Reading experience is viewed as ‘interactive and negotiable’ for different reading positions are created in readers’ responses to the same news report. To understand the differences between ‘preferred reading’ and actual readings, this article, drawing on the context models and the Appraisal framework, analyzes 785 readers’ comments attached to 23 hard news stories sourced from the China Daily mobile application and the People’s Daily Online website. The study combines corpus semantic tagging analysis for readers’ choices of evaluative lexis with a (...) manual analysis of Appraisal resources for reading position construction based on a whole text perspective. The results show that readers are likely to use Appraisal resources strategically to defend their own opinions against other commenters or affiliate with large numbers of potential readers without commenting. Furthermore, comments were found to be directed either at the text or at other commenters, and through this a number of different reading positions were revealed. The readers’ context models are the cognitive link between discourse properties and social strategies in the process of news understanding. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of the cognitive role of diagrammatic movements in the theater. Based on the recognition of a theatrical work’s inherent ability to provide new insights concerning reality, the article concentrates on the way by which actors’ movements on stage create spatial diagrams that can provide new insights into the spectators’ world. The suggested model of theater’s epistemology results from a combination of Charles S. Peirce’s doctrine of diagrammatic reasoning and David Lewis’s theoretical account of the truth (...) value of counterfactual conditionals. I argue that in several theatrical works – in particular those whose central image is dominated by movements – the relation of what Lewis names “comparative overall similarity” between the fictional and the actual world is based on diagrammatic homology. The cognitive process involved in deciphering them is, hence, based on diagrammatic reasoning. The main emphasis of the analysis is on the previously unnoticed but important cognitive role of observation in the theater: the idea that observation takes an active role in the reasoning process that enables the spectators to form new knowledge about their actual world. Samuel Beckett’s plays Quad and Come and Go serve here as case studies. (shrink)

Semiotics applied to translation studies produces an original approach that is generating scientific texts of high interest. On the other side, the notion of “translation” in a broad sense appears very important within semiotics itself, as in Ch. Peirce’s and J. Lotman’s thought. Distinguishing between translation studies’ influences on semiotics and semiotics’ influence on translation studies becomes increasingly difficult. In this article a synthesis is tried: the Soviet film ‘Strogij Yunosha’ is analyzed using the tools of both disciplines. At first (...) the concept of “strange” is analyzed from a semiotic point of view, looking also for etymological reasons to classify strangeness as simple difference or as inimicality. Then cultural implicit is considered as the problem of mediation between Self and Other, both in a collective and in an individual (psychological) sense. The ways of relating to the Other are then considered in the light of a systemic approach to the cultural polysystem, in which the least unit or subsystem is the individual. The film is then decomposed in many “worlds”, and their borders and relations are viewed in the light of the aforementioned approaches. Such translatological analysis of the film allows to hypothesize why it was banned from the Soviet regime. (shrink)

This article analyses the relationship of human faces with trauma and death, in particular focalizing on the use of snap shot and ID kinds of photos in site of memory, memorials an public art.

The emergence of the term ‘Plebanski’ as a topic trend in the scientific literature is studied as a significant communication event resulting from its use by authors to refer to the relevant aspects of Jerzy Plebanski scientific work in the area of mathematical physics. We searched the ‘Plebanski’ topic included in the titles, abstracts and key words of the papers registered in five databases: ADS/NASA, MathSciNet, SCOPUS, SPIRES and Web of Science. Our results clearly show the evolution of the JP’s (...) scientific work from a cited reference to a recognized term in the indexes of the published literature, then to a nodal concept in the scientific communication process and finally as an eponym in the Latin American scholar literature. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 551-565.

