Semiotic Level Research Articles

Conflicts of Interest, Culture Jamming and Subversive (S)ignifications: The High Fashion Logo as Locational Hip hop Artic

In 2012, a fashion line called “Conflict of Interest NYC” (C.O.I.) released a collection of three unisex t-shirts: each one took the brand name and/or logo of a storied fashion house and imposed a set of urban and hip hop references to subvert the brand’s refined, Eurocentric connotations. This article describes the t-shirts’ function as parodies using media studies accounts of culture jamming as political practice; Linda Hutcheon’s formulation of parody as literary method; and Henry Louis Gates’s outline of Signifyin(g) in the black oral vernacular tradition. It further contextualizes the t-shirts within historical tensions between dominant fashion institutions and hip hop culture at the semiotic level of the brand logo. It then reads the t-shirt containing the name BALLINCIAGA (manipulating the Paris fashion house Balenciaga) for its intertextual and historical relations to the expressive forms and urban locations of hip hop culture. Finally, the article examines a photograph of a fashion editor wearing the BALLINCIAGA t-shirt to London Fashion Week, in October 2012, as a moment of resistance but also of fashion re-appropriating the t-shirts’ political content. Still, the t-shirts’ circulation as commodities permits for reflection on the politics of fashion and subcultures within the dominant logic of capitalism.

Образотворче мистецтво у структурі роману Джона Фаулза “Жінка французького лейтенанта”

The article deals with the role of descriptive context in the structure of John Fowles’ novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. Based on the intermedial analysis there was analyzed the semiotics of fine art in the novel, in particular an appeal to the Pre-Raphaelite art and the Renaissance painting. It was found that John Fowles’ works tend to use the poetics of different kinds of arts: the writer appeals to painting, operates its sign system, recodes signs of visual art by the language of a literary text, expanding the context of its understanding, interpretation and reception.There were studied intermedial connections of the novel with other works of arts. It was found that in the writer’s novels and stories were presented the most clearly visual arts in terms of their classification for the form of sensory perception. Among the arts in relation to time and space are dominated spatial arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, decorative arts. The study focuses on the fine art, especially painting.The descriptive context is multivariation and multifunctional, it has manifestations on a level with the intermedial citation of painting, ekphrasis in landscape or portrait sketches, paintings of visualizing of characters’ imagination, allusions to works of art, etc., explicitly and implicitly represented in the texts. Intermedial analysis allows us to see the relationship of John Fowles’ novel with the Pre-Raphaelite art. In the character context the descriptive component increases literary, cultural and historical contextual characteristics. Introduced in the structure of a literary text the descriptive context on the semiotic level forms the axiological context. The system of ethical and aesthetic values of different cultural eras is extrapolated through the artistic context.So, the article studies the intermedial novel connections with other works of art. The descriptive context of the novel is manifested at different levels of poetic works, has explicit and implicit nature. The appeal to the fine art in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” relates the novel to other works of the author, in which the theme of art is developed and brings to the broader context of the study of other arts, including arts and crafts, which are provided with if not the most attention in the text.

Sentido e significância na tradução poética

Na tradução do texto pragmático, a atenção deve voltar-se particularmente para os conceitos e para a relação entre eles, de modo a salvaguardar a sua função comunicativa e a sua tendência à univocidade. Na tradução poética, predominam os elementos materiais do signo e a passagem para o nível superior da significação oblíqua, para o nível semiótico da significância, o que permite a leitura múltipla pela quebra da referencialidade externa.

Binary Coded Performance

The article explores the possibility to use a binary code as a code language that can be staged or choreographed. It mentions that numbers one and zero are performative as they can be read as indicators of failure and success. It notes the susceptibility of the numbers to the bodies that are counting and actors on whose fingers these numbers are actualised. It also emphasizes that the notion of digitality in computer technologies expresses the logic of binarism at a corporeal semiotic level.

Translation Quality Assessment (TQA): A Semiotic Model for Poetry Translation

AbstractToday the focus of translation scholars has shifted from stable aspects of texts to dynamic aspects. Such a focus requires close attention to the semiotic level of the text in translation which in turn leads to considering semiotic as well as textual aspects of a text in translation quality assessment (TQA). The present study was an attempt to apply semiotics to a model of translation assessment proposed by Vahid et al. (Journal of Language and Translation: 7–40, 2008), which is a holistic model for the evaluation of poetry translation. Although such an enterprise deserves appreciation in its own right, the model seems to carry some shortcomings. This study was thus aimed at identifying the shortcomings, removing them, and finally proposing a semiotic model through combining it with the model devised by Sojoodi (Applied Semiotics, Nashr-e-Gheseh, 2006). The resultant hybrid model was eventually applied to "Another Birth", a poem by the famous Iranian poetess, Forough Farrokhzad, translated into English by Salami (Another Birth, 2008), to show the applicability of its pragmatic features in comparison with that of the stated holistic model.

