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

Impact Factor: 0.475

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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 2021

"Measuring diagram quality through semiotic morphisms", Marshall, Guy Clarke & André Freitas, 239, 125-146.

The judges commented: "The Committee members made this decision based on several factors. First, Diagrams have always played a significant role in the explication of theoretical concepts in semiotics. This essay provides an excellent overview of the semiotic diagram and its use as a pedagogical and instrumental visual to advance semiotic theory. It also applies taxonomy and category theory to assess the quality of a diagram. Second, this essay provides an evaluation metric for diagrams in semiotic theory. Third, this article provides an organized and comprehensible discussion and evaluation of the form and function of the diagram in semiotic research. Finally, the authors have applied taxonomy and category theory to the interdiscipline of semiotics to evaluate diagram quality."

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

Book series:
Semiotics, Communication and Cognition [SCC]

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Volume 2022 Issue 247

July 2022

Publicly Available August 16, 2022

Frontmatter

Page range: i-vii

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Open Access July 18, 2022

Symbolicity, language, and mediality

Lars Elleström

Page range: 1-32

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Abstract

This article demonstrates the broad applicability of the concept of symbol in human communication, beyond but including verbal language. The starting point is Charles Sanders Peirce’s understanding of symbolicity as signification grounded on habits. The goal is to be able to conceptualize mediality in general and media interrelations, particularly in relation to symbolicity. Informed by a multimodal view on media, the author provides a systematic overview of symbolicity within the context of communication among human minds structured around two crossing parameters: symbols being limited or widespread among people and symbols not being part of or being part of systems – languages. Based on this overview, I clarify the role of culture in language notions and conceptualize language in relation to mediality. I also suggest a way of more precisely describing similarities and differences between languages and media types, without either conflating or totally separating the two concepts. Finally, I investigate how the dependence of language and media type conceptions on culture affects the idea of intermediality. Together, these investigations and conceptualizations promote a more comprehensive understanding of symbolicity in general and a deeper knowledge of the role of symbolicity in human communication, including verbal language, and intermedial relations involving all kinds of different media types.

May 19, 2022

Logonomic signs as three-phase constraints of multimodal social semiosis

Ivan Fomin

Page range: 33-54

Abstract

The article introduces the concept of the logonomic sign as an elaboration on Hodge and Kress’s promising yet under-examined ideas about logonomic systems. Logonomic signs are defined as socially devised signs that constrain multimodal semiosis by restricting who is able to produce what signs under what circumstances. Based on the Peircean categories, the functioning of logonomic signs is modeled as a three-phase process of (1) logonomic understanding (production of the meaning that is the Initial Interpretant of a logonomic sign), (2) logonomic actualization (production of the actual semiotic event that is the Dynamical Interpretant of a logonomic sign), and (3) logonomic reproduction ([re]production of the semiotic Habit that is the Final Interpretant of a logonomic sign). Based on Kull’s theory of evolution of semiotic systems, logonomic signs are theorized as mechanisms of retention and standardization of semiotic Habits. The mechanism of reproduction of logonomic signs is modeled as a sign in which past logonomic semioses function as Objects by being iconically represented by similar current logonomic semioses functioning as Representamens, and in which future logonomic semioses are produced as Interpretants. The methodological potential of the proposed concept is discussed in the context of the integrative transdisciplinary capacity of semiotics in social research.

May 23, 2022

Masked Covid life: a socio-semiotic investigation

Aleksandra Matulewska, Anne Wagner, Sarah Marusek

Page range: 55-85

Abstract

The necessity of wearing masks in response to the spread of the Covid-19 took Europe and the USA by surprise. Legislation needed to be enacted to enforce the obligation on citizens not used to such practices. The authors investigate the semiotic function of masks, legislations enacted to enforce their usage in public places, and the mask-related discourse (MRD) with a view to seeing how societies reacted to this imposition. A broad semiotic perspective is provided to analyze different attitudes and types of MRD that have emerged in Poland, France, and the USA.

May 24, 2022

Language and radical anthropocentrism: the view from the supercategory

Adrian Pablé

Page range: 87-114

Abstract

The article critically engages with the posthumanist discourse on anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. It adopts an “integrational” approach to signs, language, and communication, as outlined in the works of Oxford linguist Roy Harris. Integrational linguistics is committed to a demythologized view of “language,” which it considers to exist only as part of the experience of human individuals and human collectivities. From an integrational point of view, language is not an “object” of scientific inquiry, but a complex of human activities that make such an inquiry possible in the first place. This paper argues that posthumanists falsely ascribe language to animals and to hypothetical extraterrestrials. Based on Harris’ concept of the supercategory, it is shown that the worldviews encapsulated in science, history, and religion only make sense because they are human worldviews. No other intelligent life could grasp the various supercategorical discourses, and how they relate to each other, the main reason being that language is a uniquely integrated mode of human communication. The article thus supports a radical anthropocentrism as the only intellectually viable philosophy on which to draw in our reflections on, and inquiries into both intraspecies and interspecies communication.

