journal article
LitStream Collection
Home
doi: 10.1515/sem-2017-0121pmid: N/A
AbstractWhat does it mean to spatialize food? Why combine such an analysis with law, or with signs and spaces? Leveraging Peircean-inspired legal semiotic theory, the spatialized nature of food will serve as a porthole through which a semiotic view of the spatial dimensions of legal experience can be discerned and elaborated. Specifically, case studies of the simultaneously material and immaterial aspects of food will support an analysis that seeks to open avenues of conceptualization regarding categories. The semiotic nature of both food and law will drive a discussion of the “dis-composition” of categories. Though such an effort may appear overly scholarly and far from pragmatic, exactly the opposite claim will be made. Case studies such as that of the “Meatball Wars” will illustrate in plain terms how subject position struggles for space cannot be adequately addressed within traditional disciplinary boundaries. The essay will conclude with a demonstration of how a “discomposing” semiotic approach has the potential to serve as a means of enabling conflict resolution on a broader scale. The overall investigation is motivated by the struggle within academia – seen across the humanities – to rethink traditional foundational assumptions and dichotomies. The argument seeks to ground itself in the interconnectedness increasingly advanced, joining scholars who insist on the importance of anthro-historical context, local particulars, and the impossibility of assuming an objective position that can coolly observe phenomena from “outside.”
doi: 10.1515/sem-2016-0027pmid: N/A
AbstractMo Yan’s multi-layered and allegorical tales were highly inspired by William Faulkner. Mo Yan’s semi-fictional Gaomi Northeast Township was often linked to William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha, and he himself was extolled by the Chinese scholars to be “China’s Faulkner.” Inside China, there have emerged a great number of comparative studies on Faulkner and Mo Yan, which are usually conducted from the perspectives of literary forms, native-soil complex, attitudes towards tradition, the influence of local culture, and so on. However, despite the strong record of research on these two writers in China, there is still room for improvement in the study, for after the initial stage of the superficial and sporadic comparison between individual works, the comparative study of Faulkner and Mo Yanis in pressing need of comprehensive and systematic research of these criticisms.
Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M.; Pun, Jack
doi: 10.1515/sem-2016-0045pmid: N/A
AbstractIn this paper, we focus on contexts where the primary activity is to expound knowledge about general classes of phenomena, either by categorizing and characterizing them or by explaining them based on some theory, ranging from a commonsense folk theory to an uncommonsense scientific theory. Texts produced in such contexts include science lectures, research articles, and entries in encyclopedias. We focus on explanations, considering them across strata in terms of context, semantics, and lexicogrammar, and summarizing contributions from different research strands. Against this background, we report on a study of the registers used in secondary school chemistry textbooks in Hong Kong. We begin by summarizing a framework for classifying the contexts in which texts operate – a framework designed to allow us to differentiate different kinds of text according to the contexts they operate in. Then, we focus on one type of context – that of expounding knowledge about general classes of phenomena. Next, we identify different strategies of expounding knowledge, contrasting explanations and categorizations, and then discuss explanations in more detail. Finally, we move to the question of how these contextual types are realized semantically as texts organized as rhetorical complexes, drawing on secondary school textbooks in chemistry in particular.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2016-0137pmid: N/A
AbstractThis paper introduces and defends a way to translate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations from a semiotic standpoint. This turn builds on Semiosic Translation (Torres-Martínez 2015, Semiosic translation: A new theoretical framework for the implementation of pedagogically-oriented subtitling. Sign Systems Studies 43(1). 102–130), a framework that advances the interaction of sign systems as a necessary point of departure in the translation process. From this vantage, the key term “Bild,” is analyzed, explained and retranslated into English. This term evinces high levels of complexity and variability that cannot be captured by traditional linguistic translations. In applying a semiotic approach, any iteration of Bild is characterized as reflecting the author’s intentions at a given moment (PI: 108). This semiotic reading seeks to provide semioticians, translators, and philosophers with new conceptual tools leading to an understanding of translation as a systemic operation not confined to the realm of subjective interpretation.
