Modes Of Signification Research Articles

Multimodality in the television advertisement of Raha premium maize meal

In language and communication, multimodality refers to using various modes of signification to convey meaning. These modes transcend language to engage with audiences at multiple sensory levels. Over time, communication has evolved to reflect a paradigm shift towards a multimodal perspective. This leads to a complex interplay between different modes of shaping interpretations and constructing meaning in discourse, which has attracted little research. This paper explores the concept of multimodality as used in the television advertisement discourse of Raha premium maize meal, using the Multimodal Discourse Analysis Theory. The objective is to investigate how viewers interpret and perceive different modes of signification employed in the advertisement. A descriptive research design with a qualitative approach is used in the collection and analysis of data. The findings reveal that each mode of signification has a unique role, some of which television viewers hardly denote their meaning. Further, politics, religion, and culture influence the perception of some modes of signification used in the advertisement. We recommend that the advertisements be tailored with modes of signification that resonate with the expectations of television viewers. The findings of this paper are intended to enrich linguistic theory concerning the analysis of the representation of meaning in a text and perceptions of modes of signification used.

Strange witness: Rachel Whiteread’s art of the immemorial

ABSTRACT The paper offers a reading of the work of the artist Rachel Whiteread. The reception of Whiteread's work has focused on its site-specific, symbolic and memorial nature, the work understood as a series of mediations of and metonymies for hidden social and personal contexts and histories. The paper claims that such accounts overlook what may be a more radical and disquieting aspect of Whiteread’s work; that Whiteread’s sculptures may be understood as not primarily concerned with memory work, but rather with the limitations and failures thereof. Through this other reading, the paper reflects on the nature of the social relation, on the relation of one to the other, and the possibilities for thinking this relation as irreducible to any specific property, attribute, substance, or predicate. Following Whiteread, the paper sets out the ways in which we may understand and know this irreducibility, arguing that, in presenting us with the limits of memory work, Whiteread’s sculptures engage us another mode of signification. Specifically, a mode of de-signification. Hence, the paper proposes a ‘theory of de-signification’; de-signification describing a naming by not naming and the way in which the irreducibility of the social relation and the other make themselves known as other.

Transtocar, Three Fragments

Tra<i>n</i>stocar, Three Fragments

(Re)significaciones suplementarias del dolor en Nefando, de Mónica Ojeda

This article addresses the novel Nefando, by Mónica Ojeda, based on the experience of pain as a supplement, from the theoretical paradigm of Jacques Derrida, since its enunciation functions as a sign of a sign, which does not properly represent affect, rather, it generates a false representative that makes the sign itself present only by its absence. Consequently, the enunciation of affect is articulated as difference insofar as it configures a series of possible disseminated and deferred meanings that put into play the limits of meaning by pointing out its original lack. Thus, the (re)signification of pain makes the production of an original discourse impossible, since it produces other modes of signification that call into question the fixity of the discourse and show the de-centering of the textual structure.

The Catastrophe to Come

Taking its departure from The Differend’s analysis of Auschwitz as a sign for the evental character of history, I argue that the looming ecological disaster we now face reveals both the continuing relevance and limits of Lyotard’s thought. While the form of political agency of the catastrophe to come involves a differend, this differend cannot be attached to a proper name, however problematic its mode of signification. This, however, suggests the even greater relevance of Lyotard’s treatment, in the conclusion of The Differend, of capitalism in terms of temporal contradiction, as well as his theorization of oikos and ecology in subsequent works, where he distinguishes between the economic and the ecological. This distinction, I conclude, is rendered problematic by the catastrophe to come, as indeed is any attempt to draw an absolute distinction between “philosophical politics” and mere technocratic management or even to exclude speculation from the heart of philosophy.

