Grounding Ecological Democracy: Semiotics and the Communicative Networks of Nature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Romero ◽  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Semiotic Systems ◽  
Ecological Democracy ◽  
Ecological Communication

Developments in biosemiotics and democratic theory enable renewed appreciation of the possibilities for ecological democracy. Semiotics is the study of sign processes in meaning-making and communication. Signs and meanings exist in all living systems, and all living systems are therefore semiotic systems. Ecological communication can involve abiotic and biotic communication, including human language, facilitating an integration of politics and ecology in the form of ecological democracy encompassing communicative networks in nature and human society.

Tool and Symbol

Mind Shift ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 32-45
Author(s):  
John Parrington
Keyword(s):  
Tool Use ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Brain Evolution ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Human Brain Evolution ◽  
Equal Importance ◽  
Language Capacity ◽  
Development Of Language

This chapter examines the emergence of tool use and human language in human brain evolution. Increasing use and design of tools made possible by the bipedalism of our proto-human ancestors was a key step in the development of language. Indeed, communal tool use ‘helped to bring the members of society together by increasing the cases of mutual support and joint activity’. During this process, ‘the reaction of labour and speech on the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of conclusion, gave both labour and speech an ever renewed impulse to further development’. The chapter then considers the studies which assess the fundamental differences in terms of language capacity between humans and apes. While the behaviourist view that human language acquisition is simply an accumulation of conditioned reflexes now looks incorrect, recent studies have also challenged the view of a biological basis for a ‘universal grammar’ shared by all humans. Instead, increasing evidence points to both human biology and the process of growing up in a specific human society as being factors of equal importance in the formation of language.

Is there a Prehistory of Linguistics?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-275
Author(s):  
Colin Renfrew ◽  
Theodora Bynon ◽  
Merritt Ruhlen ◽  
Aron Dolgopolsky ◽  
Peter Bellwood
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Related Language ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Humans ◽  
Easy Answer ◽  
Archaeological Cultures ◽  
Different Parts

There are few aspects of human behaviour more fundamental than our ability to use language. Language plays a key role in the study of any living human society, and of all historical communities which have left us written records. In theory it could also throw enormous light on the development and relationships of prehistoric human communities. But here there is a huge and obvious problem: what evidence can there be for human languages in the pre-literate, prehistoric age? In other words, what hope is therefor a prehistory of linguistics? There is no easy answer, yet it is hard to accept that any account of human prehistory can be considered adequate without some knowledge of prehistoric languages and linguistic relationships, if only at the broadest scale.The list of questions we might wish to pose stretches back to the period of the very earliest hominids. When did our human ancestors first begin to talk to each other? Was language acquisition sudden or gradual? Did human language arise in one place, and then spread and diversify from- that point? Or did it emerge independently, among separate groups of early humans in different parts of the world?Leading on from this is the study of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Since the end of the nineteenth century one of the biggest problems facing prehistoric archaeologists has been the identification and interpretation of archaeological cultures and cultural groups. Do these have any social or ethnic reality? Is it right to speak of a Beaker ‘folk’? Was the Bandkeramik colonization the work of one people or of many? These questions would be so much easier to resolve if only we could trace the prehistory of languages, and could establish, for instance, whether all Bandkeramik and Beaker users spoke the same or a related language.Such possibilities may seem exciting and hopeful to some, irredeemably optimistic to others. Whatever view we take, they clearly merit serious discussion. In the present Viewpoint, our third in the series, we have asked five writers — two archaeologists (Renfrew & Bellwood), three linguists (Bynon, Ruhlen & Dolgopolsky) — to give their own, personal response to the key question ‘Is there a prehistory of linguistics?’ Can we, from the evidence of archaeology, linguistics (and now DNA studies), say anything positive about langtiage in prehistory?

The signifying voice

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Default Mode ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
Linguistic Imperialism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Semiotic Systems ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
The Common

Abstract Drawing on a social semiotic framework, this paper sets out to examine two different semiotic systems whose default mode of expression is the human voice – language and music. Through comparing how each system differentially employs the human voice, we can identify both their commonalities and differences, and go some way to treating both equally within de Saussure’s envisaged broader field of “semiology”, avoiding the common trap of “linguistic imperialism”, i.e. taking language as the model for all semiotic systems. Starting by conceptualising the key relationship between the text, or unified instance of meaning-making, and the social contexts in which it functions, the paper then examines the material affordances utilised by each system, and the kinds of social meanings they express.

scholarly journals Verbalization of Emotional States in Multimodal Text: Intersemiotic Translation (Based on the Material of the English and Ukrainian Languages)