The cybersemiotic model of communication: An evolutionary model of the threshold between semiosis and informational exchange

The present paper discusses various suggestions for a philosophical framework for a transdisciplinary information science or a semiotic doctrine. These are: the mechanical materialistic, the pan-informational, the Luhmanian second order cybernetic approach, Peircian biosemiotics and finally, the pan-semiotic approach. The limitations of each are analyzed. The conclusion is that we will not have to choose between a cyberneticinformational and a semiotic approach. A combination of a Peircian-based biosemiotics with autopoiesis theory, second order cybernetics, and information science is suggested in a five-levelled cybersemiotic framework. The five levels are 1) a level of Firstness, 2) a level of mechanical matter, energy, and force as Secondness, 3) a cybernetic and thermodynamic level of information, 4) a level of sign games and 5) a level of conscious language games. These levels are then used to differentiate levels of information systems, sign and language games in human communication. In our model, Maturana and Varela's description of the logic of the living as autopoietic is accepted and expanded with Luhmann's generalization of the concept of autopoiesis to also cover psychological and socio-communicative systems. Adding a Peircian concept of semiosis to Luhmann's theory in the framework of biosemiotics enables us to view the interplay of mind and body as a sign play. I have in a previous publication (see list of references) suggested the term 'sign play' pertaining to exosemiotics processes between animals in the same species by stretching Wittgenstein's language game concept into the animal world of signs. A new concept of intrasemiotics designates the semiosis of the interpenetration between the biological and psychological autopoietic systems as Luhmann defines them in his theory. I am suggesting a cybersemiotic model to combine these approaches, defining various concepts like thought-semiotics, phenosemiotic and intrasemiotics, combining them with the already known concepts of exosemiotics, ecosemiotics, and endosemiotics into a new view of self-organizing semiotic processes in living systems. Thus a new semiotic level of description is generated, where mind-body interactions can be understood on the same description level. This is the direction suggested to work in to create a broad philosophy of information, cognitive, and communication science that makes it possible for us to see the different approaches not as mutually exclusive, but rather as mutually complementary in accepting an ontology where reality do have structures and processes, but the foundation is hyper. complex and therefore not to be reduced by any knowledge system.

A framework for knowledge representation in semantic mobile applications

Based on the classical notions of knowledge transfer, representation, and semiotics, a framework for understanding the potential of the Semantic Web for Mobile Applications is presented. In doing so, the framework integrates the quality concerns relevant to each semiotic level to its representation. The technological possibilities for a representation at each semiotic level are introduced and analysed. To deal with the quality concerns of a representation in a concrete manner, each semiotic level is assigned one or more quality attributes. The means for addressing these quality attributes in a feasible manner are given. The scope of the framework is discussed.

"Having It Off" with Fish, Camels, and Lads: Sodomitic Pleasures in German-Language Turcica

