In Eco’s work between around 1960 and 1992, “openness” in a modern literary text can mean (a) “permitting more than one interpretation,” and (b) “requiring a good deal of decoding work from the reader,” which is close to my own position. These two aspects of openness are demonstrated using Baudelaire’s Les Chats, in regard to which Eco denies that the text may be cristallin in Lévi-Strauss’s sense, while still requiring constructive effort from the reader. It is apparent that this term is equivalent to Riffaterreʼs textual “monumentality.” Eco does not go into detail about the reader’s work in assembling the text’s global propositional structure. It is left to Riffaterre and myself to detail the various stages of this work, involving comparison of images in order to discover their common underlying generative proposition. In contrast to Riffaterre, I have long suggested that the modern poetic text is built on two such propositions. It is at the stage of relations between text and sociolect that Eco contributes much to modern poetics. Openness (b) seems to be a prerequisite for perceptual change in the reader, produced by contrast between textual structure and its sociolectic context. Riffaterre prefers to remain within the text/intertext/interpretant triad, preventing him from describing the text-sociolect relation, where the propositional innovation of the modernist text takes effect.
{"title":"Eco, Riffaterre, and a poem by Baudelaire","authors":"John A. F. Hopkins","doi":"10.1515/sem-2023-0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2023-0041","url":null,"abstract":"In Eco’s work between around 1960 and 1992, “openness” in a modern literary text can mean (a) “permitting more than one interpretation,” and (b) “requiring a good deal of decoding work from the reader,” which is close to my own position. These two aspects of openness are demonstrated using Baudelaire’s <jats:italic>Les Chats</jats:italic>, in regard to which Eco denies that the text may be <jats:italic>cristallin</jats:italic> in Lévi-Strauss’s sense, while still requiring constructive effort from the reader. It is apparent that this term is equivalent to Riffaterreʼs textual “monumentality.” Eco does not go into detail about the reader’s work in assembling the text’s global propositional structure. It is left to Riffaterre and myself to detail the various stages of this work, involving comparison of images in order to discover their common underlying generative proposition. In contrast to Riffaterre, I have long suggested that the modern poetic text is built on two such propositions. It is at the stage of relations between text and sociolect that Eco contributes much to modern poetics. Openness (b) seems to be a prerequisite for perceptual change in the reader, produced by contrast between textual structure and its sociolectic context. Riffaterre prefers to remain within the text/intertext/interpretant triad, preventing him from describing the text-sociolect relation, where the propositional innovation of the modernist text takes effect.","PeriodicalId":47288,"journal":{"name":"Semiotica","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139917595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This review article of Frederik Stjernfelt’s Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism (2022) argues that Peirce’s theory of iconicity with its subdivision into the image-diagram-metaphor triad must not be reduced to diagrammatic iconicity. The foundation of the triadic subdivision of the icon is not in Peirce’s diagrammatic logic but in Peirce’s cenopythagorean categories. A focus is on misinterpretations of Peirce’s concept of thirdness in the firstness of the icon. The paper argues that not only metaphors, but also comparisons, analogies, analogic arguments, and examples belong to the third class of icons.
{"title":"Peirce’s iconicity and his image-diagram-metaphor triad revisited: complements to Stjernfelt’s Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism","authors":"Winfried Nöth","doi":"10.1515/sem-2023-0140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2023-0140","url":null,"abstract":"This review article of Frederik Stjernfelt’s <jats:italic>Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism</jats:italic> (2022) argues that Peirce’s theory of iconicity with its subdivision into the image-diagram-metaphor triad must not be reduced to diagrammatic iconicity. The foundation of the triadic subdivision of the icon is not in Peirce’s diagrammatic logic but in Peirce’s cenopythagorean categories. A focus is on misinterpretations of Peirce’s concept of thirdness in the firstness of the icon. The paper argues that not only metaphors, but also comparisons, analogies, analogic arguments, and examples belong to the third class of icons.","PeriodicalId":47288,"journal":{"name":"Semiotica","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139917705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sounds play crucial roles in a poem’s meaning (re)construction. Grasping the content of a literary work such as poetry often requires a profound interpretation of the underlying linguistic cum phonetic codes of its discourse. Extant studies on Nigerian children’s poetry have paid little attention to this aspect of meaning conception, thereby concentrating mainly on the surface lexical constructs. Hence, this study aims to examine imagic iconicity in children’s poems in order to demonstrate how a poem’s thematic realization is inferred through the interpretation of the phonic and acoustic nature of the sounds employed. The study involves five poems: three from Ossie Enekwe’s Gentle Birds Come to me and two from Ikeogu Oke’s Song of Success and Other Poems for Children. The analysis is anchored to insights from Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the iconic sign, and exploits the action of acoustic and phonetic articulation of sounds to determine their functions and effects in the poems. The study reveals how specialized lexemic choices and onomatopoeia (kinaesthemes, phonaestheme or sound symbolism) in children’s poems make each poem functional and purposeful. Thus, children’s poetry contains language structures and configurations that transmit sense and embody what the poem is asserting in a way that interestingly engages the reader.
