Semiotic Space Research Articles

Monument as semiotic landscape

Abstract As semiotic spaces, monuments convey messages through multiple information design modes, including language, materiality and emplacement. As research on semiotic landscape has pointed out (e.g., Shohamy and Waksman 2009, Abousnnouga and Machin 2010, Train 2016), these messages are often contested in nature and convey competing discourses inherent in the spaces they occupy. This paper explores those competing discourses manifested in a monument dedicated to the 1976 student protest and violent suppression of it by the Thai military and right-wing paramilitary groups. Working within a production of space framework (Lefebvre 1991) and drawing on insights from the grammar of visual design (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) and nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004), the paper attempts to show how these contested discourses are reflected in the monument’s historiography as conceived, in its physical appearance and emplacement, and as it is experienced today. The analysis is based on photographic data of the monument and its immediate physical context, published accounts of the events of October 6, and interviews with survivors, commemoration planners, and the monument’s designer.

Signs, symbols and schemas: understanding meaning in a child’s drawings

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the schematic underpinnings in the drawings of a four-year-old girl, Thea. The paper reviews literature on graphic representations, signs and meaning-making before discussing schematic form in children’s drawings, the theoretical background for the study. The paper discusses ethical issues and methodological approaches to the study where data include drawings made at home and school, Thea’s recorded talk about drawings, and video recordings of her drawing sessions over a four-month period. These were coded manually and using NVivo to identify schemas. The paper discusses examples of Thea’s exploration of enclosure and trajectory schematic form, which are represented by rich content derived from her experiences and imagination. The paper concludes that Thea’s drawings included many schematic signifiers with clear evidence of complex thinking around enclosures and of vertical and horizontal trajectories. The paper evidences the importance of listening to children’s talk as they draw in order to understand more fully, the meanings they are making. Through signs, symbols and personal narratives, Thea used drawing as a meaningful semiotic space where her persistent schematic concerns were manifest.

Pamięć krajobrazu – zapis dziejów w przestrzeni

Landscape currently takes a particularly important place in many scientific disciplines, for example in geography, cultural anthropology, aesthetics, architecture, landscape architecture, landscape ecology and sociology. The reason for the great interest in landscape is that it is synonymous to everyday existence, the surroundings and the human environment. The article draws attention to the fact that contemporary landscape seems to be a key issue in understanding the historical processes occurring in the human environment. The concept of landscape is therefore a kind of “link” between geography and history. Nowadays the literature of the sources says about “the idea of landscape,” which expresses the historical effort to connect the visual image and the material world. The following considerations are attempts to develop a concept which describes the memory of landscape on the basis of geography. It is an attempt at a complementary approach to the existing studies in the field of humanistic geography, cultural anthropology, sociology and the theory of aesthetics. The article presents the genesis of the concept, giving the source of its ambiguity. In geography landscape commonly means the following: – a set of spatially related physical objects (both natural and anthropogenic) constituting the content of the landscape; – a system of interrelated natural and cultural processes integrating the physical structures; – a set of stimuli affecting the various senses of the user; – a set of natural values (potentials), social, economic, physical, spiritual, historical, physiognomy, aesthetic, symbolic and others; – a system providing the actual and potential service (now called landscape services or so-called landscape functions); – text, symbol, icon, palimpsest, or even a metaphor. In the broadest sense, memory is the ability to remember, store, recall, recognize and localize something that happened in the past. In the case of transfer of this concept onto the field of landscape, it is like the identity of the countryside, the memory does not mean forms of space personalization, but it expresses a special ability to record, store and recall the information about the phenomena and processes taking place in the history and taking place in the social and geographical environment. It is also the process of collecting spatial information. Regarding the landscape, this ability depends on many factors. It may take the shortterm form (memory of history record about events, short duration story) but usually, the landscape is a storehouse of information and traces of theoretically unlimited capacity and storage. The author proposes to separate a few types of landscape memory: – material memory, which is physical storage of objects and their inter-systems (spatial structures) as a form of static, real being. “Saved” and fixed objects in the landscape are not only the relics of ancient times, monuments, but they also clearly organize the space. The material form of “landscape memory” is expressed mainly by the presence of “hibernating” spatial systems (villages, towns, urban structure, texture and copper fields, road systems, etc.) with origins in ancient times, often surrounded by sites from a later period (from another era); – axiological memory, understood as storage of value. It is based on continuity, among others, tradition, identity, familiarity relating to both, tangible and intangible qualities of landscape; – phenomenological memory, which means storing information about phenomena (events, incidents, including extreme ones in terms of natural and cultural ones); – magnificence of space is located here, which is registered in landscape biography. It is mostly short-term memory, episodic, written in the history of long duration; – ontological memory, interpreted in the context of storing information about the nature of the landscape, its properties, causality (factors and stimuli), properties. It is the story of landscape recognized as a dynamic phenomenon, in which the rights and principles of landscape creation are saved; – semantic memory, which means storage of fixed meanings (symbolic landscapes, semiotics of space, storage of genius loci, the sacrum ). Th e possibility which is given by “re-reading” the former and modern functions of landscape. The paper explains the above-mentioned forms of landscape memory on the grounds of the author’s concept of cultural landscape stratigraphy. The basic types of landscapes were separated due to the relative arrangement (ascertainable in chronological order) of cultural strata present in the landscape, as a product of particular communities functioning in the history of the area.

