent metapragmatic functionality of models of indexical signs and their contexts is, in general, itself influenced by genres of metapragmatic discourse about social life that “circulate” among networks of people who participate in certain sites of sociality. Such “circulation” is a virtual reality that comes into being via chains of interdiscursivity, allowing us to imagine an “ideological” plane with its own order of virtual semiotic dialectic that, notwithstanding, we experience in actual interactional context by its effects on the ever-changing what and how of indexicality.

Creating versatility in Thai demonstratives

AbstractBeyond their basic function to index exophoric and endophoric referents, Thai demonstratives have a host of pragmatic functions to encode concerns regarding discourse organization, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. Based on a detailed analysis of demonstratives used in conversation, we attempt to uncover the pattern of grammaticalization for this class of words in Thai, and to propose a mechanism that allows them to develop multiple functions. Since demonstratives are indexical signs and are qualitatively distinct from content words, we must view the grammaticalization process of demonstratives differently from that of content words. In this paper, we use the model of thejoint attention trianglebased on Diessel’s earlier work and thefunctional utterance framebased on the “attractor position” analysis for grammaticalization of nouns and verbs advanced byBisang (1996)to analyze how exactly demonstratives come to acquire pragmatic functions.

The discussion of body in 'Every Day' by David Levithan

In the novel Every Day by David Levithan, there exists a profound discussion about body through its protagonist A’s life, its plot, dialogues, and events that unfold. This paper uses qualitative textual analysis as its methods in order to obtain relevant data to be further analyzed using the theoretical framework from Stuart Hall (theory of representation (2013)) and Chris Shilling (The Body and Social Theory (2003)). Through the indexical signs from the text, there are discussions of how the body is represented, which are as something superficial, as a mask, and as something temporary. Through the analysis of the social body, it is also found that the body has become a social asset in which it could also contribute to one’s self-identity, creating the body as a project that one could work on throughout one’s life. Consequently, the metaphor of body as a machine appears, as well as the revelation that there is also a close relation between death and the body. Through death, the social body is reduced into individual body, where the living often avoids the dead, fearing subconsciously of their own. These aspects could be observed from A’s life and Rhiannon’s response towards it.

Signs of #self: a Peircean semiotic framework for theorizing self-(re)presentations on Instagram

Performances of self on social media are mediated via platform interfaces and social rituals while dramaturgical or theatrical perspectives of frontstage/backstage identity are frequently drawn upon in scholarship. However, emphasis on face and self-portraiture tends to background other forms of representation exhibiting objects, places and the various people that could be viewed as facets of the extended or disembodied self. In this article, Instagram is taken as a case to illustrate self-(re)presentations, beyond icons or selfies (the popular term for photographic self-portraiture), to include the symbols and indexical signs of subjectification. To this purpose, the author draws on the semiotic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) in order to develop an analytic table of sign correlates. The Peircean sign doctrine is applied to systematically analyse observable elements as well as to consider the routine, abstract and conceptual sign phenomena constituting meanings in an interpreter’s mind. The analytic framework helps to unravel a series of densely stitched compound-signs, interweaving Instagrammers’ self-(re)presentations. Importantly, the sign typology does not dispense with performative ontologies entirely but suggests that signs of self cannot necessarily be removed ‘backstage’. Conversely, considering self-(re)presentations, beyond facial displays, is fruitful for theorizing what is shown, inferred as well as obscured. In turn, this illuminates self-(re)presentations orchestrated within broader sociomaterial constructs and the symphony of signs.