In 1530 the German Lutheran reformer Justus Jonas claimed: "Wherever [the Turk] does not slay all, he leads off the best men, woman and child, and the youth, into captivity, and takes them to market in Turkey, naked, has them viewed shamefully, and sells them for money, like cattle."1 What would a Lutheran reformer in the Saxon town of Wittenberg know about a Turkish bazaar? He must have gained his information from other texts, like those by former slaves of Ottoman masters, such as the Tractatus de Moribus, Condictionibus et Nequicia Turcorum (1481), presumably written by Georgius de Hungaria.2 Martin Luther republished the work in 1530; it was then very freely translated into German (and partially rewritten) by Sebastian Franck that same year under the title Cronica-Abconterfayung und [End Page 401] entwerffung der Türckey.3 The Tractatus presented an extensive description of a slave market, luridly emphasizing its sexual aspects, an approach that also became a significant part of Franck's rendering.4 Cronica provided many details of the marketplace: "[It] is shameful to say, once they are on the market, they are stripped: wife, maidens, man, etc. They are touched in public, their private parts are shown to everyone, and naked and bare they must walk in front of everyone, jump and run to make apparent whether the person on sale is weak, healthy, old, young, woman or man."5 If exposing a body to the shameful gaze and public touch violated its integrity, then the act of selling did so even more. However, neither Jonas nor Georgius/Franck would have cared had those sold not been Christians or, more precisely, Christians traded by "Turks," a term that signified "Muslims" more generally. The quotes presented above raise a number of questions: What is happening, on a semiotic level, with respect to sexually laden images in Occidental texts that take "Turks" as their theme? If the Christian body is (textually) displayed naked, a victim of gaze and touch, how is the Muslim body and Muslim sexual behavior constructed in such texts?6 Finally, how might the Other's paradigmatic "sexuality" contribute to and/or undermine the social disciplining of behaviors in the Christian Occident? [End Page 402] The early modern era experienced an ever-increasing "flood of literature on Turks."7 This body of texts, which is termed turcica, includes fiction and nonfiction and appears in genres such as poetry, song lyrics, drama, novels, religious treatises and sermons, travel narratives, broadsides, and pamphlets, both illustrated and nonillustrated. The vast outpouring of published turcica began with the 1453 Ottoman takeover of the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, an event that coincided with the onset of the age of printing. This concurrence of technological advance and military conquest is embodied in one of the oldest surviving German prints (and the oldest completely preserved printed book), issued in December 1454 in response to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans: the nine-page propagandist pamphlet entitled An Exhortation of Christianity against the Turks (the so-called "Türkenkalender").8 Throughout Europe authors and illustrators directed their attention to the "Turkish threat" in a remarkable variety of genres and languages, including Latin and vernaculars such as English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. Carl Göllner has counted about a thousand German imprints in the sixteenth century alone.9 While the texts promoted moral reforms in the Christian Occident, for the most part they championed military actions against the Ottoman Empire. To that end they fanned the flames of fear and loathing against the Muslim Other, the "hereditary foe" of Christendom, as some of the titles proclaim.10 A significant component of their rhetorical strategy is the frequent invocation of sexually charged images. [End Page 403] This focus on sexuality would be heightened and transformed by the publication of Scheherazade...

'Figure it out!' Psychological Perspectives on Perception of Migration Period Animal Art

In this article we explore some perceptual-psychological and semiotic aspects of the Migration Period 'animal art'from the northern Germanic cultural area. Primarily, it is suggested that this art, which has been described as using symmetry and 'split representations', is laden with 'ambiguous figures' (including 'embedded figures' and 'reversible figures'). The ambiguous quality of the art is suggested to be presenton a perceptual level, but also on a compositional (structural) and iconographic level. Psychological (and neurological) processes involved in the perception of ambiguous figures and their effects are presented: Gestalt formation, unconscious processing, subliminal perception, motivated perception, and changed states of consciousness. It is suggested that this art instigated,or at least referred to such processes. In addit ion,on a semiot iclevel, t heart is suggested to contain information-condensation ('hyper-texts'), cryptic information, and to have had other semiotic functions.

Victimes et bourreaux, corpus et sens lexical

Beyond its status as an object of research, the victim is also a meaningful linguistic sign. But what is meaning and what is the meaning of “victim” ? In this paper we first review a few of the main theoretical approaches to meaning. We then propose an illustrated methodology for extracting lexical meaning from machine readable corpora, which is subsequently applied to the sign “victim”. On a semiotic level, this word seems to be a sort of trigger which turns one entity into a victimiser and another one into a victim.

Design, development and implementation of a global information warehouse: a case study at IBM

The characteristics of a global information warehouse (GIW) can be understood with reference to the three dimensions implied by the three words in its name. These dimensions are boundary of the system, semiotic level of the objects in the system, and organization of objects in the system, corresponding to the terms 'global', 'information' and 'warehouse', respectively. This paper defines these three dimensions and describes the system characteristics that flow from the definitions. These characteristics also highlight the issues involved in the design, development and implementation of GIWs. The case study following the discussion of the three dimensions illustrates these issues.

How Can We Define the Sequential Organization of Dreams?

Little is known about the processes of sequential organization of dreams. To conduct experiments aimed at studying how this organization compares with that of waking narrative or day-dreams and whether it is specific to individuals or to phases of sleep, a preliminary analysis must be accomplished. We must be able to define the sequential organization of reported dreams. The present paper proposes a way to define this aspect of dreams, using different categories of connection between the successive events represented and a schematic representation of the sequence of events constituting the dream. Such analyses are based on a segmentation of the dream report into units at a semiotic level which does not correspond to the linguistic units of the report. Material collected in an interview on the day following the dream recording helps us to analyze the sequential organization. Examples of the method of definition of this organization are given. An analysis of the example shows that semantic links connect successive scenes of the dream that seem completely discontinuous from a narrative point of view.