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Basic Emotions ◽  
Visual Texts ◽  
Semiotic Systems ◽  
Multimodal Text ◽  
Visual Text ◽  
English Speaking

The article highlights the problem of translation of visual texts, meaning-making based on the analyses and comparison of descriptions of emotions, feelings, sensations and associations in the multimodal text; the paper considers the notions of multimodality, intersemiotic translation, interpretation of the visual text of illustration; the article investigates the communicative function of multimodal texts that contain the signs of different semiotic systems and represent one referential situation by different means of semiotics; it outlines the features of the artistic language of illustration; the article looks at the issues of interoception and basic emotions; it carries out the semiotic analysis of figures, forms, lines and colors, as well as the analyses of the reviews of English-speaking film critics and the film ,the interpretations of illustration symbols by the Ukrainian-speaking subjects of the associative experiment; the work conducts the comparative analysis of the interpretations of emotional states in both the English critical articles and the representatives of Ukrainian culture.

scholarly journals THE PROBLEM OF MEANING OF LAW IN A DIGITAL SOCIETY

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-628
Author(s):  
Yulia A. Gavrilova
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Main Tool ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Semantic Approach ◽  
Digital Society ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Being There

The article is devoted to the evolution of law in a digital society in a semantic approach. The rapid development of digital technologies is characterized by contradictory trends. The new technical and technological reality can be terminal for the development of society if people entrust themselves to a "digit" and will not reasonably and responsibly organize their social relations in terms of legal regulation. A more humane version is to consider digital models as a tool for solving social problems. In this way, law should acquire the quality of the main tool of such transformations and along with new functions; those functions are expert-analytical, forecasting, priority adaptation, standardization of technological control. The problem of meaning of law in a digital society can be attributed to most important problems. It covers a wide range of debatable issues: the relation-ship between the real and the virtual in law, consideration of artificial intelligence as a possible subject of law, distinction between truth and plausibility in law, se-miotic nature and methodology of cognizing the meaning of law in the world of signs, symbols, codes, etc. The purpose of the article is to formulate the author's view on the dynamics of the laws meaning in a digital society from the point of view of ontology, epistemology, methodology and applied aspect of knowledge. Research methods: formal legal, analysis, interpretation, forecasting, and modeling. The results of the study. In a digital society, law is being transformed into digital semiotic and augmented reality, with technology as an integral part of it. In these conditions, law, according to author, will preserve the regulatory and value potential for human society on condition that software machine codes are integrated into the human environment, and used to the benefit of a human being. There-fore, the traditional procedures of law-making, interpretation, concretization, application of law and dynamic meaning-making will remain relevant; by analogy with them, the software allowing to interact with the machine will be created and developed. The article arrives at the concludion that cognition of the meaning of law in a digital society rests in the search for the truth: law is a human reality and scientific and technological progress is evaluated in compliance with it.

scholarly journals Translation

Target ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-327
Author(s):  
Alison Sealey
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
The Other ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Human Animal

AbstractThis article contributes to the developing recognition that the challenges raised by the enterprise of translating between languages extend beyond human language. It suggests that there are parallels between the political issues recognised by translation scholars – of exclusion, misrepresentation and speaking for ‘the other’ – and those raised by biosemiotics, the study of signs in all living systems. Following a discussion of convergence in current developments in translation studies, semiotics and human-animal studies, the article presents an analysis of empirical data, with specific reference to the different meanings of the verbhear. The findings demonstrate the anthropocentric assumptions that are embedded in the way hearing is routinely represented, and an argument is presented for the recognition of these in communications about the semiotic resources relevant to non-human life forms. The paper concludes with some reflections on the implications of these issues for the enterprise of translation.

scholarly journals The Missing Tooth: Case Illustrations of a Child’s Assembled, Out-of-School Authorship

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari-Lynn Winters
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Semiotics ◽  
Literacy Studies ◽  
New Literacy ◽  
New Literacy Studies ◽  
Semiotic Systems ◽  
Missing Tooth ◽  
Out Of School

Case illustrations of a six-year-old boy’s adventures with a missing tooth are used in this paper to re-define a broader notion of authorship. Drawing on theories of social semiotics, New Literacy Studies (NLS), and critical positioning, this notion of authorship not only interweaves the boy’s preferred modes of meaning-making and communication, but also considers his sociocultural environments. Findings suggest that each mode of meaning-making (linguistic, symbolic, musical, etc.) has its own semiotic potential (both affordances and limitations) and that all authorship needs to be framed critically, within social contexts, in order to better understand and facilitate young children’s abilities to garner, interpret, design, and communicate ideas across a range of semiotic systems.

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