In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco essentially presents an educative vision of some basic semiotic principles that infuse the textual form of a popular fictional genre—the detective story. In effect, it characterizes the postmodernization of the traditional “whodunnit” moving the genre from the realm of “the real” or the plausible into the realm of “the metaphysical” or the unthinkable. The Name of the Rose is a practical application in semiotics. Or, how the aesthetics of textual production as generated (...) through the lexical signs and codes manifest the discursive text of a novel work. The semiotic twists and turns of the detective story facilitate this educational function and the purposeful transformation of the reader into an individual capable of appreciating and grasping the conflicting ideological viewpoints expressed through its dialogical structure. The detective genre enables the Umberto Eco to produce an educational narrative via the intricacies of plot in the detective story while teaching main aspects of semiotic theory. (shrink)

The article offers a review and analysis of the discussion on the principle of universalizability at its initial stage. The author determines the theoretical roots and key points of the discussion and reveals the directions of controversy and the position of researchers. In particular, the problem field depends on the divergence of the ethical and logical aspects of the principle of universalizability. As a result, two areas of discussion are formed: 1) the search for an ethical interpretation of the principle (...) of universalizability, 2) an analysis of the principle of universalizability in its relation to the ethical idea of the action. The author proposes the semantic models of the principle of universalizability designed to turn it into a substantive moral principle. These models are based on ideas: a) impartiality, b) justice, c) equality. The models of harmonization of universal normativity and moral experience, law and action are designed to protect the idea of universalizability from accusations of formalism and dogmatism. The grounds and vulnerabilities of the proposed semantic models of the principle of universalizability are examined and the possibility of harmonizing law and action is analyzed. The understanding of universalizability in analytic philosophy is metaphysical. Within the limits of the metaphysical understanding of universality, the problem of harmonizing the universal law and the idea of individuality cannot be solved. A possible way of solving the problem is an appeal to such a concept of universality in which the idea of universality can be reconciled with the idea of the individual freedom. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has repeatedly been described as an “essentially contested concept,” which means that its signification is subject to continuous struggle. We argue that the “CSR institution” (CSRI; i.e., the set of standards and rules regulating corporate conduct under the banner of CSR) is legitimized by narratives which “decontest” the underlying concept of CSR in a manner that safeguards the CSRI from calls for alternative institutional arrangements. Examining several such narratives from a structuralist perspective, we find them to (...) be permeated with six recurrent ambiguities that we show to be reflective of three deep-set taboos: the taboo of the noncongruency between corporate profit objectives and societal needs, the taboo of multinational firms’ continued contribution to the emergence of global socioenvironmental issues, and the taboo of the CSRI’s moderate results in solving these problems. We contend that the perpetuation of these taboos contributes to inhibiting substantial change in the way of doing business, and we sketch out possibilities for initiating a “recontestation” of CSR’s meaning. (shrink)

This paper provides a sketch of a fresh conception of the “metaphysics” of culture and a sense of its conceptual power and advantages, based on a post-Darwinian account of the artifactual, hybrid nature of a person, chiefly in terms of (what I treat as terms of art) Bildung (“external” and “internal”), Sittlichkeit (both descriptive and normative), and interpretation (diversely manifested in different sectors of inquiry). I consider the (“metaphysical”) relationship between membership in the species Homo sapiens sapiens and functioning as (...) a person the generic distinction of human cultures (enlanguaged cultures), which I call Intentionality (that is, whatever is culturally significant or significative); and the bearing of the thesis on familiar philosophical quarrels and theory of the sciences. (shrink)

Roman writing of the late Republic and early Empire, especially historiography, is filled with exempla, stories of the past meant to serve as models for contemporary and future behavior. This period also witnessed the rise of an encyclopedic mode of composition among Latin authors, which purported to collect and organize the totality of knowledge in a given field. The following essay proposes that exemplarity and encyclopedism were not just literary devices, but deep organizational principles throughout Roman culture. It seeks to (...) show how they were operative in the visual arts in the first century BCE, focusing especially on a frieze depicting the baking process on the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces in Rome. By approaching a monument like the frieze of Eurysaces through such principles we may better articulate both visual and thematic relationships across a variety of genres within the broader Roman image world. (shrink)

