This paper explores Victoria Welby's fundamental assumption of meaning process (“semiosis” sensu Peirce) as translation, and some implications for the development of a general model of intersemiotic translation.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 206 Seiten: 181-205.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 345-364.

The intersemiotic space: Adrianopol in F. Dostoevsky's "Crime and punishment" St. Petersburg. The article focuses on the peculiarities of the intertextual space of culture and the means of its analysis. Level analysis, compositional analysis and chronotopical analysis are juxtaposed in the paper. Textual and intertextual chronotopical analyses are considered separately. Two aspects of textual processuality are juxtaposed: the history of text production and the role of the manuscript page structure as a reflection of the writer's style and mode of (...) thinking (especially in the interserniotic relationship between picture, drawing andword); the history of text reception, its intersemiotic translation into different sign systems and its existence in culture in a scattered state. In this connection the notions of the individual and mental text are juxtaposed. As an example a page of F.Dostoevsky's notebook is taken, where an intricate combination of picture, calligraphy and text offers an interesting infonnation on the methods of formation of text conception. (shrink)

Jakobson introduced the concept of intersemioticity as transmutation of verbal signs by nonverbal sign systems (1959). Intersemioticity generates the linguistic-and-cultural elements of intersemiosis (from without), crystallizing mythology and archetypal symbolism, and intertextuality (from within), analyzing the human emotions in the cultural situation of language-and-music aspects. The operatic example of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867) intertextualized the cultural trends of Scandinavia. This literary script was set to music by Grieg to make an operatic expression. After the “picaresque” adventures, Peer Gynt ends in (...) a “romantic” revelation. Grieg’s music reworded and rephrased the script in musical verse and rhythm, following the intertextuality of Nordic folk music and Wagner’s fashionable operas. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt text has since been translated in Jakobson’s “translation proper” to other languages. After 150 years, the vocal translation of the operatic text needs the “intersemiotic translation or transmutation” to modernize the translated text and attract present-day audiences. (shrink)

The intersemiotic space: Adrianopol in F. Dostoevsky's "Crime and punishment" St. Petersburg. The article focuses on the peculiarities of the intertextual space of culture and the means of its analysis. Level analysis, compositional analysis and chronotopical analysis are juxtaposed in the paper. Textual and intertextual chronotopical analyses are considered separately. Two aspects of textual processuality are juxtaposed: the history of text production and the role of the manuscript page structure as a reflection of the writer's style and mode of (...) thinking (especially in the interserniotic relationship between picture, drawing andword); the history of text reception, its intersemiotic translation into different sign systems and its existence in culture in a scattered state. In this connection the notions of the individual and mental text are juxtaposed. As an example a page of F.Dostoevsky's notebook is taken, where an intricate combination of picture, calligraphy and text offers an interesting infonnation on the methods of formation of text conception. (shrink)

The intersemiotic space: Adrianopol in F. Dostoevsky's "Crime and punishment" St. Petersburg. The article focuses on the peculiarities of the intertextual space of culture and the means of its analysis. Level analysis, compositional analysis and chronotopical analysis are juxtaposed in the paper. Textual and intertextual chronotopical analyses are considered separately. Two aspects of textual processuality are juxtaposed: the history of text production and the role of the manuscript page structure as a reflection of the writer's style and mode of (...) thinking (especially in the interserniotic relationship between picture, drawing andword); the history of text reception, its intersemiotic translation into different sign systems and its existence in culture in a scattered state. In this connection the notions of the individual and mental text are juxtaposed. As an example a page of F.Dostoevsky's notebook is taken, where an intricate combination of picture, calligraphy and text offers an interesting infonnation on the methods of formation of text conception. (shrink)

This article explores the intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry and the expansion of meaning that surpasses the meanings embedded in and elicited from both. We specifically investigate the processes and mechanisms of this semantic expansion by systematically reconstructing the compositional process of poems written from three photographs and forensically investigate how the poems emerged out of each visual frame. We discovered that intersemiosis between photography and poetry demonstrates a strong interpretative component. Intra-semiotic connections between elements within the photograph (...) are interpreted by the viewer or writer and are translated by means of inter-semiotic triggers into intra-semiotic connections within the emerging poem during the process of composition. The resulting inter-semiotic connections between the photograph and the poem create and multiply meaning for both mediums together and independently. In other words, in the process of composition, the poem reads the meanings of components of the photograph framed by the photographer and super-frames them; creating a new frame of meanings that draw upon, and extend, meanings in the original frame of the photograph. At the same time, the poem enters a stage of self-change and self-reflection, inhabiting the life of the photograph. (shrink)

