Published since September 10, 2007

Cognitive Semiotics

ISSN: 2235-2066

Editor-in-chief: Peer F. Bundgaard

About this journal

Cognitive Semiotics is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal devoted to high-quality research, integrating perspectives, methods and insight from cognitive science, cognitive linguistics and semiotics, placing meaning-making into the broader context of cognitive, social, and neurobiological processes. The journal is a platform for the study of meaning-making writ large: in our interactions with the surroundings in all domains, in the natural as well as in the social world, in language and other sign vehicles, as well as in perception, and in action.

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Volume 15 Issue 1

May 2022

Publicly Available July 15, 2022

Frontmatter

Page range: i-ii

Download PDF

Editorial

July 15, 2022

Editor’s Introduction

Peer F. Bundgaard

Page range: 1-1

Article

July 15, 2022

Memorial speech delivered by Line Brandt, Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, France, 18 November, 2021

Line Brandt

Page range: 3-7

Obituary

July 15, 2022

From the blue waters of the Baltic and Kattegat to the Red Sands of Burgundy. Per Aage Brandt (April 26, 1944 – November 10, 2021)

Jean Petitot

Page range: 9-20

Articles

July 15, 2022

The semiotic scoubidou – a short intellectual biography of Per Aage Brandt

Peer F. Bundgaard

Page range: 21-28

Abstract

This text is a short intellectual biography written in memory of Per Aage Brandt (1944–2021). I present some of the main tenets of his scientific endeavor, artistic practice, and scholarly entrepreneurship.

July 15, 2022

Pronouns, metonymy, and identity

Eve Sweetser

Page range: 29-46

Abstract

Although formal linguists have focused on the deictic and (co)referential functions of pronouns, social categorization and identity are deeply involved in pronominal usage. I argue here that even the understanding of pronoun reference requires us to go beyond extensional (co)-reference. The extensive literature on linguistic categorization has focused on nouns more than on verbs, as has work on metonymy – but not on pronouns. Here I present two case studies, one of third-person pronouns and one of first-plural pronouns. In one I argue that cognitive science findings on categorization make it impossible for a masculine noun/pronoun usage to be truly “generic” in gender reference. The other examines the ways in which identity and group structure shape the possibilities for plural pronoun reference, in particular with respect to first-person plural ( we ) uses. To understand the principles of reference for these pronouns, we need to apply theoretical frameworks developed for lexical meaning: frames, category structure, prototypes, categorial metonymy and frame metonymy.

Open Access July 15, 2022

Who’s talking? Cognitive semiotics in the (new media) wild

Anders Hougaard, Todd Oakley, Seana Coulson

Page range: 47-73

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Abstract

An axiom of Per Aage Brandt’s approach to conceptual blending, known colloquially as the “Aarhus model”, is that semiosis only makes sense when grounded in communicative interaction. Here we adopt that approach in relation to the reality of current, daily communication which is increasingly mediated by digital audio-visual technology platforms. We pursue this goal via a small set of case studies that explore how this technology changes and challenges social interaction and how participants exploit and adapt cognitive, embodied, technological, and semiotic resources in creating meaningful, collective, virtual spaces of joint social activity. In so doing, we expand the horizon of inquiry and contribute insights that have relevance for the new media ecology. This application of cognitive semiotic analyses of video meetings confronts the nature of “mediation” and its accomplishment, the status of “virtual spaces”, and “social presence.”

July 15, 2022

Tom Thomson’s Islands, Canoe Lake, 1916: a rock as the head of a bear

John M. Kennedy

Page range: 75-92

Abstract

Tom Thomson is a doyen of Canadian art. Here, I argue one of his well-known pictures contains a hidden figure. In Thomson’s Islands, Canoe Lake , 1916, a blue-gray picture primitive richly affords a rock and a bear, a long-overlooked ambiguity, one that Thomson did not tell us he intended. Its picture primitives are contours and patches. They offer a limited set of scene primitives. A likelihood ratio of less than 1 in 100 supports the contention that the bear is a hidden figure.

July 15, 2022

The morphogenesis of religion and religious self-organization (with a focus on polytheism and Christianism)

Wolfgang Wildgen

Page range: 93-112

Abstract

Cognitive semiotics should not only use psychology and neurology as the background of multi-modal sign usage, but it must also take into account the biological, and specifically the evolutionary and developmental aspects of communication with signs, or in Cassirer’s terms, of “symbolic forms”. This article deals with questions of the emergence of religion (in general) and the morphogenesis of specific religious (and mythical) forms. As a theoretical background, it has recourse to René Thom’s “morpho-dynamics” and “semio-physics”. The contours of a catastrophe-theoretical model of morphogenesis of religions and their possible implosion after a phase of hyper-complexity are described with a focus on polytheistic features of Hinduism and its implosion in the Buddhist “revolution”. A section on Christianism describes the early phases of its self-organization (after the death of Jesus) and its stabilization as a state religion. The basic attractors of this morphogenesis are Jesus and (his mother) Mary. Finally, the further unfolding of religion, its semio- and ratio-genesis, are commented on. The morpho-dynamic modeling of religion avoids traditional, cultural and philosophical biases and raises the highly controversial topic of religion to a scientific level, accessible to mathematical treatment and empirical evaluation.

