Published by De Gruyter Mouton

Volume 2012 Issue 191 - Vers une sémiotique du medium : Outil, objet, pratique Meaning in motion: Interaction in cars

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Journal Overview

Publicly Available September 6, 2012

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Page range: i-viii

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September 6, 2012

Vers une sémiotique du médium : Outil, objet, pratique En guise d'introduction

Eleni Mitropoulou,

Page range: 1-4

September 6, 2012

La photographie du témoin : Où la proximité rencontre la vérité

Anne Beyaert-Geslin,

Page range: 5-16

Abstract

Résumé L'article désigne un nouveau genre de photographie de presse, prise par le témoin à la suite des attentats, et décrit ce genre par opposition à la photographie du reporter, en se fondant sur ses récurrences textuelles. En mettant en relation la scène prédicative de l'événement et la textualité, il montre que la définition épistémologique de cette photographie est aussi épistémique : la photo du témoin est considérée comme “plus vraie” que celle du professionnel.

September 6, 2012

La sémiotique face à la médiation du discours religieux

Maria Giulia Dondero,

Page range: 17-34

Abstract

Résumé Ce travail s'interroge sur la relation intermédiale entre peinture et photographie, et plus précisément sur la transformation des pratiques de réception liées au passage de certaines iconographies religieuses d'un médium à l'autre. Il décrit les effets de sens que les textes picturaux et photographiques engendrent lorsqu'ils sont censés représenter non seulement l'invisible, mais aussi la transcendance. Si la peinture religieuse a toujours été légitimée à représenter Jésus-Christ, les saints et les visions de l'au-delà, la photographie artistique a subi des “contraintes interprétatives” attribuées par la doxa à sa genèse à empreinte qui l'ont relégué à ne pouvoir représenter que l'“ici-et-maintenant.” Notre travail démontre que même un médium lié à la représentation de ce qui est “ici visible” peut signifier l'au-delà du visible. La photographie dévotionnelle, engendrant des pratiques productives, interprétatives et communicationnelles tout à fait différentes de la photographie artistique, met en scène une autre conception du médium photographique, qui le met en communication étroite avec la syntaxe figurative de l'icône, ou même avec le saint suaire de Turin — image pas faite par la main humaine (acheiropoïètes) et qui devient support d'une révélation sans médiation. On porte aussi notre attention sur la relation entre dispositif médiatique, syntaxe figurative et pratiques interprétatives des textes.

September 6, 2012

Le support comme limite et les limites du support

Odile Le Guern,

Page range: 35-48

Abstract

Résumé Le présent texte se propose de revenir sur le rôle du support comme limite de l'image, en tant qu'objet d'une part et fait de représentation d'autre part, sur l'autonomie qu'il lui donne par rapport à l'espace qui la reçoit (hors-cadre spectatoriel) et par rapport à la présentation de son contenu comme fiction Mais elle se propose également de l'envisager dans sa relation avec une autre forme de limite, le cadre, et en relation avec le fond comme deuxième zone d'inscription de la figuration. Nous espérons souligner ainsi toute l'ambiguïté du support, qui peut devenir à son tour fait de représentation (montrer) et signe de son énonciation (dire), ce que nous tenterons de montrer, en fin de parcours, sur quelques œuvres d'Yves Klein.

September 6, 2012

Le net communautaire : Quand la relation fait sens

Cyril Masselot,

Page range: 49-73

Abstract

Résumé À l'heure où le Web 3.0 se construit, l'articulation du Web 2.0 avec le Web 1.0 pose de nombreuses questions d'ordre communicationnel et sémiologique. Le sens des discours que forment ces sites et portails d'un nouveau genre, dits de “réseaux sociaux,” résulte d'une conception de la communication où l'information sert à justifier la mise en relation entre divers individus. L'information y est vécue et conçue comme un outil d'organisation des clés de mise en relation, de cooptation par similarité ou ressemblance. Le succès de portails comme “Copains d'avant” ou “Facebook” se joue essentiellement sur la capacité à mettre en relation des individus entre eux. L'usage de l'information reste marginale, instrumentalisée à ces fins relationnelles, dans un objet aux finalités économiques. Ce que l'internaute consomme alors ne relève pas du fait purement informationnel, où une partie du sens global se produit, mais plus particulièrement du fait relationnel. C'est la force de la relation, où les acteurs de la réception font partie du processus de création de l'information, d'une part, et de la mise en relation, de l'autre. Il s'agira ici d'explorer comment cette dynamique construit des pratiques sociales repositionnant les outils comme objets sémiologiques et communicationnels.