Music and Language: Commonalities in Semiotics, Syllabus, and Classroom Teaching

Music and language are often seen to be similar, and this has led to numerous music education methods based on language models. This paper describes a commonality between music and language at a semiotic level, compares their relevant syllabuses, and discusses a number of possible transfers between language teaching and music education.

HOW CAN WE DEFINE THE SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF DREAMS?

Little is known about the processes of sequential organization of dreams. To conduct experiments aimed at studying how this organization compares with that of waking narrative or day-dreams and whether it is specific to individuals or to phases of sleep, a preliminary analysis must be accomplished. We must be able to define the sequential organization of reported dreams. The present paper proposes a way to define this aspect of dreams, using different categories of connection between the successive events represented and a schematic representation of the sequence of events constituting the dream. Such analyses are based on a segmentation of the dream report into units at a semiotic level which does not correspond to the linguistic units of the report. Material collected in an interview on the day following the dream recording helps us to analyze the sequential organization. Examples of the method of definition of this organization are given. An analysis of the example shows that semantic links connect successive scenes of the dream that seem completely discontinuous from a narrative point of view.

Cybernetic Explanation as a Theory of Reading

This is the idea of a code: an array of rules and protocols linking one semiotic level to another and thereby regulating the passage between symbolic states or phenomena. Although antecedents for the idea can be found in classical theories of language, widespread use of a terminology of coding seems to date only from the decades following the end of World War Two, when cybernetics first came into its own as a field of research and for a time generated considerable excitement in the human sciences. In literary theory and textually oriented semiotics the single most important channel for the idea and the nomenclature seems to have been the work of Roman Jakobson, who drew upon both cybernetic terminology and the earlier vocabularies of Russian and Czech Formalism.' Whatever its exact provenance, the idea of codes and coding is now integral to a number of otherwise disparate ways of thinking about textual phenomena. Codes are most often invoked as the mechanism connecting the syntactic and semantic levels of some language system (or, in other terminologies, connecting signifiers and signifieds, expressions and contents, and so on). They serve somewhat more metaphorically, but with comparable frequency, to explain the processing of larger units of discourse (the reading of an entire work, for instance), such as when the move from an initial reading to a subsequent, more satisfactory understanding is said to involve recognizing subtler or more comprehensive textual codes, or when the entire act of reading is considered a kind of decoding process. Still more generally, the idea of coding plays a prominent role in textually oriented social theory, where cultural codes are invoked as the means by which action and thought are organized within complex social systems. In spite of the widespread adoption of the idea of codes and coding, however, even advocates of its explanatory force sometimes find the notion as troubling as it is seemingly indispensable.2 As an account of how meanings and effects get produced in a text or textlike cultural formation, codes explain at once too much and too little. They explain away too readily the very regularities we would like to understand

Die strekking van Job 28

Job chapter 28 seems, superficially seen, to be in conflict with the ideas of both Job and his friends. In this article the author comes to the conclusion that chapter 28 should be ascribed to Job. On the semantic level, chapter 28 seems to be the words of a person who accepts the fact that wisdom is inaccessible to man. On the semiotic level however. Job is protesting against this fact although he realizes its validity. The protest is more subtle than usual.

Phraseological expression of the concept of work in Lithuanian

The paper analyzes 420 Lithuanian idiom that refer to the concept of work. The corpus is treated in terms of a semantic field. One of its primary areas reflects work as performance and refers to it through its quantity, quality, and manner of execution, each of which has diverse representations. The second of the primary areas refers to work through man the performer and brings to the surface 36 types of people in addition to 10 explicitly denoted occupations. The syntactic and semantic structure of the idioms permit to distinguish a speaker about himself, addressing another person or making a commentary. On the semiotic level, the concept is expressed by a system in which the hand is the sign of an indispensable tool for work, as well as by a heterogeneous set composed of symbols from kinesics, proxemics, zoozemiotics, and other codes. The conclusions sum up the role of work in the historical practice of the language community as reflected by the corpus.