A Socio Semiotic Approach to Multimodal Discourse of Selected Nollywood Film Advertisement Posters

Film posters are complex forms of visual communication basically employed to promote films so as to seek for patronage from prospective viewers. Nollywood film poster designers or marketers employ a complex system of modes of multimodal communication to achieve their intended objectives. This study therefore investigates how these semiotic resources reveal the intention of the film poster designers and how other contextual variables influence the ability of the viewers to comprehend the messages embedded in film posters. The objectives of the study are to uncover the visual and linguistic semiotic resources in the film advertisement posters and their interaction. The study adopts a qualitative approach to the analyses of six randomly selected Nollywood film advertisement posters of three genres, namely: drama, thriller and comedy. Yuen’s Generic Structure Potential and Royce’s Ideational Intersemiotic Complementarity serve as the basis for the analysis of the selected texts. The study reveals that visual modes are more salient and frequently employed in the advertisement posters than the linguistic modes. However, both the visual and the linguistic modes offer complementary relationship for effective meaning-making in the selected Nollywood advertisement posters. The meanings derived are often contextual which appeal to the audience reasoning and sustain their interests. The study concludes by emphasizing the importance of the synergy of both linguistic and visual multimodal resources or modes of signification in the successful meaning-making and meaning-comprehension in the study of visual communication.

America’s Automobile: Affection or Obsession, Myth or Reality?

Mythology plays an important part of the role of the American automobile, less so in terms of its primary function that is transportation, more so in terms of an ancillary purpose: its metaphorical significance to both owner or operator and the onlooking public. Across much of the 20th century and continuing now into the third decade of the 21st century, the American automobile has undergone many design changes that have buttressed its metaphorical significance: become streamlined, gained then lost then partially regained size together with a colorful exterior, and in the 21st century become focused on an array of interior gadgets, some cast into hibernation because of an electronic chip scarcity resulting from trade wars and the Covid-19 pandemic. Many Americans seem to have almost become besotted by automobiles, including their own and those driven by others, because in some respects the American automobile has come to define its driver. Automobiles in the United States that are visually appealing symbolize affluence, material success, preoccupation with speed, including the rapid pace of social change, as well as, at least arguably, a lesser regard for protecting the environment. On balance, in the mindset of many Americans, the automobile is larger than life, “a mode of signification, a form” in contrast to a mere machine. Change in automotive design has been heralded as the talisman of a new generation of drivers. However, what is cause and what is effect? American automobiles conflate myth and reality; that which is together with that which might be sometime temporal frustrations with the American Dream.

The Uncanny Pleasures of Autotranslation

If, as Walter Benjamin suggests, a translation must 'lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification', translating is an act of creation predicated upon transference – a rewriting that entails a relationship with the other. This is in accordance with Benjamin's proposition that the translator must allow her language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. But what if the foreign tongue is one’s mother tongue? This performative paper explores what is at stake in the act of autotranslation when a writer returns to her mother tongue. I will use my own practice to identify what is recovered in this act, namely, a voice, a word, a letter threaded through the fabric of language. I ask why this act produces a linguistic and subjective destabilisation that opens up translinguistic play and suggest that autotranslation consists of a creation in each language with its own interferences, rhythms and affects. Though the theoretical frame of my investigation touches upon linguistic and translation studies, this paper is essentially underpinned by psychoanalytic concepts and concerns itself with experiential knowledge.

Collocational semiosis in the academic discourse of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): The case of AFRICA

Abstract The present study investigates the collocation-induced semiosis of the linguistic sign AFRICA as being used in the academic section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (known as COCA) (Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): one billion words, 1990-present. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). Drawing on a hybrid theoretical framework, the study utilizes Charles Peirce’s (1931–58) semiotic model of the sign and Roman Jakobson’s theory of “markedness” (Jakobson, Roman. 1972. Verbal communication. Scientific American (Special Issue, September 1). 73–80) as well as Stuart Hall’s treatment of “code” (Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/decoding. In Stuart Hall, Doothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, &amp; Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79, 117–127. New York: Routledge) and John Swales’ notion of “discourse community” (Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The study empirically tests the hypothesis that, in a given discourse domain, the relevant interpretant can decode a linguistic sign (representamen) in the co-text of its marked collocates in a way that is collocationally used via the two modes of iconic and indexical signification. The concordance-based analysis conducted in the present study offers two findings, theoretical and practical. First, the study proposes the theoretical concept of collocational semiosis as one way of methodologically integrating the study of collocation into a structural-linguistic analytic framework that richly intersects with the genre-based notion of “discourse community.” Second, in the academic discourse community of the COCA, to the expert interpretant, the representamen AFRICA has been decoded due to its marked collocates which have been technically used in two modes of signification, viz. iconic and indexical.

