Linguïculture: Thomas A. Sebeok as a revolutionary ethnographer

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-550
Author(s):  
Dinda L. Gorlée
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Community ◽  
Verbal Art ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Cultural Texts

Abstract Sebeok started his career as an ethnographer, focusing on the verbal art of anthropology to describe the cultures associated with then-called “primitive” languages. He followed Bloomfield’s linguistics to study Boas’ anthropology of primitive art to investigate man as a civilized member of a native indigenous community with art-like speech habits. Sebeok’s earliest articles were ethnographic descriptions of non-Western folktales from the Cheremis people, which he reformulated into Saussure’s phonetic system to involve literal but culturally free translations. Later, Sebeok developed Peirce’s ethnosemiotics by explaining Sapir-Whorf’s two-way differentiation of linguistic-and-cultural texts. The coded interplay of anthroposemiotics moved Sebeok from language-and-culture to language-with-culture, thence to build up the merged compound of linguïculture.

scholarly journals The polyglot self in the semiotic spheres of language and culture

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 207-225
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Magdalena Wąsik
Keyword(s):  
Text Processing ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Verbal Communication ◽  
Sound Waves ◽  
Life World ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Verbal Messages ◽  
The One

The article focuses on the human individual as a signifying and communicating self whose properties can be detected or assumed on the basis of its language in verbal communication through texts and text-processing activities or, more broadly, in both verbal and non-verbal communication through signs and sign-processing activities in the semiotics of culture. The point of departure is the distinction between the observable self and the inferable self, i.e., a concrete person who transmits and receives verbal and/or non-verbal messages, and a mental subject who is engaged in creating and comprehending them. As a consequence of this distinction, it can be stated that the communicative network of the human life-world consists of two types of collectivities. On the one hand, there are speakers and listeners of particular languages who form interpersonal collectivities of those transmitting and receiving perceivable meaning bearers through physical-acoustic sound waves in the communication channel; on the other hand, there are intersubjective collectivities of those who process and understand intelligible meaning bearers while referring them to an extra-linguistic reality through acts of reasoning and interpreting. Exposing the notion of polyglotism, this paper argues that a multiaspectual typology of selves is possible on the basis of the linguistic and cultural texts that characterize the social roles and pragmatic goals of communication participants in the various domains of the human life-world. Finally, it supports the conviction that interdependencies between language and culture must be primarily explained in terms of psychological, or rather, psycho-semiotic conditionings of humans. Since particular languages are products and components of social and cultural life, constantly being shaped and changed due to personal and subjective activities of human selves, polyglotism as both multilingualism and multiculturalism also implies an inquiry into their multicultural competence and multicultural identity.

scholarly journals Laughing across borders: Intertextuality of internet memes

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liisi Laineste ◽  
Piret Voolaid
Keyword(s):  
Web Sites ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Cultural Communication ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The People ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Estonian Language ◽  
Positive Functions

Internet humour flourishes on social network sites, special humour-dedicated sites and on web pages focusing on edutainment or infotainment. Its increasing pervasiveness has to do with the positive functions that humour is nowadays believed to carry – its bonding, affiliative and generally beneficial qualities. Internet humour, like other forms of cultural communication in this medium, passes along from person to person, and may scale (quickly or gradually, depending on the comic potential and other, sometimes rather elusive characteristics) into a shared social phenomenon, giving an insight into the preferences and ideas of the people who actively create and use it. The present research is primarily carried by the question of how the carriers of Internet humour, that is, memes and virals, travel across borders, to a smaller or greater degree being modified and adapted to a particular language and culture in the process. The intertextuality emerging as a result of adapting humorous texts is a perfect example of the inner workings of contemporary globalising cultural communication. Having analysed a corpus of 100 top-rated memes and virals from humour-dedicated web sites popular among Estonian users, we discuss how humour creates intertextual references that rely partly on the cultural memory of that particular (i.e. Estonian-language) community, and partly on global (primarily English- and Russian-language) cultural influences, thus producing hybrid cultural texts. The more interpretations are accessible for the audience (cf. polysemy Shabtai-Boxman & Shifman 2014), the more popular the text becomes, whereas the range of interpretations depends on the openness of the cultural item to further modification.

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