McGuire, Laura; Beattie, Geoffrey
doi: 10.1515/sem-2017-0138pmid: N/A
AbstractOne major assumption in the climate change debate is that because respondents report positive attitudes to the environment and to low carbon lifestyles they will subsequently engage in environmentally friendly/low carbon behaviors when given the right guidance or information. Many governmental agencies have based their climate change strategy on this basic assumption, despite some anxiety about the value-action gap in psychology more generally. Here we test this assumption. We investigated the relationship between explicit and implicit attitudes to carbon footprint, and both self-reports of environmental behavior and low carbon behavioral choices. We found that self-reported attitudes to carbon footprint were significantly associated only with self-reported environmental and self-reported low-carbon behaviors. They were not significantly associated with the choice of low carbon alternatives in a simulated shopping task. Given that the vast majority of studies on attitudes and behavior in the environmental domain use self-report measures of behavior, this may mean that we are generating research findings that could be making policy makers overly complacent about our readiness for actual behavior change. Implicit attitudes were not significantly associated with either measure in terms of group comparisons, but those with a strong positive implicit attitude towards low carbon did choose more low carbon items, but only under time pressure. The opposite trend was found for explicit attitudes – this increased only when participants were not under time pressure. These results suggest that Kahneman’s hypothesis about contrasting systems of human cognition might be highly relevant to the domain of climate change and behavioral adaptation.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2016-0116pmid: N/A
AbstractThis paper uses Wmatrix to generate semantic tagging to compare corpora of media representations between the American Dream and the Chinese Dream. The USAS tagger is used to assign the semantic field tags to the America Dream Corpus (ADC) and the Chinese Dream Corpus (CDC). The motivation of this study is to replicate the studies using an automated and inclusive method based on semantic tagging (Potts, A. & P. Baker. 2012. Does semantic tagging identify cultural change in British and American English? International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17(3). 295–324), and more importantly, to conduct a broad semantic categorization on both national dreams so as to uncover the cultural, social and historical similarities and/or differences. It is found that the cultural difference of the individualistic home and work association of the American Dream versus the collectivistic nation and world attributions of the Chinese Dream. The different historical stage and social-economic contexts are disclosed from the different temporal positions from time category, and the contrastive tags associated with negative representation of the American Dream and positive representation of the Chinese Dream.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2017-0137pmid: N/A
AbstractThis paper offers a re-reading of the works of Umberto Eco, be they academic, journalistic or literary, with a pseudologic tone: his desire to investigate the mechanisms of lying, and their relation with fiction, falsification, error, secrecy, and conspiracy. The study will review some of his main academic texts in the fields of semiotics, rhetoric, and aesthetics, and will make some references to his recent novels and essay compilations, as well as offer an explanation of how the evolution of his thoughts takes a pessimistic turn. The face of the lie, which initially was aesthetic consolation and consumerist delusion, and then a game of intelligence, a creative stimulus and an interpretive challenge, changes when serves the purpose of extortion, manipulation, and war. In short, it could be argued that Eco became increasingly disappointed by deceptions, and lost faith in fakes and forgeries.
doi: 10.1515/sem-2016-0107pmid: N/A
AbstractThis paper analyses the immunological response of breast cancer patients through the lens of medical semiotics. From this perspective both psychological and physiological symptoms are treated as a set of transitive signs. The symptomatic journey of breast cancer patients was documented through an ethnographic engagement with a breast cancer charity. This journey consists of diagnosis, treatment and remission, where both the physical and psychological trauma maybe irreversible. Equally the genetic disposition of each patient and the variability of the treatment give rise to a plethora of possible immunological responses. The case study organization provided both therapeutic treatment but also sold oncology products to its patients, matching the products’ composition to the specific immunological responses caused by breast cancer treatment, e.g., brittle skins or hair loss, etc. This paper explores how the varied and transient nature of immunological semiosis is identified and commoditized into an economic process. This challenging social context is of interest from a semiotic stand point because it offers a singular paradigm to explain the evolution of signs and symptoms into sales.
Showing 1 to 10 of 19 Articles