Due to the logical problems of unclear boundaries, staggered parallels, disordered standard, etc., existing in Jakobson’s intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translations, the first triadic division of translation in terms of semiotics has been criticized since the 1980s. However, most of the previous semiotic research in China and the world at large still stays on the interlingual translation of literary texts, neglecting semiotic transformations as a sign activity and semiosis between tangible signs and intangible ones in the same (...) and/or different period of time, within the same ethnic culture or across the distinctive ethnic cultures. Hereby, it is necessary to refer to and redefine the term “semiosphere” introduced by Yuri Lotman in 1984 and the literatures after, to revise intrasemiospheric translation, intersemiospheric translation, and suprasemiospheric translation introduced in Jia. 31–46), and to elaborate on their nature, structure, content, and connotative significance. This is not only conducive to building translation semiotics as a subfield of general semiotics, but also to broadening the theoretical visions of applied semiotics and translation studies, and verifying the theoretical validity of general semiotics and translation semiotics in interpreting and explaining the semiotic transformations in translation as a special sign activity. (shrink)

If one wants to understand translation, it is necessary to look at all its aspects from the psychological to the ideological. And it is necessary to see the process of translation, on the one hand, as a complex of interlinguistic, intralinguistic, and intersemiotic translations, and on the other hand, as a complex of linguistic, cultural, economic, and ideological activities. Translators work at the boundaries of languages, cultures, and societies. They position themselves between the poles of specificity and (...) adaptation in accordance with the strategies of their translational behaviour. They either preserve the otherness of the other or they transform the other into self. By the same token, they cease to be simple mediators, because in a semiotic sense they are capable of generating new languages for the description of a foreign language, text, or culture, and of renewing a culture or of having an influence on the dialogic capacity of a culture with other cultures as well as with itself. In this way, translators work not only with natural languages but also with metalanguages, languages of description. One of the missions of the translator is to increase the receptivity and dialogic capability of a culture, and through these also the internal variety of that culture. As mediators between languages, translators are important creators of new metalanguages. (shrink)

Human communication can be either monosemiotic or polysemiotic, depending on whether it combines ensembles of representations from one or more semiotic systems such as language, gesture and depiction. Each semiotic system has its unique storytelling potentials, which makes intersemiotic translation from one system to another challenging. We investigated the influence of the source semiotic system, realised in speech and a sequence of pictures, respectively, on the way the same story was retold using speech and co-speech gestures. The story (...) was the content of the picture book Frog, Where Are You?. A group of Finnish speakers saw the story in pictures, and another group heard it in matched oral narration. Each participant retold the story to an addressee and all narrations were video-recorded and analysed for both speech and gestures. Given the high degree of iconicity in depiction, we expected more iconic gestures (especially enactments) in the narratives translated from pictures than in those translated from speech. Conversely, we expected greater narrative coherence in the narratives translated from speech. The results showed that more iconic gestures were produced in the narratives translated from speech, but these were primarily not from the enactment subtype. As expected, iconic enactments were more frequent in the narratives translated from the story presented in pictures. The narratives produced by participants who had only heard the story did not have a greater variety of connective devices, yet the type of devices differed slightly between the groups. Together with some additional differences between the groups that had not been anticipated, the results indicate that a story presented in different semiotic systems tends to be translated into different polysemiotic narratives. (shrink)

If one wants to understand translation, it is necessary to look at all its aspects from the psychological to the ideological. And it is necessary to see the process of translation, on the one hand, as a complex of interlinguistic, intralinguistic, and intersemiotic translations, and on the other hand, as a complex of linguistic, cultural, economic, and ideological activities. Translators work at the boundaries of languages, cultures, and societies. They position themselves between the poles of specificity and (...) adaptation in accordance with the strategies of their translational behaviour. They either preserve the otherness of the other or they transform the other into self. By the same token, they cease to be simple mediators, because in a semiotic sense they are capable of generating new languages for the description of a foreign language, text, or culture, and of renewing a culture or of having an influence on the dialogic capacity of a culture with other cultures as well as with itself. In this way, translators work not only with natural languages but also with metalanguages, languages of description. One of the missions of the translator is to increase the receptivity and dialogic capability of a culture, and through these also the internal variety of that culture. As mediators between languages, translators are important creators of new metalanguages. (shrink)

