Impact Factor: 0.475

Published since January 1, 1969

Semiotica

Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique

ISSN: 1613-3692

Editors-in-chief: Stephanie Walsh Matthews, Massimo Leone, Jamin R. Pelkey

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About this journal

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.

Your Benefits

Your benefits:

inclusive scope focusing on all branches of semiotic studies
multidisciplinary approach to semiotics
comprehensive overview of current literature in semiotics
prestigious publication of the International Association for Semiotic Studies
international and renowned editorial board
bilingual publication: English and French

History

Semiotica was founded in 1969.

Other publications in the field
Journals:
Chinese Semiotic Studies
Cognitive Semiotics

Language and Semiotic Studies

Book series:
Semiotics, Communication and Cognition [SCC]

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Supplementary Materials

Topics

External Links

Volume 2023 Issue 250

March 2023

Publicly Available February 13, 2023

Frontmatter

Page range: i-xii

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Research Articles

January 23, 2023

A pragmatic view of the poetic function of language

Alessandro Capone

Page range: 1-25

Abstract

In this paper, I try to expatiate on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson and Waugh. I try to bring in the consideration that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved by taking into account the context of previous analyses of a poetic text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression; the poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions.

January 24, 2023

“Little music” or “rough music”?: Ishion Hutchinson, modernist poet

John Hopkins

Page range: 27-41

Abstract

In this essay I will suggest that part of what makes the young Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson so remarkable is the fact that much of his work – in this age of “anything goes” post-postmodernism – is clearly modernist poetry, in both structure and effect. This structure will be that explained in my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of poetry, which deals with modernist work. I will suggest that one of the distinctive features of the latter is that a modern poetic text is distinguished by two underlying “matricial” propositions, each of which generates a set of variant images having the same underlying semantic structure. This paradigmatic method of signifying is unique to poetry. Each matrix is reassembled by the reader from a comparison of the images of each set. The matrices are linked syntagmatically in a variety of relations such as negation or difference of scale. This bimatricial relation (subject-sign) has an intertextual counterpart (object-sign) of similar structure but different lexicon. The interpretant of these two complex signs has a sociolectic counterpart of similar lexicon but different structure. The semantic contrast thus established produces innovation, which is the other distinctive feature of modern poetry. It turns out that much of Hutchinson’s innovative work is structured in this way.

January 16, 2023

How binding and bonding communicate interpersonal meanings in a children’s museum to address Jordan’s energy and water challenges

Ahmad El-Sharif

Page range: 43-66

Abstract

Museums’ structures, spaces, and exhibits are understood as semiotic resources that make spatial texts that communicate a discourse defined by the authorities of the museum or its curators. The current study follows a social-semiotic approach in analyzing the spatial discourse of the Children’s Museum in Amman. It demonstrates that interpersonal meanings are semiotically communicated to children visitors in the Museum by firstly establishing a “comfort-zone” and secondly by aligning children visitors into groups with shared qualities, attitudes, and dispositions of affiliation and solidarity, and thirdly by providing abstract and material representations of the real world that encompasses participants, processes, events, and places. These interpersonal meanings produce a pedagogical discourse that semiotically addresses Jordan’s energy and water challenges, and that can “charge” the Museum’s role as a “Bonding Icon” that stands for shared communal ideals that Jordanians might identify with, or rally around.

January 16, 2023

Autocommunication in crib speech and private speech

Lauri Linask

Page range: 67-90

Abstract

Autocommunication, communication with oneself, may become distinct from communication with an “other” both in form and function. Autocommunication has a special role in the development of thinking in small children, as differentiation of speech for oneself, known as “private speech,” from communication for social purposes entails the child’s organization of her or his own cognition and behavior with the aid of symbols. Recent studies have suggested that speech distinctly for the child him or herself is particularly observable during what is called “crib speech” and thus it appears to support already early language acquisition. The purpose and functions of crib speech in child development have been topics of interest until recently, but they are still debated. In autocommunication, instead of transfer of signs from one mind to another as when in communication with an “other,” there is transfer of signs from one state of mind to another, as in the case of recalling something with the help of signs. Next to this mnemonic type autocommunication, Juri Lotman was interested in the type in which textual devices within a text guide the communicative interpretation in relation to the text itself, particularly characteristic to poetry. The paper provides a semiotic analysis of crib speech in terms of Lotman’s concept of autocommunication explaining its particular appearance both in form and content, as well as what initiates and inspires it for the small child and why does it bring such joy. From the point of view of semiotics, crib speech presents as an exceptionally rich phenomenon. In addition to being small children’s language practice, crib speech appears as language play, if not poetry, serving as a modelling system for enacting and representing the world as it appears for the small child.