\u2018On the grammar of death\u2019: the construal of death and killing in Colombian newspapers

The aims of this paper are twofold. First, following Halliday’s 1998 paper ‘On the grammar of pain’, this study maps the lexicogrammatical resources available to Spanish speakers in the register of hard news to construe death and killing. Based primarily on a 250,000+ corpus of news reports of violent actions by illegal armed groups in the internal conflict from four major Colombian newspapers, it distinguishes between congruent and metaphorical construals of death, accounting for the different roles of the participants involved in these different types of constructions. In addition, it offers a topological perspective of the intersection of the more delicate distinction of process types and the system of Agency. The second objective is to apply these findings to contrast the construal of violence by the actors in the conflict, Marxist guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries. The results of the analysis show how the deployment of lexicogrammatical resources construes different semiotic spaces, highlighting the role of one group while diminishing the responsibility of the other.

New(s) Readers: Multimodal Meaning-Making in AJ+ Captioned Video

New(s) Readers: Multimodal Meaning-Making in AJ+ Captioned Video

“You have to teach the judge what to do”: Semiotic gaps between unrepresented litigants and the common law

AbstractThe courtroom can be seen as a semiotic space where the practice of signs is institutionalized. There are specific ways to perform signs in court, be they verbal (e. g., turn-taking) or nonverbal (e. g., attire). Legal signs communicate and signify differently than their non-legal counterparts. Laypeople may not be aware of such differences, and may encounter a gap between their expectation and the actual practice of legal signs. This is precisely the case for unrepresented litigants, laypeople who go to court without legal counsel, whose understanding and practice of signs usually differ from legal ones given their limited exposure to legal knowledge and culture. This paper examines unrepresented litigants’ lay practice of signs in Hong Kong courtrooms, and analyses how it clashes with that used by legal professionals. Our data consist of courtroom observations of 54 Cantonese case managements and 13 Cantonese trials in district courts in Hong Kong, 10 interviews with unrepresented litigants and 6 relevant judgments. The paper shows that the differences in the use of semiotics often place laypeople as out-group members of the law and may limit their access to justice. Our analysis will contribute to an understanding of laypeople’s behavior in the courtroom, which in turn bridges the communication gap between laypeople and legal professionals in common law jurisdictions.

Semiotic space of economic culture

Semiotic space of economic culture

ALL THE WORLD'S OFFSTAGE: METAPHYSICAL AND METAFICTIONAL ASPECTS IN SENECA'SHERCVLES FVRENS

In his essay on Seneca, T.S. Eliot used theHercules Furens(=HF) as his example to illustrate ‘this curious freak of non-theatrical drama’. Even though Senecan scholarship has by and large moved away from his indictment, the sense that the attention seems to be directed away from the stage points to the play's unique dramaturgy. The surest indicator of this reverse orientation is the conspicuous absence of Hercules himself for much of the play. Hercules is (or wishes to be) permanently ‘elsewhere’. His entrance is delayed for a long time; once home, he rushes offstage after a few lines to kill Lycus. He returns onstage only to be attacked by madness, and is drawn inside the palace again to kill his wife and sons. When his madness abates, he falls asleep onstage; on waking, he longs for a place beyond the known world (and underworld) and finally exits into exile. This article proposes a closer examination of the semiotics of space, especially the symbolic value of the offstage. Seneca is constantly drawing attention to the pull towards the stage perimeter and the unseen offstage, characterizing the cosmic nature of Hercules’ conflict with Juno and questioning the hero's place in the world as the son of an immortal father.