This paper examines the color symbolic values in two different and unrelated languages, Arabic and English. It analyses the colors mentioned in the Qur’an semiotically and their translation based on Peirce’s semiotic model of sign interpretation, while considering the socio-cultural differences that influence the understanding and rendering of color signs, informed by corpus-based analysis. Although the Qur’an contains the most basic colors like other languages, the semiotic values of some colors are different. The study shows that colors in the (...) Qur’an, and Arabic in general, are tightly linked to the environment and culture of the early Muslims who received the Qur’an first-hand from the Prophet. These colors as situated in their culture could appear positively or negatively to users in other languages in a way that is not intended in the source text. Therefore, the translator’s awareness of the socio-cultural signs could bridge the gap between the different systems of codification and recodification of signs. (shrink)

Being the most intuitive and yet perhaps most contestable of all, the correspondence theory remains an axis around which the philosophical debate on truth incessantly spins, with indefiniteness remaining as its main propelling force. The following work presents one more interpretative attempt; it will be argued that each classical contemporary version of the theory incorporates an idea of translation process. For this purpose, initially one was specified what notion of translation should be applied here by enumerating its key (...) features. Next, three classical models were examined—those proposed by Russell, Moore and Austin—in such a way as to expose the place of translation in each analysis. Consequently, the research both provide an element which unifies them and highlight the significance of translation for the philosophical inquiry into the concept of truth. (shrink)

Translation science is going through a preliminary stage of self-definition. Jakobson’s essay “On linguistic aspects of translation”, whose title is re-echoed in the title of this article, despite the linguistic approach suggested, opened, in 1959, the study of translation to disciplines other than linguistics, semiotics to start with. Many developments in the semiotics of translation — particularly Torop’s theory of total translation — take their cue from the celebrated category “intersemiotic translation or transmutation” (...) outlined in that 1959 article. I intend to outline here the contributions that the science of translation — following a semiotic perspective opened by Peirce and continued by Torop — can gather from another discipline: psychology. The “totalistic” approach to translation provided by Torop can be more deeply enforced by applying to it the consequences deriving from the psychological insight offered by the concept of “interpretant” as mental sign; the perceptual interpretation of the prototext; reading and writing as intersemiotic translation processes; unlimited semiosis as interminable analysis; primary and secondary process in dreams and in other kinds of translation; metaphor and disambiguation as mental processes; the defenses activated when translation criticism (review) and self-criticism (revision) are made. (shrink)

The discipline of translation studies has been recently challenged with powerful incentives from other sciences. This tendency has become visible especially in the context of more and more interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary methodologies, which have changed the profile of translation research to a considerable degree. It has also shifted the perspective with which scholars perceive key concepts of the discipline, many of which have become rather unpopular if not completely outdated. However, it seems true that instead of rejecting old (...) terms translation scholars should try to reconcile the old and new by adopting more general frameworks that would allow them to re-interpret or re-write the existing knowledge. Moving intellectual investigations beyond the level of natural languages, semiotics may offer this framework. The article is an attempt to show the potential of a semiotics-based model of interlingual translation and to support the hypothesis that every act of translation is semiotic by nature. To this end it outlines the most significant ideas of semiotic approaches to translation studies and semiotics, with special attention to translation semiotics and semiotics of culture. This in turn helps to draft a working model of interlingual translation and its constraints. (shrink)

