The role played by the artist and the nature of art are two of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy. Indeed, if we were to trace the history of aesthetics, it seems evident that the role of the artist and the effects of art have been called into question as history crosses over into another age. My concern in this study has to do with the function of art and the artist throughout Western history, which is not so much an emancipatory movement as it is a crisis of transcendence. Likewise, the secular intellectual dogmatism that, in our age, treats literary texts as open documents of linguistics analysis without consideration for the author’s intention is less a democratic endeavor than it is a crisis of religious belief.
{"title":"From Transcendence to Kitsch: Have We Lost Faith?","authors":"Alberto Castelli","doi":"10.1086/726198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726198","url":null,"abstract":"The role played by the artist and the nature of art are two of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy. Indeed, if we were to trace the history of aesthetics, it seems evident that the role of the artist and the effects of art have been called into question as history crosses over into another age. My concern in this study has to do with the function of art and the artist throughout Western history, which is not so much an emancipatory movement as it is a crisis of transcendence. Likewise, the secular intellectual dogmatism that, in our age, treats literary texts as open documents of linguistics analysis without consideration for the author’s intention is less a democratic endeavor than it is a crisis of religious belief.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139345053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the southern Dutch province of North Brabant, local dialect use is declining sharply. Dialect leveling and loss lead to convergence to standard Dutch, and simultaneously to divergence that is reflected in increasing variation, that is, hyperdialectisms. This can be clearly observed in morphosyntactic features such as the adnominal masculine gender suffix -e(n). The current study investigates the sociolinguistic enregisterment of this suffix in 336 multimodal “tiles” with Brabantish aphorisms and jokes on Instagram. Based on digital and interview data, it shows how linguistic structure, situated use, and metalinguistic awareness (i.e., Silverstein’s total linguistic fact) are constantly interrelated. It is argued that the gender suffix acquires indexical social meaning at the expense of grammatical function, as its (hyperdialectal) use becomes associated with and recognizable for a place-based identity (“Brabantishness”). This research offers insights into how this meaning-making process is enhanced by co-occurring linguistic and nonlinguistic resources in mediated “languagecultural” practices.
{"title":"Enregistering Grammatical Gender: Indexing Brabantishness through Languagecultural Practices in Digital Tiles","authors":"Kristel Doreleijers","doi":"10.1086/726196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726196","url":null,"abstract":"In the southern Dutch province of North Brabant, local dialect use is declining sharply. Dialect leveling and loss lead to convergence to standard Dutch, and simultaneously to divergence that is reflected in increasing variation, that is, hyperdialectisms. This can be clearly observed in morphosyntactic features such as the adnominal masculine gender suffix -e(n). The current study investigates the sociolinguistic enregisterment of this suffix in 336 multimodal “tiles” with Brabantish aphorisms and jokes on Instagram. Based on digital and interview data, it shows how linguistic structure, situated use, and metalinguistic awareness (i.e., Silverstein’s total linguistic fact) are constantly interrelated. It is argued that the gender suffix acquires indexical social meaning at the expense of grammatical function, as its (hyperdialectal) use becomes associated with and recognizable for a place-based identity (“Brabantishness”). This research offers insights into how this meaning-making process is enhanced by co-occurring linguistic and nonlinguistic resources in mediated “languagecultural” practices.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139345143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study focuses on a series—Of Beautiful Arms—by Israeli artist Zohar Tal Inbar. The paintings were created a few years after the artist’s son was released from the army, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It includes figurative paintings, most of them focusing on the body of a young man—a soldier. The methodology combines visual analysis of the paintings with interviews with the artist. Findings have shown that the series embodies double estrangement—thematic and stylistic. The artist has used intertextuality to portray soldier images borrowed from Greek and Roman mythology and from Christianity. In terms of style, the paintings portray realistic figures against abstract backgrounds that distance them from Israeli reality while leaving them recognizable as Israeli soldiers. Using double estrangement allowed the artist to express a feminist counterposition—that of a woman refusing to passively accept the role of an uncritically supportive soldier’s mother. In addition, she has explored the soldier’s fragility by pointing to PTSD, a common phenomenon among military personnel, which in Israeli discourse still suffers a disfranchised status.