声音在诗歌的意义（再）建构中起着至关重要的作用。要把握诗歌等文学作品的内容，往往需要对其话语中潜在的语言和语音密码进行深入解读。关于尼日利亚儿童诗歌的现有研究很少关注意义构思的这一方面，因此主要集中于表面的词汇建构。因此，本研究旨在考察儿童诗中的意象标志性，以说明如何通过对所使用的声音的语音和声学性质的解释来推断诗歌的主题实现。本研究涉及五首诗：三首选自奥西-埃内奎（Ossie Enekwe）的《温柔的鸟儿来找我》（Gentle Birds Come to me），两首选自伊科古-奥克（Ikeogu Oke）的《成功之歌》（Song of Success and Other Poems for Children）。分析以查尔斯-桑德斯-皮尔斯（Charles Sanders Peirce）的 "标志性符号"（icononic sign）概念为基础，利用声音和语音的发音动作来确定其在诗歌中的功能和效果。这项研究揭示了儿童诗中的专门词汇选择和拟声词（kinaesthemes、phonaestheme 或声音象征）如何使每首诗具有功能性和目的性。因此，儿童诗歌中的语言结构和构型能够传递意义，并以有趣的方式体现诗歌所要表达的内容，从而吸引读者。
{"title":"Imagic iconicity as thematic representation in selected Nigerian children’s poetry","authors":"Amaka Grace Nwuche, Chinyere Loretta Ngonebu, Ogechi Chiamaka Unachukwu","doi":"10.1515/sem-2021-0083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2021-0083","url":null,"abstract":"Sounds play crucial roles in a poem’s meaning (re)construction. Grasping the content of a literary work such as poetry often requires a profound interpretation of the underlying linguistic cum phonetic codes of its discourse. Extant studies on Nigerian children’s poetry have paid little attention to this aspect of meaning conception, thereby concentrating mainly on the surface lexical constructs. Hence, this study aims to examine imagic iconicity in children’s poems in order to demonstrate how a poem’s thematic realization is inferred through the interpretation of the phonic and acoustic nature of the sounds employed. The study involves five poems: three from Ossie Enekwe’s <jats:italic>Gentle Birds Come to me</jats:italic> and two from Ikeogu Oke’s <jats:italic>Song of Success and Other Poems for Children</jats:italic>. The analysis is anchored to insights from Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the iconic sign, and exploits the action of acoustic and phonetic articulation of sounds to determine their functions and effects in the poems. The study reveals how specialized lexemic choices and onomatopoeia (kinaesthemes, phonaestheme or sound symbolism) in children’s poems make each poem functional and purposeful. Thus, children’s poetry contains language structures and configurations that transmit sense and embody what the poem is asserting in a way that interestingly engages the reader.","PeriodicalId":47288,"journal":{"name":"Semiotica","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139758298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper introduces a novel perspective on Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar (AgCCxG) by examining the intricate interplay between mind and language through the lens of both Active Inference and Peircean semiotics. AgCCxG emphasizes the impact of intention and purpose on linguistic choices as a cognitive imperative to balance the symbolic Self (Intelligent Agent) with the dynamics of the environment. Among other things, the paper posits that linguistic constructions, particularly Constructional Attachment Patterns (CAPs), like argument structure constructions, embody experienced interactions with the world through reenactment routines via the integration of multisensory channels. Unlike traditional usage-based approaches (e.g., construction grammars), AgCCxG embraces a robust theory of signs that reveals human representation as a continuous process of semiotic hybridization for the creative prediction of uncertain scenarios. Importantly, the paper challenges the notion of the mind as a unified, rational, uncertainty-reducing machine by asserting that physical processes governing open biological systems profoundly influence the linguistic sign system. Intelligent agents’ adaptability in expressing incongruous realities thus highlights the role of semiotic hybridization in preserving an agent’s autonomy and semiotic boundary.