September 6, 2012

Une sémiotique du medium pour explorer le communicationnel

Eleni Mitropoulou,

Page range: 75-100

Abstract

Cet article tente une approche sémiotique du medium de la communication depuis l'angle d'une narrativité du processus de communication et en fonction des trois modes de focalisation : – D'abord, le medium de la communication en position de focalisation 0 ; c'est le medium-actant, manipulateur du faire savoir et du faire croire des pratiques médiatiques. Ensuite, le medium de la communication en position de focalisation interne ; c'est le medium introducteur (ou non) d'une rupture communicationnelle dans la scène des pratiques médiatiques. Enfin, le medium de la communication en position de focalisation externe ; c'est le medium selon le point de vue de l'expérience médiatique que lui-même engage.

September 6, 2012

Meaning in motion: Sharing the car, sharing the drive

Pentti Haddington,, Maurice Nevile,, Tiina Keisanen,

Page range: 101-116

September 6, 2012

What it means to change lanes: Actions, emotions and wayfinding in the family car

Eric Laurier,, Barry Brown,, Lorimer Hayden,

Page range: 117-135

Abstract

In this paper we investigate how the sequential organization and settlement of disagreements comes to shape, and be shaped by, navigation. Using extracts of in-car interaction, we examine the gestalt of projectable aspects of road travel, car movements, and driver-navigator talk. Navigation when accomplished without maps relies on making sense of streets, landmarks, and signs, activities that are displayed through passengers and drivers giving directions to each other, alongside embodied references to passing roadside features and the movement of the vehicle. More broadly, “finding the way” is bound up with the social relationships between passengers — in particular families caring for one another and showing their epistemic and emotional stance on particular matters. To examine this we draw on existing conversation analytic work on epistemics, stance, and emotion to explore the potentially argumentative character of direction-giving and direction-receiving and how this comes to be combined with the task at hand.

September 6, 2012

Movement in action: Initiating social navigation in cars

Pentti Haddington,

Page range: 137-167

Abstract

This paper studies how participants start social navigation in cars. It draws on audiovideo recordings of social interaction inside cars and on a methodology that studies situated multimodal social actions as they sequentially unfold in interaction. The paper studies what kinds of actions initiate or are treated as making navigation relevant, and how and when an initiating action is produced. The analysis shows that the design of the initiating action is indicative of the participants' situated understandings in a particular semiotic context of whether some driving action is required in the more distant future or right now. The analysis suggests that routes are not always planned before, nor do navigational plans always work. Navigation is also a social and collaborative activity that emerges from the requirements of the driving situation and in which co-participants display their understandings of the situation in a reflexive relationship with the semiotic environment and the events in it.

September 6, 2012

Interaction as distraction in driving: A body of evidence

Maurice Nevile,

Page range: 169-196

Abstract

This paper examines social interaction as a source of distraction in driving. It uses naturally occurring data, an in-car video recording of driver and passengers during an ordinary real-life journey. The paper shows in close detail how moment-to-moment the embodied and locally occasioned participation in interaction can impact specific activities for driving such as looking and orienting forwards to the road ahead and maintaining hand contact with the steering wheel. Distraction is evidenced as configurations of the body, especially for gaze direction, postural orientation, and hand movement, which serve interaction and do not contribute to driving. The paper examines what interaction as distraction actually looks like in practice, in the rich and meaningful details of drivers' and passengers' complex and temporally unfolding joint experience of real-life real-time car journeys. It explores generally the semiotic resources by which drivers make sense of and organize the demands of interaction and driving as simultaneous and competing activities. These resources include language and the sequentiality of interaction, the position and movement of the body in space, the particular material features and constraints of the car (i.e., seating arrangements, the rear-view mirror), and objects brought into the car such as a mobile phone.