本研究侧重于以色列艺术家 Zohar Tal Inbar 的系列作品--《美丽的手臂》。这些画作是在艺术家的儿子被诊断出患有创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）并从部队退伍几年后创作的。作品包括具象绘画，其中大部分以一名年轻男子--士兵的身体为主题。研究方法结合了对画作的视觉分析和对艺术家的访谈。研究结果表明，该系列作品体现了主题和风格上的双重疏离。艺术家利用互文性描绘了借鉴自希腊和罗马神话以及基督教的士兵形象。在风格上，这些画作以抽象的背景描绘了现实中的人物，使他们与以色列的现实拉开了距离，同时又能让人认出他们是以色列士兵。利用双重疏离的手法，艺术家表达了一种女权主义的反立场--一位女性拒绝被动地接受不加批判地支持士兵的母亲的角色。此外，她还通过指出创伤后应激障碍来探讨士兵的脆弱性，这是军人中的一种普遍现象，在以色列的言论中，这种现象仍然处于被剥夺权利的地位。
{"title":"An Unheard Voice: The Paintings of Zohar Tal Inbar, a Mother Looking at Her Soldier Son","authors":"Shahar Marnin-Distelfeld","doi":"10.1086/726199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726199","url":null,"abstract":"This study focuses on a series—Of Beautiful Arms—by Israeli artist Zohar Tal Inbar. The paintings were created a few years after the artist’s son was released from the army, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It includes figurative paintings, most of them focusing on the body of a young man—a soldier. The methodology combines visual analysis of the paintings with interviews with the artist. Findings have shown that the series embodies double estrangement—thematic and stylistic. The artist has used intertextuality to portray soldier images borrowed from Greek and Roman mythology and from Christianity. In terms of style, the paintings portray realistic figures against abstract backgrounds that distance them from Israeli reality while leaving them recognizable as Israeli soldiers. Using double estrangement allowed the artist to express a feminist counterposition—that of a woman refusing to passively accept the role of an uncritically supportive soldier’s mother. In addition, she has explored the soldier’s fragility by pointing to PTSD, a common phenomenon among military personnel, which in Israeli discourse still suffers a disfranchised status.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139345627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Turkey, tea is a near-universally consumed beverage that also operates as a salient moral and political sign in social life. This article describes how tea functions as a “medium of value” in the country, circulating as both a physical commodity and a multivalent sign vehicle that is closely linked in popular imagination to modern modes of egalitarian sociability and the formation of Turkey’s postwar multiparty democracy. In describing the semiotic ideologies that inform tea’s uptake as a sign and its place in Turkey’s modern public culture, the article also traces the historical-material processes that have made tea into both a symbolic model of communal solidarity and a salient sign of national difference—a contested semiotic medium of representation that informs popular discourses on public virtue and democratic politics and that is prominently mobilized in divergent public making projects in contemporary Turkey and North (“Turkish”) Kurdistan.
{"title":"Signs of Solidarity and Difference: Kaçak Tea, Samimiyet, and the National Public in Turkey","authors":"Patrick Charles Lewis","doi":"10.1086/726975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726975","url":null,"abstract":"In Turkey, tea is a near-universally consumed beverage that also operates as a salient moral and political sign in social life. This article describes how tea functions as a “medium of value” in the country, circulating as both a physical commodity and a multivalent sign vehicle that is closely linked in popular imagination to modern modes of egalitarian sociability and the formation of Turkey’s postwar multiparty democracy. In describing the semiotic ideologies that inform tea’s uptake as a sign and its place in Turkey’s modern public culture, the article also traces the historical-material processes that have made tea into both a symbolic model of communal solidarity and a salient sign of national difference—a contested semiotic medium of representation that informs popular discourses on public virtue and democratic politics and that is prominently mobilized in divergent public making projects in contemporary Turkey and North (“Turkish”) Kurdistan.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139345457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Among linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists interested in multimodal communication, much attention has been paid to the motor activity of the hands. Psychologists have treated the hands as a window onto the mind and as a facilitator of thought. Linguists have treated the hands as articulators of linguistic signs, and linguistic anthropologists have treated the hands as an integral part of broader, interacting semiotic processes. This essay builds on these approaches by attending to DeafBlind observations about the communicative potential of the hands. Hands are what you touch when you meet someone, and their texture, temperature, and movements remain available to you over the course of an interaction. From the hands' qualities, the rest of the person and their environment can be inferred. From this perspective, the hands appear not only as a window onto the mind, as a facilitator of thought, or as an articulator of signs, but also as a kind of appendage to the self—like cilia, left out in the world to register the dynamics of social life. This suggests new methodological possibilities for analyzing the motoric activity of hands as a sociocultural and biosemiotic problem.