July 15, 2022

Germand Gladensvend and the monster

Henrik Jørgensen

Page range: 113-130

Abstract

The present analysis discusses the narratological structures of the Danish folk ballad on ‘Germand Gladensvend’ (‘Happy Germand’, DgF 33). The text is preserved in six different manuscript versions, all of them written before appr. 1630, and in a printed version from 1591. Although the story is strongly related in all of them, including stanzas that are identical almost word for word, the different versions nevertheless have rather different narratological structures, depending on the strong variation between the conclusions of the different versions. In order to make these differences clear, the analysis uses classical narratological concepts, like movements of objects of value and the semiotic square. The narrative structures in the extant versions of the Danish popular ballad “Germand Gladensvend” (DgF 33).

July 15, 2022

The Band’s The Weight – a semio-cognitive narratological adventure

Ulf Cronquist, Torben Knap

Page range: 131-146

Abstract

After providing information about details of the song’s historical genesis and an exegetic Explication De Texte we proceed to analyze the lyrics as a modernist, surrealist narrative that is not always easy to make clear sense of, yet best can be understood as a classical structure of dramatic complications and possible catharsis with reference to Per Aage Brandt’s work on diegesis and narrative forces and spaces. Brandt’s contributions to cognitive narratology provide an extended framework of force dynamics, catastrophe theory and structuralist psychoanalysis – also with considerations of intentionality and imagination as integral parts of intersubjectively experienced story-worlds. Our empirical object of study departs from the original canonical recording song lyrics produced in 1968 on the album Music from Big Pink , where the many consecutive live performances by The Band and other artists remain quite faithful to the original text. To the best of our knowledge, a thorough scholarly analysis of the lyrics of The Weight has not yet been available until we now present our detailed, philological amplification on the details of this piece of art.

July 15, 2022

Enunciation – some psychosemiotic reflections

Bent Rosenbaum

Page range: 147-159

Abstract

The concept of ‘enunciation’ was developed very early in Per Aage Brandt’s work. Giving Saussure’s semiology a prominent position, Brandt’s enunciation model became the basis for further development of a psychosemiotic model that was used in the analysis of persons in traumatized and psychotic states of mind. This paper describes this development and its claim that the enunciative, spoken words, statements or narrations, in which the enunciation is more or less silently embedded, is anchored or embedded in internal communicative components, which in themselves can be said to be enunciatively structured. These components will be described in detail as well as their characteristics encompassing the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of language.

July 15, 2022

Rhythm in verse

Line Brandt

Page range: 161-173

Abstract

This paper on rhythm is an adaptation of the semiotic research on rhythm in versified language presented as one of the seven types of poetic iconicity in Chapter 5 of The Communicative Mind: A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and Meaning Construction (L. Brandt 2013) entitled “Effects of poetic enunciation: Seven types of iconicity”. Defined by the linebreak, poetic language use engenders distinctive interpretive affordances, some of which manifest themselves as emphatically iconic sign relations contributing to the expressive whole of a text. In “Effects of poetic enunciation”, I explore syntactic, semantic, phonetic, rhythmic and rhetorical aspects of the phenomenon of semiotic iconicity, and its counterpart aniconicity, in language characterized by an intentionally (line)broken syntax and contribute a systematic account of the different types of semiotic iconicity relations, understood as figural or diagrammatic similarity relations – or, conversely, potent dis similarity relations, i.e. aniconicity – between expressive means and semantic content. Rhythmic iconicity is the fifth type of iconicity in this typology.

Volume 15 (2022)

Issue 1 Special Issue: In honor of Per Aage Brandt; Edited by Peer F. Bundgaard

Volume 14 (2021)

Volume 13 (2020)

Volume 12 (2019)

Volume 11 (2018)

Volume 10 (2017)

Volume 9 (2016)

Volume 8 (2015)

Volume 7 (2014)

Volume 4 (2012)

Volume 6 (2010)

Issue s1

Volume 5 (2009)

Cite Score	1.5
SCImago Journal Rank	0.296
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	1.124

Submit

Contributions should be in English.

Manuscripts should be submitted to the Editor-in-Chief Peer Bundgaard at sempb@dac.au.dk.