Law as one sign system can be recorded and interpreted by another sign system—media. If each transaction in court is taken as a sign, it can be interpreted or transferred by different signs of media for the same purpose, though with different effects. This study focuses on the transformative effects of the semiotic revolution in media on law. The present research revealed that the evolution of media has driven the administration of justice to pay more attention to the process of (...) court proceedings. This research also discusses the semiotic conflict and compatibility between the sign subsystems within media upon interpreting the administration of justice. In addition, disequilibrium between different sign systems highlights the consequent need for intersemiotic translation, consciousness and evaluation as part of decision making on court domains. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thou Art Translated! The Pull of Flesh and MeaningKarmen MacKendrickIn A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare offers us a particularly comic instance of translation. In the first scene of the third act, the mischievous fairy Puck has set into motion all manner of havoc, including the substitution of a donkey’s head for the ordinary head of poor Nick Bottom, a weaver who had been innocently engaged in rehearsing (...) a play that he and other “rustics” intended to perform for visiting royalty. Bottom is, understandably, a little cranky and confused about this buffoonish substitution—he had offered to play the far nobler part of a lion (Shakespeare 2004, Act 1, scene 2, 68–70)—and he does not react happily to the responses that it generates among other members of his company. The first to see him is the tinker Tom Snout, who declares, “O Bottom, thou art changed! what do I see on thee?” (Act 3, scene 1, 114). And Snout is followed by Peter Quince, a carpenter and the author of the ill-fated play that had been in rehearsals, who will give us our relevant line, as he exclaims in surprise, “Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated” (Act 3, scene 1, 118).Indeed he is. Bottom, when he declares the events a dream, proposes that Quince shall write a ballad of this transformation (Act 4, scene 1, 224–26).1 This ballad might be seen as a further translation, of the sort Umberto Eco calls “intersemiotic”—a translation across forms, rather like that of interpretive dance, which is sort of famous for translating badly. What is not quite clear, though, is how layered this translation may already be just in Nick Bottom’s appearance. The use of “ass” for buttocks—that is, for the bottom—is first attested only in 1860,2 more than two and a half centuries after A Midsummer [End Page 36] Night’s Dream was written (sometime in the 1590s). But there is some speculation that the pun may already have been current, even if cutting-edge, when Shakespeare translated Bottom to ass, and certainly such a pun would not have been out of character for the author—after all, we also find a snout among the would-be actors, and Shakespearean brilliance is hardly incompatible with crude punning. The translation of the flesh is in this instance also a translation of the word, not just in parallel but somehow of one another, and the visible head of the indignant ass betrays the indignity of the rustic weaver sporting the name of Bottom.We don’t so often think of bodies being translated, but before turning to more abstract considerations here, let me offer one further instance, one a little closer to the main current of my own research. The translation of relics (that is, of pieces or close possessions of saints) is their movement from one location—specifically, from one church congregation—to another. This sounds markedly unexciting, I grant, but that’s only if you don’t know that throughout the Middle Ages the relics were sometimes said to have translated themselves, moved of their own volition. This was held to demonstrate the desire of the relevant saints for the newly privileged location—which means their desire to patronize and to bless the new church or congregation. This happened especially often when those of us with less devotion would more likely say that the relics had been stolen by members of their new communities.In the translation of relics, an original—a whole, unified original in the form of an intact body—is the very source of meaning. The relic matters because it belonged to the body of a saint, and each fragment is held to contain, somehow, the wholeness of saintly power and sancitity (for more detail on this very complex subject, see MacKendrick 2008, 102–31). But as a rule, that original is impossible to find; the meaningful pieces are only ever fragments. (In fact, studies of older relics often show that they are not even fragments of humans.) Now the relic means what it is translated to mean: the saint’s blessing upon... (shrink)

Assessing the quality of translation is never straightforward and rarely objective. Context, audience, text type, function and lexis are only some of the criteria that need to be taken into account. In the case of constrained intersemiotic translation, subtitling being a prime example thereof, determining universal criteria for assessment is particularly testing. Often referred to as “necessary evil”, audiovisual translation needs to avoid distracting the audience, while aiding their comprehension of the audiovisual message. This is particularly (...) the case for additive AVT, for instance subtitling, where the translation does not replace the original, but coexists with it. Relevance Theory, a controversial but flexible approach to communication, may provide a viable framework for gauging subtitling quality. The interplay between relevance, communicative intention and processing effort can help explain the rationale behind the process of decision-making in the practice of AVT. This paper provides a theoretical foundation for the application of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory to interlingual subtitling, followed by an analysis of selected examples from a large corpus of mostly English-language movies, series and documentaries streamed on Netflix with Polish subtitles. Though the corpus is Polish-centred, the research conclusions are intended to be universal enough to apply regardless of the language pair. (shrink)