January 27, 2023

From action to performative gesture: the Slapping movement used by children at the age of four to six

Silva H. Ladewig, Lena Hotze

Page range: 91-116

Abstract

This paper introduces a manual movement performed recurrently by German children in the age range of four to six. Based on the movement gestalt and its meaning, we termed it the Slapping movement. All forms identified in the data were performed with a communicative function, yet they showed different degrees of “gesturality.” To be more precise, we observed versions that clearly count as actions or gestures, but we also observed transitional forms between them. Based on a thorough analyses of form, meaning, and context we determined variations of the Slapping gesture that showed different degrees of abstraction from action to gesture in a semiotic sense. These degrees are distinguished by modifications in the execution of the movement and different levels of form stability, environmental coupling, and representational complexity.

January 20, 2023

An important chapter in the history of semiotics: inference from signs in Philodemus’ De signis

Giovanni Manetti

Page range: 117-148

Abstract

Philodemus’ De signis is one of the classical texts of greatest semiotic interest. It reports the debate which arose between the Epicureans and an opposing school, usually identified as the Stoics, concerning semiotic inference. The Epicureans proposed to construct semiotic inferences based on generalizations resting on similarity, ultimately configuring their method as a form of induction. Their opponents attacked the Epicurean proposal in a twofold way: on the one hand, they argued that the Epicureans’ method intrinsically lacked cogency, invalidating their inferences from a logical point of view. On the other, they criticized the notion of similarity, arguing that it is generally a vague notion, and in some cases impossible to implement, as when one is faced with unique cases. The debate is very complex and is divided into replies and rejoinders. The ultimate impression one gets is that the Epicureans were able, for the first time in antiquity, to propose a real method to construct semiotic inferences, even though the latter were subject to fallibility, while their opponents did not propose a method, but a test, “elimination,” able only to check the logical soundness of semiotic inferences. In doing so, they placed themselves in a tradition extending back to the theory of signs formulated – albeit in a significantly different way – by Aristotle.

Open Access January 11, 2023

Meaning and the evolution of signification and objectivity

Mark Pharoah

Page range: 149-166

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Abstract

The coevolution of objectivity and subjectivity and the nature of both their division and connection are central to this paper. Section 2 addresses the nature of meaning from the subjective perspective. Initially, I examine the meaningful engagement that exists between the unicellular organism and its environment. In this respect, I focus on the ontological importance of the qualitative biochemical assimilation of the physical rather than on the evolution of form and function. In Section 3, I broaden the discussion to include multicellular organisms and introduce the idea that meaning, at various levels, qualifies different objective and informational constructs of the world. These determine the character of interactive engagement and reveal much about the way in which an agent signifies the external. In Section 4, I review Darwinian evolution from the position of the existential self. I emphasize that meaning is that which qualifies the human concept of objectivity, rather than that objectivity is that which will help humankind qualify or understand meaning. Ultimately, this outlook challenges scientific disciplines that have tended to obscure the relevance of meaning and sought, instead, to explain it from an epistemological footing. In its overall scope, I try to establish the view that the subjective and objective domains are more nuanced, layered, and intertwined ontologically than the default stance that presents a binary juxtaposition between the two.

January 13, 2023

Shielding the learned body: a semiotic analysis of school badges in New South Wales, Australia

Colin Symes

Page range: 167-190

Abstract

School badges, though an integral part of education’s “aesthetic order,” of its signage and apparel, have not been the subjects of much of analysis. In addressing this oversight, the following paper examines the badges of New South Wales government schools and argues that like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, they draw on heraldic models and are constructs of colors, names, motifs, and mottoes that in various ways have local cogency and significance. For example, many badges draw on Australia’s flora and fauna or refer to aspects of its colonial history and thereby induct pupils into the nation’s identity. Some schools, under the pressure to be more business-oriented, have turned their back on the traditional badge in favor of logos and slogans that, arguably, are more commensurate with their times.

January 25, 2023

The primordiality of representation

Steven Bonta

Page range: 191-233

Abstract

The ontological implications of the Peircean Categories, as set forth most clearly in Peirce’s summative architectonic statement, “New Elements,” and referenced elsewhere in Peirce’s body of writings, are examined with reference to the existent or physical universe. The Peircean universal ontological Categories Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are shown to give rise to a cosmos that is triadic and representational in essence. This immanently representational cosmos, denominated the “Book Universe,” is shown to be evidenced by the representational contours of both the mathematical and of the conceptual framing of the three broad domains of theoretical physics, the quantum, classical, and relativistic domains. This triadic “Book Universe” model is both characterized and also contrasted with the “Block Universe” model, and is seen to incorporate both time and space as emergent representational characteristics, and to be manifest, qua triadic Representamen, in terms of a “foliated eternalism” that requires both antecedent and parallel cosmoi.