The Image of Contemporary Society in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy novel Neverwhere revolves around some problematic aspects prevalent in the contemporary world, such as an iniquitous discrepancy between social classes or a problematic attitude to history. The artistic universes created by Gaiman are instrumental in conveying a complex condition of postmodern society. Although one of the represented worlds, London Above, is realistic and the other, London Below, is fantastic, both are suggestive of the contemporary social situation, citizens’ shared values and aspirations. Only when considered together can they reveal a comprehensive image of what the community accepts and what it rejects as no longer consistent with commonly held beliefs. The disparities in the representations of London Above and London Below refer to the division into the present and the past. The realistically portrayed metropolis is the embodiment of contemporary times. The fantastic London Below epitomises all that is ignored or rejected by London Above. The present study is going to discuss the main ideas encoded in the semiotic spaces created by Neil Gaiman, on the basis of postmodern theories. I am going to focus on how the characteristic features of postmodern fiction, such as the use of fantasy and the application of the ontological dominant, by highlighting the boundaries between London Above and London Below affect the general purport of the work.

Constructing the African City Through Hip-hop in “Nai Ni Ya Who?” by Muthoni the Drummer Queen

Departing from the popular approach of reading hip-hop from a sociological and contextual perspective, this article considers it as a consciously created aesthetic text. It argues that hip-hop strategically constructs an effect of reality based on its own figurations that, although it may build on social reality, is not simply a mirror of it. My aim is to show through a close reading of one hip-hop song from Kenya how hip-hop creates a reality within its own semiotic space. To this end, I focus on how the urban African space is developed textually through different elements such as the rapper’s persona, language, and topoi within the text. By looking at how the artiste uses recurring leitmotifs, figures, and hip-hop discursive strategies, I show how the narrative of the city within the text is not simply a reflection of a context but rather an artistic construct.

Актуализация актем в дискурсивно-семиотическом пространстве театральной коммуникации

Актуализация актем в дискурсивно-семиотическом пространстве театральной коммуникации

Information design opportunities with augmented reality applications

Interaction design and augmented reality applications map information relationships between physical and virtual worlds. Mobile devices provide new opportunities for integrating digital graphics, text, and sound with the surrounding physical environment. Designers and artists are experimenting with innovative applications that present challenges in information design research and praxis. This paper explores the following dimensions of augmented reality that are integral to applications in information design that use this technology: semiotics of space and time; multisensory design; relational aesthetics, and kinesthetic interaction that incorporates gestures, physical movement, and embodiment into the interactive process.

Conceptual Blending Revisited: A Case of Paraphrased Literary Text in Contemporary Advertising

ABSTRACT One of the successful tools used in creative contemporary advertising is the intentional modification of texts taken from popular literature (Gajewska 2011, also Bralczyk 2004). This paper offers a conceptual blending analysis of an advertisement for Ranigast ®, a medicine used in the treatment of dyspepsia, which relies on a paraphrased fragment of The Sick Kitten , a famous Polish poem for children written by Stanislaw Jachowicz. The linguistic analysis of the proposed advertisement will be carried out in the light of conceptual blending theory, in particular with the aid of Line Brandt and Per Aage Brandt’s model of conceptual integration (Brandt and Brandt 2005) Assuming that each advertisement is, to some extent, an interplay between the speaker and the hearer, a particular emphasis is going to be laid upon the complexity of the so-called Semiotic Base Space which serves as a “prerequisite for meaning construction” in the analyzed ad (Brandt and Brandt 2005: 225). For further elaboration of the Semiotic Base Space , which I consider of vital importance for an analyzed instance, Ronald Langacker’s notion of Current Discourse Space (Langacker 1999, 2001) as well as Esther Pascual’s notions of the Verbal Space and Here-and-Now Space (Pascual 2009) will also be taken into account.

Social Networking Sites for Language Learning: Examining Learning Theories in Nested Semiotic Spaces

Las redes sociales para el aprendizaje de lenguas (resal) han creado nuevos modelos de aprendizaje, de interacción social y de experiencias de aprendizaje. Este estudio se centra en Busuu —una resal bastante conocida— y examina las perspectivas de aprendizaje que subyacen al diseño semiótico del mismo. El artículo parte de la premisa según la cual la composición semiótica de cualquier medio de comunicación posiciona y promulga ciertas formas de tratamiento, adquisición y aprendizaje de los contenidos, y se basa en fundamentos teóricos y metodológicos de la investigación etnográfica y la semiótica social multimodal para analizar el sitio web. Una de las principales conclusiones del estudio indica que Busuu constituye un sistema ecológico de espacios semióticos entretejidos, donde los elementos y principios pedagógicos de las diferentes teorías del aprendizaje de lenguas —conductista, cognitiva, constructivista— se amalgaman de manera conflictiva y, al mismo tiempo, complementaria.

La pluralidad de diálogos en "La frontera de cristal", de Carlos Fuentes = A plurality of dialogues in "La frontera de cristal", of Carlos Fuentes

The following essay presents a critical analysis of the novel La Frontera de Cristal, by Carlos Fuentes (1995) with emphasis on the multiplicity of meanings of the semiotic space of the border as seen in the novel. We shall examine the various types of representation of border(s) as a multi-structural space as well as the dialogical function of the languages or voices of the narrative.