Metalinguistic operations signify understanding and translation, specified in Jakobson’s varieties of six language functions and his three types of translation. Both models were first presented in the 1950s. This article is rooted in Jakobson’s models in connection with Peirce’s three categories. Bühler’s three functions with qualitative difference anticipated, perhaps not accidentally, Jakobson’s distinctions indicating qualitative difference within literary forms and structures as well as other fine arts. The semiotic discovery, criticism and perspective of elements and code-units settle the (...) numerical differences as well as the differences in realistic messages and conceptual codes. Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation is updated in vocal translation, which deals with the virtual reality of opera on stage, reaching a catharsis of the operatic mystique. The word-tone synthesis of opera (or semiosic symbiosis) will demonstrate the typological unification of verbal and nonverbal languages. (shrink)

RESUMOA audiodescrição consiste em fornecer a pessoas com cegueira e baixa visão a tradução sonora de processos comunicativos visuais e audiovisuais, como programas de TV, obras de artes plásticas ou ópera. Esta atividade se formalizou na década de 1980, nos Estados Unidos, a partir do modelo "descreva o que você vê". Tal proposição, o audiodescritor, empunhando a controversa bandeira da "objetividade", oferece leitura supostamente isenta - e em certa medida protocolar - sobre aquilo que observa. A escola americana prosperou e (...) se disseminou pelo mundo, tornando-se o padrão da AD realizada, inclusive, no Brasil. Recuperando, contudo, a melhor tradição tupiniquim da "transcriação" ou "recriação", defendida pelos poetas concretos, lançaremos, ao menos para as artes visuais, outra proposta metodológica/experimental: o uso de diagramas poéticos sonoros para a realização da AD, compreendida como tradução intersemiótica. Acredita-se que a camada sensível, tão cara às artes, é muitas vezes perdida no tecnicismo da AD normatizada, e que construções diagramáticas talvez possam recuperar esta dimensão através de signos sonoros inteligíveis mas, sobretudo, sensuais. Há, conforme explicamos, certa articulação estética, ética e semiótica que referenda a proposta aqui apresentada.ABSTRACTAudio description is the act of providing blind and low vision people with a sound translation of visual and audiovisual communication programs, such as TV shows, artworks, or operas. This activity was formalized in the 1980s in the United States, using the model: "describe what you see." In this model, the audio describer, wielding the controversial banner of "objectivity," offers a supposedly impartial - and to some extent protocolized - reading of what he/she observes. The American school prospered and spread around the world, becoming the standard for AD, even in Brazil. However, by recovering the best Tupinikin tradition of "trans-creation" or "re-creation," defended by the concrete poets, we raise, at least for the visual arts, another methodological/experimental proposal: using sound poetry diagrams to perform AD, a process known as intersemiotic translation. It is widely believed that the sensitive layer, which is significant in the arts, is often lost in the technicality of standardized AD, and that diagrammatic constructions, can perhaps recover this dimension through sound signs that are intelligible but, above all, sensual. There is, as we explain, a certain aesthetic, ethical, and semiotic articulation that reinforces the proposal presented here. (shrink)

Metalinguistic operations signify understanding and translation, specified in Jakobson’s varieties of six language functions and his three types of translation. Both models were first presented in the 1950s. This article is rooted in Jakobson’s models in connection with Peirce’s three categories. Bühler’s three functions with qualitative difference anticipated, perhaps not accidentally, Jakobson’s distinctions indicating qualitative difference within literary forms and structures as well as other fine arts. The semiotic discovery, criticism and perspective of elements and code-units settle the (...) numerical differences as well as the differences in realistic messages and conceptual codes. Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation is updated in vocal translation, which deals with the virtual reality of opera on stage, reaching a catharsis of the operatic mystique. The word-tone synthesis of opera (or semiosic symbiosis) will demonstrate the typological unification of verbal and nonverbal languages. (shrink)