January 26, 2023

The existential signs through the works of Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye

Ayse Ece Onur, Erdal Aygenc

Page range: 235-250

Abstract

This article is about the signs during the creative stage of one’s self-development. With the acceptance of the creative act as an existential phenomenon, the research considers the creative process as a genuine expression that has been actualized during one’s search for his/her existence. An artist reflects his/her existential being through his/her work to construct an original self, by facing the world and within the struggle to construct the new self that stands beyond confusion. Tarasti’s philosophical approach to “existential semiotics” will be applied to the existential being of the artist Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye, and her creative act will be analyzed by means of the modalities, the semiotic square of being/doing, and the sign processes evident in the field of art. Siesbye’s existential personality and creative acts have been discussed by looking at what she has done in terms of her attitude on clay; her position in the contemporary art world and her artistic interrogations has been discussed in the existential being of the artist with the existential signs.

January 23, 2023

Paratexts and the reframing of a classic: Korean translations of the Japanese Women’s Analects

Kyung Hye Kim, Yifan Zhu

Page range: 251-269

Abstract

This study examines the Korean translations of a Japanese work Joshi no rongo [女子の論語/Women’s Analects] (Yuki, Ako [祐木亜子]. 2011. 女子の論語 . Tokyo: Sunmark Publishing House), a modern interpretation of the Chinese classic The Analects , with a view to identifying how the paratexts of a translated text contributed, or hindered the reception of the work in the target culture. By drawing on Gérard Genette’s (1997 [1987]. Paratexts: Threshold of interpretation , Jane E. Lewin (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) concept of “paratexts,” this study both analyses translation shifts in the peritexts (e.g., cover, foreword, table of contents) and the epitexts (reviews) of the Korean translations. The analysis shows that the additions and rearrangements of some paratextual elements in the Korean translation further reinforced the traditional view presented in the source text, which ironically brought about heavy criticisms of the original Japanese text and resulted in the Korean retranslation of the work. The scrutiny of peritexts and epitexts in this article will enhance our understanding of the interactions between the translator, the publisher, and the public readers, which jointly contextualize the production and reception of a translated work in a given culture.

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5-year Impact Factor	0.413
Cite Score	0.7
European Reference Index for the Humanities
Impact Factor	0.475
Journal Citation Indicator	0.72
SCImago Journal Rank	0.290
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	0.762

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Rapid online publication ahead-of-print with short turnaround times
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Submissions should be formatted according to the De Gruyter Mouton journal style sheet, especially regarding the proper format for citations and reference entries
Submission of your paper via our submission management tool
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The editorial office will forward your manuscript for double-blind peer-review. This takes on average 3-4 months
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Additional information for manuscript formatting

Manuscripts should be no longer than 30–35 pages.
Review articles should be headed 'Review article' and 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: *Ray Jackendoff, Languages of the mind: Essays on mental representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
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.
Corrections. Authors are asked to check their manuscripts very carefully before submitting them in order to prevent delays at the proof stage. Especially check in-text citations against listings in the References section, to be sure dates and spelling match, and that all works cited are listed.
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Editorial

Editors-in-Chief
Stéphanie Walsh Matthews
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

Massimo Leone
University of Turin, Turin, Italy

Jamin Pelkey
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

e-mail: semioticaeds@degruyter.com

Managing Editor
Paolo Ammirante
e-mail:semiotica@ryerson.ca

Editorial Committee
Myrdene Anderson
Prisca Augustyn
Paolo Balboni
Marcello Barbieri
Arthur Asa Berger
Mohamed Bernoussi
Per Aage Brandt
Thomas Broden
Patrizia Calefato
Le Cheng
Paul Cobley
Robbie B. H. Goh
Louis Hébert
André Helbo
Kalevi Kull
Dragana Martinovic
Frank Nuessel
Susan Petrilli
Roland Posner †
Eddo Rigotti
Shi-xu
Eero Tarasti
Bill Thompson
Didier Tsala Effa
Massimo Vedovelli
Hongbing Yu
Giovanna Zaganelli
Yiheng Zhao

(Deutsch)

Online ISSN: 1613-3692
Print ISSN: 0037-1998
Type: Journal
Languages: English, French
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
First published: January 1, 1969
Publication Frequency: 6 Issues per Year
Audience: Researchers in the field of semiotics