EL TIEMPO DE LA COMUNICACIÓN DISCURSIVA. LA SEGUNDA VOZ DEL CARNAVAL Y LAS ESTRATEGIAS DE LA INVERSIÓN

RESUMEN Este artículo se propone relevar el lugar asignado por Mijaíl Bajtín a las relaciones entre el tiempo del enunciado y el tiempo de la comunicación discursiva. Los conceptos de conciencia, intención, creatividad ideológica y comprensión acuden a la delimitación de otros, estructurantes y decisivos, como el del tiempo de la interacción estratégica. La perspectiva dialógica de abordaje de la cultura popular nos sugiere aún discutir sobre la relación que se establece en el espacio semiótico agónico abierto entre dos dominios: lo ideológico y el tiempo de lo ideológico. La heteroglosia designa un campo de interacción de voces con proyectos estratégicos. Reconocerlo implica asumir la voz de la cultura popular como interactuante con otras voces en el tiempo de la lucha por la significación ideológica. La fecundidad del debate nunca consumado sobre el sujeto histórico del discurso nos invita a poner en tensión la noción de transformación con aquello que Balandier denomina estrategias de inversión. Exploramos, de esta forma, las preocupaciones de índole sociológica que atraviesan las reflexiones bajtinianas sobre el texto y el enunciado.

THE POSSIBLE INFLUENCE OF RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGY ON THE FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE

The article presents an analysis of the influence of religious thought on imaginative, semiotic cult decision space. This describes the process of creating the iconic space. The main part that creates it is the architect, philosophy of religion, physical ability construction. To create an iconic space, the architect should pass in the structure of the essence of religion, its thinking and ideas. Religious worldview through the canonical regulations creates a model of religious space in the form of schemes. It comes out of the world of ideas in the figurative world, has an effect for the purpose of transmitting information and teaching. All this does not affect the freedom of creativity of the architect, because the inside of the canons he is free to decide the design space of worship in accordance with his skills. The model space is specified by Canon gives the possibility of building both simple and complex design of buildings. The above situation demonstrates the dominant role and influence of religious ideology on the formation of religious architecture. It provides the ideological basis for the model space of worship, fixing them in the symbolism of forms and their mutual arrangement. Such findings are important for the theory of culture and architecture, because not only the architect and its shape can determine the life and importance of architecture, but also a worldview.

Social distance and the multimodal construction of the Other in sectarian song

This paper introduces the concept of “tonal gravity” through a multimodal analysis of a YouTube video to demonstrate how multimodality is key to the construction of “Rule Britannia” as a sectarian song. The analysis focuses upon the multimodal semiotics of social distance which has been a key concept in sociological and anthropological traditions in recent times. This concept offers a means to understand the social semiotic relationship between Self and Other in multimodal discourse. Following previous work in social semiotics and music studies which examine how visual composition, music and the voice have constructed social distance or expressions of intimacy, I introduce the concept of tonal gravity which extends the metaphors of semiotic space in previous work in the musical mode, to account for a fuller understanding of how music helps narrate the multimodal Self and Other. This is introduced via a close multimodal analysis of “Rule Britannia” as a Rangers Football fan video which is only transformed into a sectarian text through multimodal collocation where different semiotic resources in various modes act in combination to produce a dominant Self actively prejudiced against a low Other.

Experiências do Espaço Semiótico

In this study we examine the key articulations that consolidated the notion of text as a semiotic problem of culture, namely translation, modeling, and the semiotic space of the semiosphere. The main hypothesis is concerned on Lotman's assumption of the semiotic space as an important interconection between cultural systems outside the notion of space as limit and place for things. Cultural texts are examined and taken according the dynamic modeling of the space refering to cultural traditions not always in evidence in the West.

Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotics as a contribution to media ecology

Abstract The article is devoted to the scientific legacy of a famous Soviet literary and culture scholar and semiotician, Yuri Lotman. Authors consider that many of Lotman’s ideas bring him together with the field of media ecology. Lotman’s cultural semiotics approach could in general be reduced to the formula ‘the medium is the text’. According to his studies the whole culture could be seen as a text that has interdependent ideas and structures. Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere, or dynamic inhomogeneous semiotic space, the cause and the result of culture, is analysed in the final part of the article. The main semiosphere features, which include two types of the text structure (binary and ternary) and two types of the cultural dynamics (progress and explosion), are depicted. We consider that the concept of the semiosphere is fruitful for further research of complicated and multilevel media environment.