Metalinguistic operations signify understanding and translation, specified in Jakobson’s varieties of six language functions and his three types of translation. Both models were first presented in the 1950s. This article is rooted in Jakobson’s models in connection with Peirce’s three categories. Bühler’s three functions with qualitative difference anticipated, perhaps not accidentally, Jakobson’s distinctions indicating qualitative difference within literary forms and structures as well as other fine arts. The semiotic discovery, criticism and perspective of elements and code-units settle the (...) numerical differences as well as the differences in realistic messages and conceptual codes. Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation is updated in vocal translation, which deals with the virtual reality of opera on stage, reaching a catharsis of the operatic mystique. The word-tone synthesis of opera (or semiosic symbiosis) will demonstrate the typological unification of verbal and nonverbal languages. (shrink)

Among the graphic peculiarities that the manuscript T 235 presents, the famous Alcoran in letter of the Christians kept in the Library of Castilla-La Mancha, it is noticeable the use of the abbreviation al̶h. to translate the term Allāh. Examined the different techniques used to that end in other manuscripts in Latin characters coming from the different Hispanic Islamic communities between the 16th and 17th centuries, ranging from non-translation to the equivalent coined and through the loan with different transcripts, (...) we propose an interpretation of the aforementioned abbreviation in terms of intersemiotic translation, i.e. as a reduction to a simple visual form that aims to keep in the Spanish version the fiction of retaining the term Allāh in its original form in Arabic spelling by means of Latin characters. (shrink)

The coding function of semiotic-systems in literature is explored as an example of Umberto Eco’s real and fictional protocols in the play of discourse formation (lector in fabula). The intricate phenomenological levels of intersemiotic translation (apposition, opposition, chiasm, zeugma) are illustrated by analyzing a rhetorical passage (semiotic object) from Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House. The passage on the logic of series (“lists”) allows us to explore fact/fiction, real/imaginary, normal/abnormal, sane/insane, neurotic/psychotic choices as discourse voice protocols (active, middle, passive) (...) for the axiological interpretation (ethic, moral, aesthetic, politic, and rhetoric) of meaning formation (tropes) and signification function (figures). Models of discourse are drawn from Benveniste, Foucault, Greimas, Lévi-Strauss, and Wilden. (shrink)

This paper presents an original use of Twitter to interpret and rewrite the poems of Francesco Petrarca's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta implemented within the Oregon Petrarch Open Book OPOB). This activity was partially inspired by the idea of Twitterature developed by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin; we believe with them that our digital time should develop new and more functional ways of addressing literary texts but at the same time we are convinced that the "burdensome duty of hours spent reading" cannot (...) be eliminated. On the contrary, the new ways of reading in the digital era as we envisage them are the result and consequence of broader and deeper reading activities. We conceived the project of writing 366 tweets, out of the 366 poems that make the last form of Petrarca’s Rvf, as the result of different philological activities, from reading the texts in the original language to consulting manuscripts, translations and intersemiotic renderings of the texts. Before writing the 140 characters that make one tweet we also elaborated paraphrases, summaries and keywords related to the individual poems. Students created the first version of the tweets during the 2011 UO seminar on Re-reading Petrarca’s Rvf in the Digtal Era. The second version was elaborated in the context of a seminar on the same topic during Winter 2014. This paper presents the two versions of the Twitter Edition of Petrarca's Rvf now available in the OPOB and focuses on the philology connected to the latest edition that provided an English translation of the original tweets written in Italian. The actual Italian and English 366 tweets are published in the Appendix to the article. (shrink)

We explore Peirce’s pragmatic conception of sign action, as a distributed and emergent view of cognition and exemplify with the emergence of classical ballet. In our approach, semiosis is a temporally distributed process in which a regular tendency towards certain future outcomes emerges out of a history of sign actions. Semiosis self-organizes in time, in a process that continuously entails the production of more signs. Emergence is a ubiquitous condition in this process: the translation of signs into signs cannot (...) be inferred from the properties of the components of a semiotic triad alone, but has to take into account a complex interaction between a micro-semiotic and macro-semiotic level of description. This interaction can be understood as an interplay of potentialities and tendencies, or upward constitutive determinative relations and downward selective determinative relations. According to this view, emergence is a central defining condition of processes of meaning. Ballet is a sign in action. The emergence of classical ballet is a self-regulatory process, in which a system of different kinds of cognitive artifacts (musical, bodily/motor, spatial/architectonic) and agents obtained a stable semiotic relation throughout many phases of development between the 16th and the 19th Century. One case is the development of the verticality of dance in classical ballet as a semiotic relation connecting proscenium arch stages, dancing bodies, and audiences. This development is micro-semiotically determined by the spatial constraints of the proscenium arch stage, and macro-semiotically determined by a historical construction of the dancing body as a sign within a network of semiotic chains, such as the intersemiotic regulation of body of the dancer by principles coming from painting. This is not only the emergence of actual meaning, but also the emergence of an open-ended field of potential and general meanings, an autonomous tendency of development. To say that ballet, as sign action, emerges, is to say that cognitive artifacts such as dancer’s bodies, stages and audience’s point of view, musical compositions, costumes, all sorts of supporting institutions, etc, constitute a niche for sign action, interacting according to tendencies of development that didn’t exist before. (shrink)