September 6, 2012

“Uh-oh, we were going there”: Environmentally occasioned noticings of trouble in in-car interaction

Tiina Keisanen,

Page range: 197-222

Abstract

This paper examines environmentally occasioned noticings in social interaction in cars, between the driver and the passenger(s), as they occur as part of the overall mobile driving activity. Two types of noticings are discussed. The first type consists of noticings which do not have a direct connection to the driving activity, and typically concern the scenery or the other traffic. Such observations can justifiably be done either by the driver or the passenger(s). Noticings in the second group are used to indicate that the current so-far unproblematic course of the drive is observably compromised and that it possibly requires adjustment in some manner. Such noticings are typically done by the driver. It is argued that the driver's noticings that make salient some trouble are used as displays of accountability and for assuming responsibility for one's actions. Such noticings are further shown to involve a set of recurrent turn constructional features, which contribute to the emergence of a conversational format for carrying out noticings of journey-related trouble in in-car interaction. The analyses are based on examining video recordings of the drivers' and passengers' social accomplishment of noticings and the ensuing sequences of interaction.

September 6, 2012

Talking and driving: Multiactivity in the car

Lorenza Mondada,

Page range: 223-256

Abstract

Car conversations constitute a perspicuous setting, characterized by multiactivity (i.e., by an engagement in multiple simultaneous activities, as talking and driving). Based on a corpus of videorecordings of various naturally occurring car journeys, the paper focuses on the way in which participants coordinate their multiactivity in either convergent or divergent ways. It shows how they mobilize various embodied multimodal resources, such as talk, gesture, gaze, head movements, and body postures in order to display their current engagement in one or more activities, in a way highly sensitive to the sequential organization of talk.

September 6, 2012

Car talk: Integrating texts, bodies, and changing landscapes

Marjorie Harness Goodwin,, Charles Goodwin,

Page range: 257-286

Abstract

Making use of videotaped recordings of interaction in cars filmed as middle class families pursue their daily activities, we examine some of the ways in which talk while driving includes as parts of its intrinsic organization ongoing attention to phenomena beyond the stream of speech. Important consideration is given to issues posed by the task of driving while talking about a seeable field in either the unfolding landscape or a textual artifact within the car itself. Of particular interest to our analysis is how such phenomena are attended to, collaboratively recognized, and incorporated into the ongoing organization of talk. This process involves making use of a range of resources including deictics, perceptual directives, address terms, pointings (C. Goodwin 2003), etc., to locate for others these phenomena, as well as forms of stance display that inform how the speaker aligns towards the event. Through their gaze direction, questions, and displays of understandings recipients can display their response to a noticing or reporting.

September 6, 2012

The eyes have it: Technologies of automobility in sign language

Elizabeth Keating,, Gene Mirus,

Page range: 287-308

Abstract

Cars present an unusual environment for human interaction and communication. For deaf people using sign language, a visual language, the car is far from ideal for establishing and maintaining conversation. This is due to the visual pre-occupation of the driver with watching the road, manual preoccupation with maneuvering the car, and the layout of seats for passengers. This article describes and analyzes particular conversational interactions of signers to show how deaf signers innovatively and creatively manage to adapt their signing in the car for effective signed interaction. Signers manipulate particular aspects of the car environment, including mirrors and seats, they use the body in particular ways to accommodate to visual perception boundaries, and they shift distribution of meaning to both manual signs and to aspects of the immediate physical environment. They also distribute the work of attending to actions both within and outside the vehicle. Signers thus both adapt language to the context and adapt the context to language, showing important ways that technologies and mobility impact language practices.