{"title":"Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar: a predictive semiotic theory of mind and language","authors":"Sergio Torres-Martínez","doi":"10.1515/sem-2018-0138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2018-0138","url":null,"abstract":"This paper introduces a novel perspective on <jats:italic>Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar</jats:italic> (AgCCxG) by examining the intricate interplay between mind and language through the lens of both Active Inference and Peircean semiotics. AgCCxG emphasizes the impact of intention and purpose on linguistic choices as a cognitive imperative to balance the <jats:italic>symbolic Self</jats:italic> (Intelligent Agent) with the dynamics of the environment. Among other things, the paper posits that linguistic constructions, particularly Constructional Attachment Patterns (CAPs), like argument structure constructions, embody experienced interactions with the world through reenactment routines via the integration of multisensory channels. Unlike traditional usage-based approaches (e.g., construction grammars), AgCCxG embraces a robust theory of signs that reveals human representation as a continuous process of semiotic hybridization for the creative prediction of uncertain scenarios. Importantly, the paper challenges the notion of the mind as a unified, rational, uncertainty-reducing machine by asserting that physical processes governing open biological systems profoundly influence the linguistic sign system. Intelligent agents’ adaptability in expressing incongruous realities thus highlights the role of semiotic hybridization in preserving an agent’s autonomy and semiotic boundary.","PeriodicalId":47288,"journal":{"name":"Semiotica","volume":"4 2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139584349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The primary objective of this study was to propose a functional discrete mathematical model for analyzing folklore fairy tales. Within this model, characters are denoted as vertices, and explicit instances of communication – both verbal and non-verbal – within the text are depicted as edges. Upon examining a corpus of Eastern Slavic fairy tales in comparison to Chukchi fairy tales, unforeseen outcomes emerged. Notably, the constructed models seem to evade establishing certain connections between characters. Consequently, instances where the interactions among fairy tale characters would result in a non-planar graph structure are notably absent. To put it differently, the models refrain from incorporating sub-graphs delineated by the Kuratowski theorem governing planar graphs, specifically the minimal non-planar graphs Κ5 and Κ3,3. Remarkably, even in more extensive texts featuring a larger cast of characters, connections that would yield a non-planar graph pattern are consistently avoided. This leads to the formulation of a hypothesis positing that traditional folk tales adhere to a “planar narrative” design – an identifiable narrative variant characterized by inherent limitations in complexity. This design, in turn, appears deeply entrenched within the societal framework of the cultures that produced these folk narratives.
{"title":"A planar graph as a topological model of a traditional fairy tale","authors":"Nazarii Nazarov","doi":"10.1515/sem-2023-0116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2023-0116","url":null,"abstract":"The primary objective of this study was to propose a functional discrete mathematical model for analyzing folklore fairy tales. Within this model, characters are denoted as vertices, and explicit instances of communication – both verbal and non-verbal – within the text are depicted as edges. Upon examining a corpus of Eastern Slavic fairy tales in comparison to Chukchi fairy tales, unforeseen outcomes emerged. Notably, the constructed models seem to evade establishing certain connections between characters. Consequently, instances where the interactions among fairy tale characters would result in a non-planar graph structure are notably absent. To put it differently, the models refrain from incorporating sub-graphs delineated by the Kuratowski theorem governing planar graphs, specifically the minimal non-planar graphs Κ<jats:sub>5</jats:sub> and Κ<jats:sub>3,3.</jats:sub> Remarkably, even in more extensive texts featuring a larger cast of characters, connections that would yield a non-planar graph pattern are consistently avoided. This leads to the formulation of a hypothesis positing that traditional folk tales adhere to a “planar narrative” design – an identifiable narrative variant characterized by inherent limitations in complexity. This design, in turn, appears deeply entrenched within the societal framework of the cultures that produced these folk narratives.","PeriodicalId":47288,"journal":{"name":"Semiotica","volume":"163 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139584227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the ideological, social, economic, and political aspects of life on planet Earth. This study examines the visuals associated with COVID-19 published in Pakistani English newspapers. Visual data were collected through purposive sampling, analyzed using social semiotic theory, and discussed through a post-colonial lens. The visual data were grouped as Global South and North owing to socioeconomic and political categorization among countries. The results show that the Pakistani media portrayed the Global South as rebellious, miserable, and noisy against the government. However, the Global North is depicted as civilized, stress-free, and abiding by all the instructions of the authority. Analysis shows that the two realms are visually represented as remarkably divergent from each other, and media portrayal has attached stereotypes identities to the nations. Pakistani media follows a basic restricted code of conduct, which should be extended to avoid labelling and politicizing groups and nations.