In Australia as is the case elsewhere, ethics is a developing aspect of business behaviour. Many educational institutions and business enterprises have a strong interest in the subject, particularly from the practical viewpoint of creating an ethical culture in business that has substantial practical effects. In this paper, the codes of ethics of five large enterprises are examined. They were selected as being typical of a collection of corporate codes used in Australia held by the Ethics Research Group at the (...) University of Technology, Sydney. Two codes were from international companies: a chemical manufacturing company and a health, beauty and medical manufacturer. The other codes were from an Australian bank, an Australian federal government business agency, and an Australian mining company.Corporate codes of ethics rarely contain operational definitions to direct their addressees on situations of moral hazard and the required response, to achieve a particular desired ethical corporate culture. Consequently, addressees constitute the locus of ethical decision making in enterprises. By contrast, the language used in the corporate codes examined construct an authoritarian position in the writer/reader relationship from the overuse of grammatical structures such as relational clauses, the passive, nominalisation, grammatical metaphor and modality. Collectively, these structures communicate a strong sense of obligation and even powerlessness since a strong authoritarian tone is established which does not give the addressees the possibility of discretionary decision making. (shrink)

This article is about weaponisation of emotions through visual culture. It interrogates how geopolitics trickles down to everyday life and becomes personal through the embodiment of screen actors....

The article reviews Italian semiotician and philosopher Umberto Eco’s vision of semiotics as a discipline, the aim of which is to study the ‘whole of culture’. It focuses especially on Eco’s trajectory out of structuralism and on the development of a cognitive semantics based on strong pragmatist principles, that inform his notion of interpretability as the key process of semiosis and on the encyclopedia as the format more apt to describe the cultural space. After a consideration of the interface between (...) the cognitive, the pragmatic and the cultural dimensions of semiosis, the article highlights a few open problems in contemporary, culturally-oriented sociological theory that could benefit from a deeper engagement with these concepts. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores specific forms that neoliberal discourse and culture in academia today take in the field of Israeli Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The article applies various textual and contextual interrogation strategies to the language, narratives and the unsaid in interviews with leading scholars in the field, in order to construe what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘political unconscious,’ particularly that arising from the use of market as a conceptual metaphor. Contextualising this field of discourse within neoliberal academia, I deconstruct (...) the work ‘demand’ and ‘interest’ do, and highlight the dialectical dynamics of experts’ dependence on audience. I argue that, in this field, the economic discourse shelters Zionist logics, presuppositions and praxis, such as recruitment logics and fundraising practices that effectively address Jewish and Zionist students and donors. (shrink)

The article aims at showing how far the technologies of audiovisual registration affect not only the ontology of images but also our sense of realism in politics and history. As argue Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, historical events have become “tele-events” after the birth of these technologies. Our handling with images has changed accordingly. As argues Pietro Montani, we no longer consider them as “copies” of real objects but rather as “occasions” for initiating processes of “validation” of history. Hannah Arendt’s (...) opposition between the ancient concept of history being based on praxis and the modern concept of history as “fabrication” (poiesis) of the humankind must be therefore reconsidered. History is rather the negotiation between these two attitudes (praxis and poiesis): cinema might be one of the exemplary sources of this negotiation, as epitomized by the documentary work in the audiovisual archives conducted by Esfir Shub (1927) and Harun Farocki (1992). Representation (Louis Martin) becomes thus a dynamical power of imagination dealing with historical and political reality; consequently, the “ideal spectator”, just as the “ideal reader” for novels (Umberto Eco), is charged with a new task of actualizing the sense of images with regard to their historical and political references. (shrink)

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the significance and meanings of faces within monuments and memorials. The presence of faces in monuments and memorials transcends cultures and spans throughout history. Faces serve as vital components of public statues, conveying the emotions of depicted characters and establishing communicative connections with observers. Moreover, they are employed within memorials to commemorate the deceased. Memorial museums frequently feature corridors adorned with portraits of those who perished in wars, terrorist attacks or natural disasters. The (...) aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to develop a theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of faces in monuments and memorials, drawing upon the cultural semiotics of Juri Lotman as well as theories proposed by Algirdas J. Greimas and Umberto Eco. Secondly, to construct a typology that elucidates the various ways faces are utilized within monuments, memorials, and commemorative practices. A historical roadmap of the facial presence in monuments and memorials is then presented. By achieving these aims, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the meanings of faces within monuments and memorials in particular and memory politics in general. (shrink)