September 6, 2012

Inhabiting the family-car: Children-passengers and parents-drivers on the school run

Chaim Noy,

Page range: 309-333

Abstract

Inspired by recent advances in the field of automobility, this article explores how families inhabit cars, and how daily automobilized family routines are accomplished interactionally in and through cars' uniquely structured inner space(s). Following Urry's (2006) notion of the “socially inhabited car,” the article assumes sociological and ethnomethodological sensibilities and sensitivities in researching in-car interactions. Specifically, a single strip of a familial dispute that takes place in the car on a routine trip to school is studied. The audiovisual data was taken from recordings of five urban families living in Jerusalem, Israel, during daily trips to school. A camcorder was supplied to the passengers — children of elementary school age — which served as a mobile recording device that captured the car's interior spaces and the interactions therein. Studying up-close verbal and gestural interactions reveals how family members, including driver (in the front seat) and passengers (in both the front and back seats), make use of the unique material design of the car's inner spaces as semiotic resources for communication and for affiliating and disaffiliating with the overall argumentative interaction. The article illuminates how an immediate physical context, in the shape of the car's interior, acts simultaneously as a material given and as a socially emergent or accomplished semiotic environment.

About this journal

Open Access

As part of De Gruyter‘s Subscribe to Open program, we plan to transform Semiotica to Gold Open Access in 2024. For details on S2O, please see here.

Objective
Semiotica is published in six annual issues, in two languages (English and French). From time to time, Special Issues, devoted to topics of particular interest, are assembled by Guest Editors. The publishers of Semiotica offer an annual prize, the Mouton d'Or, to the author of the best article each year. The article is selected by an independent international jury.

Topics
We welcome papers reporting results of research in all branches of semiotic studies.

Article formats
Research articles, in-depth reviews, guest editorials, reports

Mouton D’Or Winner 2022

"Semiotricité et corps en jeu", Parlebas, Pierre, 248, 9-35.

The judges commented: "The Committee members made this decision based on many appreciations. First, the article contains a concise theory on semiotics of movement, synthesizing decades of research of the author. It opens an exciting framework for the contribution of many other authors. The theoretical grounds of semiotircity are built on the most classical semiotic approaches and represent a genuine development. Second, the article refreshes semiotics methodology in very original way, by engaging the applied semiotics for furtive and instantaneous activities analysis. Third, the article is pretty clear and well structured, written in very comprehensible French. The theoretical frame it opens is thorough and far reaching. Fourth, the semiotic theory of movement comes in a very special moment when the whole world is football, but it covers also many other areas of applicability which reflect major trends such as the general gamification of life thanks to new media and digital technologies. It is crucial for semiotic theory to open its theoretic scope towards significant cultural trends and become more attractive for young researchers."

Les membres du comité ont pris leur décision en fondant leur appréciation sur quatre éléments principaux. Premier élément : l'article, en peu de mots, en prenant appui sur des décennies de recherche de la part de l'auteur, déploie de manière précise les termes d'une sémiotique du mouvement. Les fondements théoriques de la sémiotricité sont construits sur des approches sémiotiques bien établies et représentent un véritable développement dans le domaine. En cela, le texte ouvre un cadre passionnant pour les contributions de nombreux autres chercheurs. Deuxièmement, l'article renouvelle la sémiotique appliquée de manière très originale, l'engageant dans une approche efficace des actions instantanées et furtives; la méthodologie sémiotique en général en tire donc aussi profit. Troisième point, en plus d'être profond, avec un cadre théorique d'ampleur et de grande portée, l'article est particulièrement bien structuré et écrit dans un français très compréhensible, ce qui est un véritable gain pour sa diffusion. Enfin, quatrièmement, s'il est indéniable que le texte pourrait bénéficier d'une visibilité complémentaire due à la ferveur liée au contexte récent de la coupe du monde de football au Qatar, il couvre surtout de nombreux autres domaines d'applicabilité qui reflètent des tendances majeures telles que la gamification générale de la vie, portée par les nouveaux médias et les technologies numériques. L'on y voit une belle opportunité pour la théorie sémiotique d'ouvrir son champ à la faveur de tendances culturelles significatives; ceci est une garantie pour continuer à attirer de nouvelles générations de chercheurs.