The Cybersemiotic Model of Communication: An Evolutionary View on the Threshold between Semiosis and Informational Exchange

This paper discusses various suggestions for a philosophical framework for a trans-disciplinary information science or a semiotic doctrine. These are: the mechanical materialistic, the pan-informational, the Luhmanian second order cybernetic approach, Peircian biosemiotics and finally the pan-semiotic approach. The limitations of each are analysed. The conclusion is that we will not have to choose between either a cybernetic-informational or a semiotic approach. A combination of a Peircian-based biosemiotics with autopoiesis theory, second order cybernetics and information science is suggested in a five-levelled cybersemiotic framework. The five levels are 1) a level of Firstness, 2) a level of mechanical matter, energy and force as Secondness, 3) a cybernetic and thermodynamic level of information, 4) a level of sign games and 5) a level of conscious language games. These levels are then used to differentiate levels of information systems, sign and language games in human communication. In our model Maturana and Varela’s description of the logic of the living as autopoietic is accepted and expanded with Luhmann’s generalization of the concept of autopoiesis, to cover also to psychological and socio-communicative systems. Adding a Peircian concept of semiosis to Luhmann’s theory in the framework of biosemiotics enables us to view the interplay of mind and body as a sign play. I have in a previous publication (see list of references) suggested the term “sign play” pertaining to exosemiotics processes between animals in the same species by stretching Wittgenstein's language concept into the animal world of signs. The new concept of intrasemiotics designates the semiosis of the interpenetration between biological and psychological autopoietic systems as Luhmann defines them in his theory. One could therefore view intrasemiotics as the interplay between Lorenz' biological defined motivations and Freud's Id, understood as the psychological aspect of many of the natural drives. In the last years of the development of his theory, Lorenz worked with the idea of how emotional feedback introduced just a little learning through pleasurable feelings into instinctive systems because, as he reasoned, there must be some kind of reward of going through instinctive movements, thus making possible the appetitive searching behaviour for sign stimuli. But he never found an acceptable way of modelling motivation in biological science. I am suggesting a cybersemiotic model to combine these approaches, defining various concepts like thought-semiotics, phenosemiotic and intrasemiotics, combining them with the already known concepts of exosemiotics, ecosemiotics, and endosemiotics into a new view of self-organizing semiotic processes in living systems. Thus a new semiotic level of description is generated, where mind-body interactions can be understood on the same description level.

The Cybersemiotic Model of Communication: An Evolutionary View on the Threshold between Semiosis and Informational Exchange

This paper discusses various suggestions for a philosophical framework for a trans-disciplinary information science or a semiotic doctrine. These are: the mechanical materialistic, the pan-informational, the Luhmanian second order cybernetic approach, Peircian biosemiotics and finally the pan-semiotic approach. The limitations of each are analysed. The conclusion is that we will not have to choose between either a cybernetic-informational or a semiotic approach. A combination of a Peircian-based biosemiotics with autopoiesis theory, second order cybernetics and information science is suggested in a five-levelled cybersemiotic framework. The five levels are 1) a level of Firstness, 2) a level of mechanical matter, energy and force as Secondness, 3) a cybernetic and thermodynamic level of information, 4) a level of sign games and 5) a level of conscious language games. These levels are then used to differentiate levels of information systems, sign and language games in human communication. In our model Maturana and Varela’s description of the logic of the living as autopoietic is accepted and expanded with Luhmann’s generalization of the concept of autopoiesis, to cover also to psychological and socio-communicative systems. Adding a Peircian concept of semiosis to Luhmann’s theory in the framework of biosemiotics enables us to view the interplay of mind and body as a sign play. I have in a previous publication (see list of references) suggested the term “sign play” pertaining to exosemiotics processes between animals in the same species by stretching Wittgenstein's language concept into the animal world of signs. The new concept of intrasemiotics designates the semiosis of the interpenetration between biological and psychological autopoietic systems as Luhmann defines them in his theory. One could therefore view intrasemiotics as the interplay between Lorenz' biological defined motivations and Freud's Id, understood as the psychological aspect of many of the natural drives. In the last years of the development of his theory, Lorenz worked with the idea of how emotional feedback introduced just a little learning through pleasurable feelings into instinctive systems because, as he reasoned, there must be some kind of reward of going through instinctive movements, thus making possible the appetitive searching behaviour for sign stimuli. But he never found an acceptable way of modelling motivation in biological science. I am suggesting a cybersemiotic model to combine these approaches, defining various concepts like thought-semiotics, phenosemiotic and intrasemiotics, combining them with the already known concepts of exosemiotics, ecosemiotics, and endosemiotics into a new view of self-organizing semiotic processes in living systems. Thus a new semiotic level of description is generated, where mind-body interactions can be understood on the same description level.