“We Must Be Able to Get Used to the Real”

ABSTRACT The names “COVID-19” and “Sars-CoV-2” signify an impoverished Symbolic Order attempting to come to terms with “a great disorder in the Real.” Our contemporary defense against the Real has proceeded by way of the insistence of the Imaginary, and at the same time, the Symbolic has become enslaved to this very same Imaginary. The article ends with a plea for a revitalized mode of signification—a correspondence—between the Real and the Symbolic.

Online tourism destination image: components, information sources, and incongruence

ABSTRACT This article considers the three modes of signification of images (i.e. designative, appraisive, and prescriptive) to understand incongruences between different image formation agents. Quantitative and qualitative techniques were used to compare texts (208,348 words) and pictures (4,990) from four sources (DMO, agencies, guides, and blogs) of images about Barcelona. The results explained incongruences between sources. Blogs and agencies tend to offer more images with appraisive meaning than other sources. Guides and blogs tend to offer more prescriptive images of the destination. This study emphasizes that the designative, appraisive, and prescriptive components are valuable conceptualizations to study tourism destination image.

Faith in formaldehyde: conversion in the oldest cabinet of curiosity in the Philippines

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the oldest existing museum in the Philippines, the University of Santo Tomas Museum of Arts and Sciences, as a cabinet of curiosity and a catalyst of conversion. By Spanish royal decree, its early collection acquired through colonial expeditions, complex evangelical networks and commercial expositions formed the classroom materials for the Natural History course taught by Dominican friars. By 1877, the fauna, flora and mineral collections – from the minute to the monumental, from the ordinary to the odd – were inventoried in a three-volume catalogue raisonné. Its collection has since elicited a sense of wonder in nature's perfection and diversity. Within the broader philosophical contexts of natural and revealed theology and the revival of Thomism after Charles Darwin's publication of his theory of evolution through natural selection, the museum's pursuit of scientific knowledge masked its pursuit of sacred truth, engendering an epiphany through the embalmed and serving the divine through the drama of its dioramas. Operating as a mode of signification and translation of the Word, the museum became a biblical exegesis of the origin of species to archive God, preserving faith in formaldehyde as a means of maintaining the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines.

Revisiting Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker: a Semiotic Study of the Dramatis Personae

The present article sought to offer a semiotic analysis of Pinter’s The Caretaker’s characters as signifiers in their own right. The article also aimed at studying the play’s dramatis personae as loci of multi-coded expressions, with a focus on the various modes of signification associated with them. Using semiotics as an analytical method, the author explored the linguistic and paralinguistic features of the characters’ discourses as signs in relation to the play’s pivotal themes, their kinesic and body expressions as indexical signs, as well as their distinctive proxemic behavior(s) onstage. Some attention was also given to the characters’ handling of stage props and the special meanings attached to them as replicators of character personality. The results of the discussion showed that using a semiotic approach to analyze The Caretaker’s characters can yield positive outcomes in terms of comprehensive analysis and interpretation of the characters as dynamic unities of interrelated sign-systems.