A police interrogation is goal-oriented, conventionalized with repeated and distinctive features of institutional discourse that arise from its communicative purpose as identified by police officers of the professional community. In China, the written notes of police interrogations are indispensable documents in the prosecution process and are presented as evidential confessions. By comparing the two versions of police interrogations – the written notes and the oral interrogation, that is, the tape-recordings, the paper finds that the written notes do not accurately reflect (...) the whole question-and-answer process. Based on the concept of genre and taking oral police interrogation as a genre in legal settings, this present study regards the written notes as a transgenre, a body of translated legal documents that do not fully comply with textual conventions of either the source or the target text. The present study examines the generic structure and lexical-grammar features of the written notes and the tape-recordings to unravel the transfer inside the genre of police interrogations. From the perspective of semiotics, the paper explores the constraints of other sign systems, such as law, professional culture, and socio-culture on transgenre in police investigative settings. (shrink)

Normative pictures are in use in various fields of legal practice. A background knowledge enables the understanding of this sort of pictures and affects both the morphology of the normative picture and its practical use. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part will focus on the morphology of normative pictures. The second part of the paper focuses on the different uses of normative pictures. Normative pictures with the same morphology can play very different roles because their relationship (...) with the rules can vary. (shrink)

In 1813 Isaak von Sinclair published a poem entitled “The New Acquaintance.” It recounts a meeting between himself, his friend Friedrich Hölderlin, and one other unidentified guest whom Sinclair awaited with keen anticipation. Because of Hölderlin’s well established friendship with Hegel it has been assumed in the past that the unknown acquaintance was in fact Hegel. However, at the time to which the poem refers, Hegel was a relatively obscure and unknown figure with no reputation. If we are therefore to (...) accept that the poem does indeed allude to Hegel then we must assume that Sinclair, as early as 1813, had recognized Hegel’s genius and wanted retrospectively to associate his name with the newly rising star of German philosophy. In that case we must ask why he refrained from mentioning Hegel by name or at least making the character of the unknown unambiguously clear? In translating this poem for the first time into English I offer for consideration another candidate as the “acquaintance,” namely, Wilhelm Heinse. (shrink)

In the eleventh of his Antiquarian Letters, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing discusses a phrase from Lucian's description of the painting by Zeuxis called A Family of Centaurs: ‘at the top of the painting a centaur is leaning down as if from an observation point, smiling’. ‘This as if from an observation point, Lessing notes, obviously implies that Lucian himself was uncertain whether this figure was positioned further back, or was at the same time on higher ground. We need to recognize the (...) logic of ancient bas-reliefs where figures further to the back look over those at the front, not because they are actually positioned above them but because they are meant to appear as if standing behind.'1 · 1. The passage is in George Lessing, Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts, p. 81. Panofsky's discussion does not note that the original text of Lucian makes clear that what is described is a copy of the original painting. This means that some of the issues of misunderstanding situated by Lessing and Panofsky in Lucian's court may in principle be attributable to the copyist. This makes no difference to the conceptual thrust of Panofsky's case.—Trans. (shrink)

The basic problem affecting humanitarian law today remains that of its implementation. As of now, requests made by individuals before national courts to assess the compatibility of certain acts with international humanitarian law failed. The present case study and commentaries focus on the decision of a German civil court sitting Bonn to deny the victims of a NATO air raid the right to sue Germany and claim compensation for alleged violations of international humanitarian law.