{"title":"Civilized Global North versus rebellious Global South: a socio-semiotic analysis of media visual discourse","authors":"Rahat Bashir, Musarat Yasmin","doi":"10.1515/sem-2023-0081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2023-0081","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the ideological, social, economic, and political aspects of life on planet Earth. This study examines the visuals associated with COVID-19 published in Pakistani English newspapers. Visual data were collected through purposive sampling, analyzed using social semiotic theory, and discussed through a post-colonial lens. The visual data were grouped as Global South and North owing to socioeconomic and political categorization among countries. The results show that the Pakistani media portrayed the Global South as rebellious, miserable, and noisy against the government. However, the Global North is depicted as civilized, stress-free, and abiding by all the instructions of the authority. Analysis shows that the two realms are visually represented as remarkably divergent from each other, and media portrayal has attached stereotypes identities to the nations. Pakistani media follows a basic restricted code of conduct, which should be extended to avoid labelling and politicizing groups and nations.","PeriodicalId":47288,"journal":{"name":"Semiotica","volume":"37 6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139556308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Few other social technologies and institutions are more consequential to human societies than money. Yet money remains a deeply perplexing phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a pan-human system of valuation, but on the other, it is conventional and variable in its uses. While it is controversial if money instantiates a fully-fledged sign system, it is rife with semiotic capacities. To present an illuminating analysis of money is thus a test case for the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) of meaning making, with roots in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Using MSM, we analyze two origin accounts of money: the commodity money account evidenced in archaic and classical Greek coinage, and the credit money account exemplified by early findings in Mesopotamia. Both accounts focus on the interactions between the three levels of MSM: the pre-signitive Embodied, the cultural Sedimented, and the interactional Situated levels of meaning and propose different series of “loops” to account for the genesis of money. Despite key differences in the two origins, both imply semiotic processes operating according to motivated, and hence non-arbitrary, conventions developing within institutional formations that ultimately influence present day concepts of money.
{"title":"Origins of money: a Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) analysis","authors":"Todd Oakley, Jordan Zlatev","doi":"10.1515/sem-2023-0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2023-0031","url":null,"abstract":"Few other social technologies and institutions are more consequential to human societies than money. Yet money remains a deeply perplexing phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a pan-human system of valuation, but on the other, it is conventional and variable in its uses. While it is controversial if money instantiates a fully-fledged sign system, it is rife with semiotic capacities. To present an illuminating analysis of money is thus a test case for the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) of meaning making, with roots in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Using MSM, we analyze two origin accounts of money: the commodity money account evidenced in archaic and classical Greek coinage, and the credit money account exemplified by early findings in Mesopotamia. Both accounts focus on the interactions between the three levels of MSM: the pre-signitive Embodied, the cultural Sedimented, and the interactional Situated levels of meaning and propose different series of “loops” to account for the genesis of money. Despite key differences in the two origins, both imply semiotic processes operating according to motivated, and hence non-arbitrary, conventions developing within institutional formations that ultimately influence present day concepts of money.","PeriodicalId":47288,"journal":{"name":"Semiotica","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139556412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Grotesque imagery is widely used by all genres and movements of art and literature without exception, but its historical development and theoretical aspects have not been sufficiently studied. This study seeks to define and diagnose the main aspects of the development of the grotesque as a literary problem. The leading methods of researching this problem are methods of analysis, deduction, induction, and comparison of approaches. The research covers the approaches to the study of the grotesque phenomenon; the interpretation of this trope is provided, its origin is described, in whose works it is widely used; the forms of grotesque and its specific features are described; various theoretical concepts of the question are demonstrated; the codes of grotesque poetics and their levels of display in the artistic system of works are identified; the qualities and features of Poe’s literary activity are diagnosed, and the components of the grotesque aesthetics are defined. The material in this study is of practical and theoretical value to students and literary scholars who study literature and its artistic features.