Manuscripts must be formatted according to the style sheet of the journal (see link below), and should, as a rule, be no longer than 7500 words. An abstract (maximum of 200 words) summarizing the whole article (not just the conclusions) and five keywords should also be supplied. Manuscripts should be reasonably divided into sections, and where necessary, subsections, with numbered headings. All pages of the manuscript should be numbered consecutively.

Tables and figures included in the manuscript should also be submitted in a separate file/files to ensure the best quality for reproduction.

Because manuscripts are evaluated anonymously, they should not bear the author's name or institutional affiliation. Please remove from the manuscript all references or acknowledgements that might indicate the identity of the author.

Review articles should be headed "Review article" and be given an appropriate title that is different from the title of the work(s) under review. The title should be followed by an asterisked footnote, placed at the bottom of the first page of text, containing the bibliographical details of the work(s) under review: *Leonard Talmy, Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

References to the work under review should be cited by page number alone (e.g., "p. 16"). Otherwise, the references should conform to the style for articles.

Line drawings and photographs (called "Figures" in the text) must be reproducible originals and should be submitted on separate sheets, carefully numbered and labeled. Captions should be typed on a separate sheet and placed at the end of the manuscript.

Tables should be numbered consecutively and titled, and must be referred to in the text. Please refrain from using phrases such as "preceding" or "following" table, as the printer may not be able to preserve its original position. Each table should be submitted on a separate sheet; captions should be listed on a separate page.

Notes should be kept to an absolute minimum.

Style. Authors should refer to the De Gruyter Mouton journal style sheet, especially regarding the proper format for citations and reference entries.

Corrections. Authors are asked to check their manuscripts very carefully before submitting them in order to prevent delays at the proof stage. We ask that authors take special care in checking in-text citations against listings in the References section, making sure the dates and spelling match, and that all works cited are listed.

Proofs. Authors will receive PDF page proofs for correction, which must be returned by dates determined by the publication schedule.

Offprints. Upon publication, authors will receive electronic offprints (in PDF format) of their contribution. Guest editors of special issues will receive complimentary print copies of the issue.

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Before submitting your article please have a look at our Publication Ethics Statement and our copyright agreement
Once your article is accepted you have the option to publish it open access.
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Editorial

Editor-in-Chief

Peer F. Bundgaard
Aarhus University
Center for Semiotics
Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7
8000 Aarhus
Denmark
Email: sempb@dac.au.dk

Associate Editors

Merlin Donald (Queen's University, Canada)
Bruno Galantucci (Yeshiva University, USA)
Todd Oakley (Case Western Reserve University, USA)
Göran Sonesson (Lund University, Sweden)

Editorial Board

Per Aage Brandt (Case Western Reserve University, USA)
Seana Coulson (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Terrence W. Deacon (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis, USA)
Jean Petitot (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France)
Frederik Stjernfelt (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Eve Sweetser (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Leonard Talmy (University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA)
Evan Thompson (University of Toronto, Canada)
Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve University, USA)
Patrizia Violi (University of Bologna, Italy)
Jordan Zlatev (Lund University, Sweden)

Advisory Board

Liliana Albertazzi (University of Trento, Italy)
Chiara Ambrosio (University College London, UK)
Juana Isabel Marin-Arrese (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
Bernard Baars (The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, CA, USA)
Alexander Bergs (University of Osnabrück, Germany)
Luis Emilio Bruni (Aalborg University, Denmark)
Roberto Casati (Jean Nicod Institute, Paris, France)
Roberto Flores (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico)
Rick Grush (University of California, San Diego, USA)
David Herman (Ohio State University, USA)
Barend van Heusden (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Mark Johnson (University of Oregon, USA)
Kalevi Kull (University of Tartu, Estonia)
Jean Lassègue (CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France)
Ronald Langacker (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Michael Leyton (Rutgers University, USA)
Dominic McIver Lopes (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Raymond A. Mar (York University, Canada)
Irene Mittelberg (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Frederic Nef (Jean Nicod Institute, Paris, France)
Douglas Niño (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Colombia)
Martina Plümacher (Technische Universität, Berlin, Germany)
Roberto Poli (University of Trento, Italy)
Andreas Roepstorff (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Chris Sinha (University of Portsmouth, UK)
Jesper Sørensen (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Mónica Tamariz (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Reuven Tsur (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
Kristian Tylén (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Mikkel Wallentin (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Wolfgang Wildgen (University of Bremen, Germany)

(Deutsch)

Online ISSN: 2235-2066
Type: Journal
Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
First published: September 10, 2007
Publication Frequency: 2 Issues per Year
Keywords: semiotics; cognitive science; philosophy of mind; psychology; anthropology; aesthetics