Open Access May 13, 2022

Mechanisms of homonym transformations: on Catholic variants of Stalinist discourse in Poland

Jakub Sadowski

Page range: 115-138

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Abstract

Despite its anti-religious character, totalitarian discourse, in the years 1949–1956 filling the entire space of Polish official culture, had its Catholic segment. Within this segment, there occurred a transformation of the religious net of concepts into semantic units of totalitarian language, a transformation of Catholic worldview narratives into Stalinist ones. This text aims to describe the semiotic mechanisms of such transformation. The relations between the initial semiosphere of language and the sub-semiosphere of its totalitarian variant are described. Presented here is a proposal for a theoretical description of the transformation of signs and texts of natural language into totalitarian ones, and an analysis of its possible strategies: renomination of signs, resemantization of texts, and incorporation of signs and texts from foreign semiotic fields. The material analyzed here comes mainly from the weekly magazine Dziś i Jutro and from other parts of the discursive field of Polish Catholic journalism, which tended towards the official discourse, including periodicals of the circles of Catholic priests ready to institutionally cooperate with the communist authorities.

June 14, 2022

Moral character, moral choice and the existential semiotics of space awareness

Niclas Sandström, Anne Nevgi

Page range: 139-165

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a semiotic programme that proposes an alternative conceptual framework to understand the moral positionalities that people have in socio-material space. The study amalgamates moral character and signs and signification through a discussion of moral choice and value acts in an existential semiotic framework, as laid out by Eero Tarasti. The programme was triggered by a lived experience in a non-place, yielding the concept of semiotic space awareness – i.e., the value acts that work as signs of moral character in people’s socio-material space . It is the moral positioning of a subject in the socio-material and semiotic space in relation to other subjects. People’s positionalities primarily take place in the socio-material space, and the dimensions we discuss focus on how value acts are produced and interpreted in space and place. Our aim is to take the approach used in, e.g., proxemics to a universal metalevel in terms of its key, undivided semiotic ingredients irrespective of cultural variation. We then extrapolate by discussing how these value acts trigger potential tensions and conflicts that can be approached using semiotics as a foundation for analysis. More specifically, the moral character that people portray in their value acts is theorized and applied as an explanatory tool to understand the semiosis and its repercussions in Dasein . We also introduce affordance as an additional dimension in the interplay and modalizations between moral character and moral choice to understand value acts and semiotic space awareness in subjects’ Dasein and Umwelt .

May 27, 2022

A rhetoric of inauthenticity: critical object images in Woolf’s Victorian scenes

Margaret J.-M. Sönmez

Page range: 167-200

Abstract

This paper extends the fields of visual and object semiosis, style, and rhetoric by introducing the concept of critical object images. It identifies five of their rhetorical functions in literature and demonstrates the semiotic and rhetorical specificity and force of literary object images. Inter-disciplinary concepts and theories used in the study are introduced before the concept is tested and developed through analyses of object images with critical roles in the Victorian scenes of Virginia Woolf’s novels. The inductive analyses trace the semiosis and stylistic affordances (meanings) of the selected critical object images, with reference to three categories of kitsch inauthenticity, and their formal and cultural contexts, noting the rhetorical function(s) they serve. Multimodal stylistics and the semiotics of visual images and of objects are used in these analyses, and the unique contribution of critical object images as rhetorical elements in literature is uncovered and explained. The analysis of Woolf’s representation of selected objects shows how the critical object images function rhetorically, through their stylistic connotations (here of kitsch inauthenticity), to present unambiguous meanings that are not openly stated in the texts’ verbal discourse.

May 16, 2022

The visual expression of temporal concepts in visual narratives

Xiran Yang

Page range: 201-225

Abstract

This study examines the visual representation of diegetic time in visual narrative stories, and explores why the invisible diegetic time flow could be expressed through visible elements, and how patterns and textures could be used to specify states of happenings. The study demonstrates that metaphorical relations between time and space are visually realized in visual narratives, leading to the representation of diegetic time and its related concepts on different levels of two-dimensional space. The segmentation of page space and the visual components within panel space are employed to build a diegetic timeline as well as specify temporal aspects of actions and states in visual narrative stories. Neuroscientific evidence which suggests that a common metric is used to compute magnitudes of time and space in the human brain might help explain why time as an abstract concept could undergo visual materialization in visual narratives.