{"title":"The grotesque as a literary issue","authors":"Gulmariya Ospanova, Altynai Askarova, Balzhan Agabekova, Assel Zhutayeva, Saule Askarova","doi":"10.1515/sem-2022-0090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2022-0090","url":null,"abstract":"Grotesque imagery is widely used by all genres and movements of art and literature without exception, but its historical development and theoretical aspects have not been sufficiently studied. This study seeks to define and diagnose the main aspects of the development of the grotesque as a literary problem. The leading methods of researching this problem are methods of analysis, deduction, induction, and comparison of approaches. The research covers the approaches to the study of the grotesque phenomenon; the interpretation of this trope is provided, its origin is described, in whose works it is widely used; the forms of grotesque and its specific features are described; various theoretical concepts of the question are demonstrated; the codes of grotesque poetics and their levels of display in the artistic system of works are identified; the qualities and features of Poe’s literary activity are diagnosed, and the components of the grotesque aesthetics are defined. The material in this study is of practical and theoretical value to students and literary scholars who study literature and its artistic features.","PeriodicalId":47288,"journal":{"name":"Semiotica","volume":"161 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139556413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While participation in social media has become everyday practice among young people, there have been few studies examining how youth as social media users are represented in the media discourse. Focusing on the promotional materials of an award-winning and widely-viewed documentary film, The Social Dilemma, this paper examines the media depictions of youth that attract the public’s attention. Through a social semiotic analysis, we analyzed the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings in the poster and trailer to identify how young people have been represented in the media discourse. Our findings show that they are constructed as vulnerable social media users who are manipulated by social media companies. We argue that such depictions of youth not only negate their sense of agency but also ignore their active engagement in the participatory culture afforded by social media. The implications of such depictions propagate a protectionist perspective of youth. This can undermine efforts towards the development of an empowerment approach in digital literacy education.
{"title":"Representing youth as vulnerable social media users: a social semiotic analysis of the promotional materials from The Social Dilemma","authors":"Wei Jhen Liang, Fei Victor Lim","doi":"10.1515/sem-2023-0047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2023-0047","url":null,"abstract":"While participation in social media has become everyday practice among young people, there have been few studies examining how youth as social media users are represented in the media discourse. Focusing on the promotional materials of an award-winning and widely-viewed documentary film, <jats:italic>The Social Dilemma</jats:italic>, this paper examines the media depictions of youth that attract the public’s attention. Through a social semiotic analysis, we analyzed the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings in the poster and trailer to identify how young people have been represented in the media discourse. Our findings show that they are constructed as vulnerable social media users who are manipulated by social media companies. We argue that such depictions of youth not only negate their sense of agency but also ignore their active engagement in the participatory culture afforded by social media. The implications of such depictions propagate a protectionist perspective of youth. This can undermine efforts towards the development of an empowerment approach in digital literacy education.","PeriodicalId":47288,"journal":{"name":"Semiotica","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139515683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article is a qualitative study charting the dimensional range of a particular type of translative phenomenon, namely, intralingual translation within educational practice. Theoretically, the article is based on a broadened concept of translation that encompasses any kind of sign translation, including the transcending of a language-internal comprehension barrier, such as the one between scientific and lay linguistic registers. Further, the article assumes that such intralingual translation is conceptually identical with the interpretive procedures found in didactic practice, given that the central aim of (much) pedagogy is to make sense of new and unfamiliar knowledge – typically embedded in abstract, scientific concepts – to learners. The article also draws on the Bakhtinian concept of “dialogized heteroglossia,” i.e., the view that different language varieties may be fused into, and brought into dialogue with each other within, one and the same text. Empirically, the article investigates intralingual translation in didactic practice through analyses of textbooks and one classroom lecture in five different academic disciplines, spanning both the natural and social sciences and the humanities. The analyses identify a handful of different translational strategies, some of which are shared across several disciplines, and others of which are unique to a single discipline only.
{"title":"Intralingual translation in didactic practice: five case studies","authors":"Aage Hill-Madsen","doi":"10.1515/sem-2022-0097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2022-0097","url":null,"abstract":"This article is a qualitative study charting the dimensional range of a particular type of translative phenomenon, namely, <jats:italic>intralingual translation</jats:italic> within educational practice. Theoretically, the article is based on a broadened concept of translation that encompasses any kind of sign translation, including the transcending of a language-internal comprehension barrier, such as the one between scientific and lay linguistic registers. Further, the article assumes that such intralingual translation is conceptually identical with the interpretive procedures found in didactic practice, given that the central aim of (much) pedagogy is to make sense of new and unfamiliar knowledge – typically embedded in abstract, scientific concepts – to learners. The article also draws on the Bakhtinian concept of “dialogized heteroglossia,” i.e., the view that different language varieties may be fused into, and brought into dialogue with each other within, one and the same text. Empirically, the article investigates intralingual translation in didactic practice through analyses of textbooks and one classroom lecture in five different academic disciplines, spanning both the natural and social sciences and the humanities. The analyses identify a handful of different translational <jats:italic>strategies</jats:italic>, some of which are shared across several disciplines, and others of which are unique to a single discipline only.","PeriodicalId":47288,"journal":{"name":"Semiotica","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139515608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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