{"title":"The Hands as Reflex Republic","authors":"Terra Edwards","doi":"10.1086/724180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724180","url":null,"abstract":"Among linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists interested in multimodal communication, much attention has been paid to the motor activity of the hands. Psychologists have treated the hands as a window onto the mind and as a facilitator of thought. Linguists have treated the hands as articulators of linguistic signs, and linguistic anthropologists have treated the hands as an integral part of broader, interacting semiotic processes. This essay builds on these approaches by attending to DeafBlind observations about the communicative potential of the hands. Hands are what you touch when you meet someone, and their texture, temperature, and movements remain available to you over the course of an interaction. From the hands' qualities, the rest of the person and their environment can be inferred. From this perspective, the hands appear not only as a window onto the mind, as a facilitator of thought, or as an articulator of signs, but also as a kind of appendage to the self—like cilia, left out in the world to register the dynamics of social life. This suggests new methodological possibilities for analyzing the motoric activity of hands as a sociocultural and biosemiotic problem.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47530665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Luxembourg is characterized by a personal language policy in which Luxembourgish, French, German, and German Sign Language are recognized and enregistered as national (Luxembourgish) and administrative languages. Pivotal in such a policy development was the enregisterment of a Luxembourgish voice throughout the nineteenth century as either a bilingual French/German voice (subsuming Luxembourgish under German) or as a gallicized German voice through conflicting ideologies of personhood and nationhood. Through an analysis of policy, media, and linguistics texts from 1830 to 1896, I argue that cross-event linkages between these texts allow for the identification of two distinct ethnometapragmatics. These typify a Luxembourgish voice and enregister the Luxembourgish language as a highly disputed emblem of nationhood. These ethnometapragmatics were speech events that solidified into pathways that characterized nineteenth-century Luxembourg until 1896, when Caspar Mathias Spoo gave a speech in Parliament whose effects slightly shifted these two pathways by redefining the high/low register division through an ideology of democratization.
{"title":"The Enregisterment of Luxembourgish Standards in the Nineteenth Century","authors":"Gabriel Rivera Cosme","doi":"10.1086/724086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724086","url":null,"abstract":"Luxembourg is characterized by a personal language policy in which Luxembourgish, French, German, and German Sign Language are recognized and enregistered as national (Luxembourgish) and administrative languages. Pivotal in such a policy development was the enregisterment of a Luxembourgish voice throughout the nineteenth century as either a bilingual French/German voice (subsuming Luxembourgish under German) or as a gallicized German voice through conflicting ideologies of personhood and nationhood. Through an analysis of policy, media, and linguistics texts from 1830 to 1896, I argue that cross-event linkages between these texts allow for the identification of two distinct ethnometapragmatics. These typify a Luxembourgish voice and enregister the Luxembourgish language as a highly disputed emblem of nationhood. These ethnometapragmatics were speech events that solidified into pathways that characterized nineteenth-century Luxembourg until 1896, when Caspar Mathias Spoo gave a speech in Parliament whose effects slightly shifted these two pathways by redefining the high/low register division through an ideology of democratization.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45827305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyses an environmentalist activity known as forest therapy in a suburb of Tokyo and formulates qualia as a rhematic textual process semiotically calibrating an encounter with forests in such a way that its effects seem raw, natural, or “unmediated.” In particular, it ethnographically demonstrates how a distinctive cooccurrence style of Japanese language use, involving ideophones and euphonic forms with various diminutive effects during forest therapy interactions, becomes a perceivable object of the senses qua discursive form, whose effects—which are not natural but naturalizing—further equips participants in forest therapy sessions to apperceive and discursively specify the attributes of other perceivable things, now taken to be “immediate” sensuous truths, through a process whose effects Peirce captions as qualia, or facts of firstness. The article further reveals that such a naturalized—and thus therapeutic—encounter with forests is figurated through various rhematic, text-metrical patterns that rely on specific discursive resources, which cumulatively diagram agents’ affective attunements to a nonhuman forest world, while enacting transspecies engagement with animals and “fictionalizing” the (lost) animistic linkage in the Anthropocene with “wildness” through their bodies as phatic nexus.