May 23, 2022

Intersemiotic projection and academic comics: towards a social semiotic framework of multimodal paratactic and hypotactic projection

Lei Zeng, Xinyu Zhu

Page range: 227-254

Abstract

Intersemiotic projection is one of the most common configurations in the knowledge construction process of academic comics. Although previous studies address some general features of intersemiotic projection, further research on interdependency relations of intersemiotic projection is needed in order to map out the whole system. This study, based on the social-semiotic approach to multimodal studies, proposes a systemic framework of image-text paratactic and hypotactic projection in academic comics. This framework identifies three sub-categories of paratactic projection and hypotactic projection, respectively: (1) Emergent, (2) Adjoined, (3) Sequential, (4) Compound, (5) Subsumed, and (6) Fused. The use of these projection configurations contributes to the realization of the communicative purposes of academic comics to evidence, exemplify, emphasize, explain, elaborate, and visualize the discussed knowledge. This research attempts not only to contribute to the theoretical development of multimodality from the social-semiotic perspective by refining and enlarging the multimodal hypotactic projection framework but also to provide an effective and applicable tool for comics analysis.

May 18, 2022

Semiotics of humor in Nigerian politics

Adeyemi Adegoju

Page range: 255-282

Abstract

This study explores the semiotics of humor and political disaffection in the online feedback discourse evaluating party performance in a post-election era in Nigeria’s democratic practice. It examines the incongruities in multimodal digital humor as semiotic resources of subversive play to criticize a political party for its perceived weak program-to-policy linkage. Data for the study comprise some purposively sampled political internet memes which were deployed to express political disaffection at the party All Progressives Congress (APC) in the first half (2016–2017) of its four-year (2015–2019) tenure. The study applies Algirdas J. Greimas’ semiotic theory by drawing upon the notions of narrativity and modalities to read the selected political internet memes, which run profound social commentaries on the anxieties and frustrations of the ordinary citizens in a failing economy, thereby underpinning the thrust of the theory, which lies not only in the signification of texts but also in the signification of the living experience. The study reveals the power of signs evidenced in the deployment of objects, behaviors, practices, images, and symbols within the socio-economic sub/culture of the production of the internet memes to configure backlashes of democratic deficits relating largely to worsening poverty, hunger, struggle for survival, and political cynicism in an emerging democracy.

Open Access May 16, 2022

Redundancies of traffic signs: an exploratory study

Michał Dudek

Page range: 283-317

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Abstract

Against the background of studies on redundancy in law that completely omit the visual element in law and of studies on traffic signs that are laconic about their redundancies, the present study proposes more focused investigation into the redundancies of traffic signs. After presentation of the broader context of existing studies on traffic signs and on redundancy in law, and following a discussion of the direct inspiration for embarking upon research into this topic, the article moves to present and discuss six proposed types of redundancies of signs. Utilizing Franciszek Studnicki’s distinction between sign-types and sign-realizations, and given that traffic signs exist in various complicated relationships with each other, with written formulations in legal texts, and with the environments in which they are placed, the study comments on six types of redundancy: (1) sign-type–basic task(s) of road traffic law; (2) of sign-type’s elements; (3) sign-type–sign-type; (4) sign-type–legal text; (5) sign-realization–sign-realization; and (6) sign-realization–environment. Analysis of each type is supported through examples, various subdivisions, and additional lines of inquiry. The study has value for both strictly theoretical and more practical enterprises related both to traffic signs themselves and to the wider realm of visualization of norms.

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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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You can easily submit your manuscript online. Simply go to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/semi and you will be guided through the whole peer-reviewing and publishing process.

Your benefits of publishing with us

Rapid online publication ahead-of-print with short turnaround times
Annual prize, the Mouton d'Or, to the author of the best article each year
High quality peer-review
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Free publication of color figures both in online and print editions and no page charges
Optional open access publication
Every article easily discoverable because of SEO and comprehensive abstracting and indexing services
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Submission process

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
Peer review process (you will be guided through every step)
The editorial office will forward your manuscript for double-blind peer-review. This takes on average 3-4 months
If accepted: you have the option to publish your article open access

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.
Proofs. Authors will receive PDF page proofs for correction which must be returned by dates determined by the publication schedule.
Author copy. Upon publication, authors will receive electronic access to 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 Author Publication Policy, Publication Ethics Statement and our copyright agreement
Manuscripts must be written in clear and concise English or French (please also see the Notes aux Auteurs)
Once your article is accepted you have the option to publish it open access.
Our repository policy allows you to distribute 30 PDF copies of your published article to colleagues (the PDF has to include the information that it is an author's copy). Please also feel free to distribute the link to the online abstract
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We look forward to receiving your manuscript!

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Authors have the option to publish their article under an open access license. The standard article processing charge for a hybrid open access article is 2,000 Euro (plus VAT if applicable). Please note that corresponding authors from institutions with which we have a transformative agreement, can publish open access without paying the fee. More information on the eligible institutions and articles can be found here.

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