Mythological Indifference in Schelling and Nerval

Mythological Indifference in Schelling and Nerval

Ut figura sit. Beda Czcigodny o tropach Pisma

The main purpose of the paper is to discuss thirteen tropes presented by the Venerable Bede, a Benedictine monk from the Kingdom of Northumbria, in the manual On figures and tropes (De schematibus et tropis, ca. 710), dedicated to his disciple, Cuthbert. Using the definitions and examples given by Donatus (Ars maior), Bede described thirteen tropes and their variants: metaphor, catachresis, metalepsis, metonymy, antonomasia, epithet, synecdoche (totum a parte, pars a toto), onomatopoeia, periphrasis, hyperbaton (histerologia, anastrophe, paren­thesis, tmesis, synchysis), hyperbole, allegory (irony, antiphrasis, enigma, chari­entism, paremia, sarcasm, asteism), and homoeosis (icon, parable, paradigm). Each of these rhetorical devices was illustrated with examples drawn from the Scripture. Therefore, the categories form the grammatical tradition were trans­formed into the exegetical means, particularly useful during reading the Bible and discovering its hidden meanings. Deploying tropes for interpretative purposes, Bede proposed the model of exegesis concentrated on both what is signified and the mode of signification.

A ANÁLISE SINCRÔNICA E SUA RELAÇÃO MÚSICO-ESTRUTURAL

O moteto à cinco vozes, Jerusalem surge (‘Liber octavus ecclasiasticarum’, Tylman Susato, Antuérpia, 1553) de Jacobus Clemens non Papa, baseia-se no verso e no responsório de uma das antífonas cantadas no segundo domingo do advento. Neste estudo, propõe-se a análise considerando duas abordagens complementares entre si: (1) a leitura exegética pela análise sincrônica e (2) a análise das estruturas musicais reveladas a partir de fontes primárias alemãs. Um exame detalhado das possíveis relações entre tais aspectos contribui à uma abordagem que contemple a música como um meio pelo qual o texto evoca um modo particular de significação.

Value and Abstraction in Thomas Hardy

AbstractThe production of abstract value—not limited to the transformation of labor under the exigencies of capitalism but extending to modes of signification undermined by abstract equivalence—plays an unprecedented yet overlooked role in the major novels of Thomas Hardy: unprecedented because the realist novel has been previously theorized in terms of an expressive self-production thwarted by social alienation or the usurpation of individual agency; overlooked because Hardy criticism has focused on work as a protected category of meaning creation and social continuity. Abstract value is, however, an empty quantification of labor’s duration and the enforcement of its equivalence; it is not an extension of self into world. Across his novelistic career Hardy revises the tragic weight given in his early fiction to binding material attachments, so the later novels are, by contrast, tragedies of abstract equivalence and separation. In the face of a regime of capitalist abstraction and its relentless downward mobility, Hardy upholds not the continuity or intimacy of work but the less certain affiliations of precarious and uprooted surplus populations.

МІМЕЗИС І ПРОБЛЕМА СПОСОБУ СИГНІФІКАЦІЇ: ФІЛОСОФСЬКО-ЕСТЕТИЧНИЙ АСПЕКТ

The purpose of the work is to formulate the problem of mimesis in terms of semiotic approach and to determine its specific mode of signification. The results of the study were obtained through the application of semiotic and hermeneutic approaches, which allow the complex using of aesthetics tools as to reveal the problem of meaningful generation and the organization of signifiers in the logic of mimesis. On the basis of this scientific research, the authors developed and implemented the working curriculum of the academic discipline "Aesthetics" into educational process of Kyiv National University named after Taras Shevchenko, which is included into the Educational Curriculum "Philosophy" for bachelor degree on the specialty 6.020301 "Philosophy". Originality of this is to reveal mimesis mode of signification through the definition of the ratio of the signifier, the signified and the referent. The results obtained suggest that the development of a semiotic approach reveals the possibility of improving aesthetic component of the professional training of philosophers at Kyiv National University named after Taras Shevchenko.

Mobile Technologies and the Mobilization of Medieval Urban Identity

A particular category of signs of identity, seals, circulated in urban spaces as a form of public platform. Serving their owners both as self-extension and as means of engagement with their environment, seals relayed urban identity as it flowed in a concourse of multiple devices, even as seal users themselves circulated and inflected identity beyond its network of media. The paper considers the ways in which mobility, replication, and miniaturization, in predicating particular modes of signification, affordedmedieval cities and citizens a mechanism for the ongoing construction, performance, and communication of their plural personality. The replicated nature of seal impressions, by forming a continuing series of repeated statements, created a trans-temporal template that may well have fostered identity as mobilization. Yet, however immobilized, the formulation of identity on city seals acquired innovative forms that transported representation away from symbolism and toward verism. City seals, in dealing with the representation of a collective person, engaged the tropes of distinction and individuation.

