Approaches to Applied Semiotics [AAS] – serie

No detailed description available for "The Forms of Meaning".

No detailed description available for "Semiotics in Language Education".

Music is said to be the most autonomous and least representative of all the arts. However, it reflects in many ways the realities around it and influences its social and cultural environments. Music is as much biology, gender, gesture - something intertextual, even transcendental. Musical signs can be studied throughout their history as well as musical semiotics with its own background. Composers from Chopin to Sibelius and authors from Nietzsche to Greimas and Barthes illustrate the avenues of this new discipline within semiotics and musicology.

Using both verbal and nonverbal techniques to make its messages as persuasive as possible, advertising has become an integral component of modern-day social discourse designed to influence attitudes and lifestyle behaviors by covertly suggesting how we can best satisfy our innermost urges and aspirations through consumption. This book looks at the categories of this form of discourse from the standpoint of semiotic analysis. It deals with the signifying processes that underlie advertising messages in print, electronic, and digital form.

Communication Games is a new and radical interpretation of the relationship between culture and communication. It explores the idea that culture and communication studies should be seen predominantly in relation to struggles and conflicts within the social arena.It criticizes the conventional heritage of the social sciences and humanities. Culture and communication are conceived not merely as means of integrating social actors, but as semiotic ways of providing fitness indicators that allow for the resolution of competition between individuals. From the perspective of Peircean semiotics and the Darwinian understanding of life processes, Communication Games redefines culture in terms of Darwin's notion of sexual selection. Moving on from the realization that sexual selection creates individual organisms with conflicting interests, Communication Games emphasizes the contribution of game theory to semiotics and communication studies.The book demonstrates how cooperation and shared conventions eventually emerge, and how conflicts are resolved through the display of costly and inflated signs. It is from these inflated signs and the escalation of excessive messages that cultures gain a certain degree of stability. Communication Games proposes a new way of understanding culture, communication, and semiotic exchange in terms of game theory.

This book investigates how the media have become self-referential or self-reflexive instead of mediating between the real or fictional worlds about which their messages pretend to be and between the audience that they wish to inform, counsel, or entertain. The concept of self-reference is viewed very broadly. Self-reflexivity, metatexts, metapictures, metamusic, metacommunication, as well as intertextual, and intermedial references are all conceived of as forms of self-reference, although to different degrees and levels.The contributions focus on the semiotic foundations of reference and self-reference, discuss the transdisciplinary context of self-reference in postmodern culture, and examine original studies from the worlds of print advertising, photography, film, television, computer games, media art, web art, and music. A wide range of different media products and topics are discussed including self-promotion on TV, the TV show Big Brother, the TV format "historytainment," media nostalgia, the documentation of documentation in documentary films, Marilyn Monroe in photographs, humor and paradox in animated films, metacommunication in computer games, metapictures, metafiction, metamusic, body art, and net art.

The book provides an introduction to an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that can be called "global linguistics" (GL). GL emerges to tackle the ever-growing phenomenon of intercultural communication (IC) in today's world of international contacts. The specific aim of GL is to look at the form and contents of dialogues among speakers of different cultural backgrounds who will use a "default language" or koiné (usually English) to interact, in order to detect communication breakdowns at various levels of "depth", as well as the opportunities for developing sound intercultural communication practice. The book includes an accessible presentation of fundamental questions concerning languages and language use. Among the questions addressed are the universal design features of languages, the connection between language and conceptual systems, how people use language to coordinate their actions and interact in a variety of social contexts, and the place of language in a semiotic view of culture. The volume also addresses how language, context and culture shape the way in which we argue a point and try to persuade other people, and why intercultural argumentation is both necessary and risky.Global Linguistics: An Introduction describes fundamental notions in linguistics and cognate fields and is thus well-suited for use as a textbook in courses dealing with IC in general. At the same time, the book is of general interest to scholars in linguistics and communication studies, as it places particular emphasis on theoretical models such as argumentation theory and conceptual metaphor theory, which are generally not presented in textbooks on language and IC.