{"title":"How Forests of Qualia Emerge","authors":"Y. Asai","doi":"10.1086/724190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724190","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses an environmentalist activity known as forest therapy in a suburb of Tokyo and formulates qualia as a rhematic textual process semiotically calibrating an encounter with forests in such a way that its effects seem raw, natural, or “unmediated.” In particular, it ethnographically demonstrates how a distinctive cooccurrence style of Japanese language use, involving ideophones and euphonic forms with various diminutive effects during forest therapy interactions, becomes a perceivable object of the senses qua discursive form, whose effects—which are not natural but naturalizing—further equips participants in forest therapy sessions to apperceive and discursively specify the attributes of other perceivable things, now taken to be “immediate” sensuous truths, through a process whose effects Peirce captions as qualia, or facts of firstness. The article further reveals that such a naturalized—and thus therapeutic—encounter with forests is figurated through various rhematic, text-metrical patterns that rely on specific discursive resources, which cumulatively diagram agents’ affective attunements to a nonhuman forest world, while enacting transspecies engagement with animals and “fictionalizing” the (lost) animistic linkage in the Anthropocene with “wildness” through their bodies as phatic nexus.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49020955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article focuses on the nexus between political discourse and contemporary concerns about the arbitration of truth to argue that Trump’s way of using speech about speech (i.e., his metapragmatic discourse) resembles the manipulation tactic commonly called gaslighting. Based on examples drawn from 2020 (i.e., White House press conferences and electoral presidential debates), I explore Trump’s metapragmatic gaslighting both as an epistemic tactic for the manipulation of information and as an effective style of political self-presentation. By analyzing specific instances of Trump’s metapragmatic commentaries that blatantly contradict shared pragmatic principles for the interpretation of utterances’ illocutionary force and denotational content, I show how Trump is able to present himself as a champion of semantic and moral candor and simultaneously promote a highly personalist view of the meaning-making process. In so doing, I also propose a metapragmatic approach to the epistemological and political predicaments posed by the “post-truth” epistemic regime.
{"title":"On Metapragmatic Gaslighting: Truth and Trump’s Epistemic Tactics in a Plague Year","authors":"Aurora Donzelli","doi":"10.1086/724084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724084","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the nexus between political discourse and contemporary concerns about the arbitration of truth to argue that Trump’s way of using speech about speech (i.e., his metapragmatic discourse) resembles the manipulation tactic commonly called gaslighting. Based on examples drawn from 2020 (i.e., White House press conferences and electoral presidential debates), I explore Trump’s metapragmatic gaslighting both as an epistemic tactic for the manipulation of information and as an effective style of political self-presentation. By analyzing specific instances of Trump’s metapragmatic commentaries that blatantly contradict shared pragmatic principles for the interpretation of utterances’ illocutionary force and denotational content, I show how Trump is able to present himself as a champion of semantic and moral candor and simultaneously promote a highly personalist view of the meaning-making process. In so doing, I also propose a metapragmatic approach to the epistemological and political predicaments posed by the “post-truth” epistemic regime.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48159217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article presents a digital ethnographic study of amateur entrepreneurs who sell cosmetic samples primarily in an online marketplace in Hong Kong to illustrate how they use language to to create added value in their unconventional beauty product niche. It examines how these people cross over to an authoritative and professional brand persona by reappropriating product description of the original products to introduce their own beauty sample products to a wide audience, forming interdiscursive links between the original brand and their own business. These linguistic and semiotic resources afforded by the online platforms help create extra value in the normally not-so-expensive cosmetic sample products being (re)sold by ordinary, unauthorized people. The marketing decision and invested labor of these amateur entrepreneurs display their neoliberal selfhoods, illustrating the precarious nature of their online business. This study offers unique insight into current research about the authenticity and commodification of language.
{"title":"Language and Neoliberalism in the Online Cosmetic Sample Business","authors":"Gloria Yan Dou","doi":"10.1086/724087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724087","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents a digital ethnographic study of amateur entrepreneurs who sell cosmetic samples primarily in an online marketplace in Hong Kong to illustrate how they use language to to create added value in their unconventional beauty product niche. It examines how these people cross over to an authoritative and professional brand persona by reappropriating product description of the original products to introduce their own beauty sample products to a wide audience, forming interdiscursive links between the original brand and their own business. These linguistic and semiotic resources afforded by the online platforms help create extra value in the normally not-so-expensive cosmetic sample products being (re)sold by ordinary, unauthorized people. The marketing decision and invested labor of these amateur entrepreneurs display their neoliberal selfhoods, illustrating the precarious nature of their online business. This study offers unique insight into current research about the authenticity and commodification of language.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46940789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：