Lasker-Schüler's Languages: Hebrew and Hieroglyphics

Lasker-Schüler's Languages:Hebrew and Hieroglyphics Samuel J. Spinner (bio) I will begin with a quotation from Else Lasker-Schüler in its original language: Ani ben-hamelech mi-Teben sholeach lecha ethamichtav hazeh asher nifkad me-itivenichtav bichtav hakinorim hana'ale sheliri ha-ivrit Ir-Zahav: vehineni meshiv lecha et etzem hagulgoletasher beyamim avaru kavashta lema'anibamilchama: adom yifga becha hachesed ka'asher natanli linshom od: yavo-na dami alecha: (Der Malik 87) These words are Hebrew. But Lasker-Schüler did not know Hebrew. Although she famously maintained that her works were composed in Hebrew, she did not, however, claim that she knew Hebrew (Shedletzky 171). And her contention is correct: at least in the single example cited here, she did in fact write in Hebrew. While Hebrew words appear elsewhere in her works—usually as titles or captions of drawings—none of these examples is as substantial as the text cited above, from her 1919 prose work Der Malik. I will demonstrate that this text emerges from a complex of concerns that were current in Lasker-Schüler's context—the avant-garde interrogation of the relationship between word and image and the exploration of modern forms [End Page 701] of Jewish identity. In the case of Lasker-Schüler's Hebrew, and her notions of Jewish identity more broadly, these two areas—aesthetics and the "problems" of modern Jewishness—are fully enmeshed in a manner that was current among (largely) Yiddish-speaking writers and artists. While it is certainly idiosyncratic, perhaps even sui generis, for a writer to produce a text in a language she does not know, Lasker-Schüler's Hebrew was, to an extent, of a piece with figurations of Jewishness at the intersection of word and image across central and eastern European Jewish modernism. And although the scholarship largely ignores this context of Lasker-Schüler's work, I will show that attending to it can help explicate works otherwise indecipherable.1 Specifically, Lasker-Schüler developed an approach to Hebrew—as language and as script—in conversation with Jewish artists and writers (the latter typically working in Yiddish or Hebrew) whom she met in Berlin in the late 1910s and early 1920s. As a result, although Lasker-Schüler's Hebrew text is characteristically daring, it is nonetheless in accord with the efforts of a number of eastern European Jewish writers and artists who sought to demonstrate the capacities of both Yiddish and Hebrew to meet the demands of avant-garde semiotics and aesthetics without abandoning the traditions that preserved the Hebrew letter into modernity. The fact that Lasker-Schüler, unlike these other figures, could only painstakingly write a few Hebrew characters and could probably barely read them, does not make her project incompatible with the broader discourses on Jewishness in the period. Indeed, the focus in the avant-garde on the visuality of text and script meant that comprehending the semantics of a text could be, as in this case, beside the point. And so a Hebrew text that was illegible to its author and readers is not only a fascinating experiment in the creation of new modes of signification but also an attempt to elaborate new understandings of Jewish language and Jewish poetry. The visual aspect of Hebrew—the appearance of its letters—opened a space for conceptions of Jewish language to turn away from semantics and toward form; away from content and toward effect. Hebrew in German It was the Hebrew and Yiddish poet Uri Zvi Greenberg who reported, decades later, that Lasker-Schüler had once responded to his offer to translate some of her works by stating that her poems were written [End Page 702] in Hebrew to begin with (Shedletzky 171). Interestingly, Greenberg agreed with her. In a Hebrew essay written in honor of Lasker-Schüler's fiftieth birthday, published in 1924 in the Tel Aviv Hebrew newspaper Davar,2 Greenberg argued that Lasker-Schüler's poetry is an example of modern Hebrew verse (Kol Ketavav 122–29). Revising Lasker-Schüler's famous claim that she was born in Thebes, Greenberg writes that...