Many historical and traditional symbols are recorded in cemeteries. The symbols and motifs on tombstones profile individual lives, but they also convey information regarding a society's order, values, religious practices, and realities at the time of the individual's death. The primary goals of this research effort were to identify a variety of…

This paper explores the symbolic representation of the teaching situation as a triangle involving teacher, student, and content. The paper explores what is meant by didactic communication, and then studies the meaning of the semiotic triangle in the light of two lines of research: the patterns used to analyze communication situations and ongoing…

Drawing on writings by recent post-modernist thinkers and semioticians, this paper focuses on a combination of hermeneutic and semiotic viewpoints and applies them to defining the nature of interpretation in an educational setting (e.g., text interpretation), the interpreter, and the essence of the act of comprehension and interpretation. The main…

To analyze the appropriateness of textual media in the construction of meaning, this paper first provides a review of the psychological research on semiotics and multiple intelligences that supports a broadened notion of text. The paper next reports on preliminary research on the construction of non-print texts in disciplines other than…

It may be argued that what is considered to be knowledge is intimately related to the manner in which such knowledge is communicated. Thus some social scientists and scientists argue that science itself is a form of communication, and the scientific method it closely bound to the method of interpretation. An important vein of thinking in the…

The puzzling quality of modern art, in both its complexity and its simplicity, symbolizes a barrier between the student and the elite's privilege of power. Too frequently, students have been taught that art is a secret, a code to which only teachers have the key, and that there is only one correct interpretation of a work, which must be imparted…

This collection of papers on semantics and cohesion is organized into two sections: Meaning and Semantics, and Textual Cohesion. Titles and authors are as follows: "Functional Text Semantics, Idioms, and Variability" (Jan-Ola Ostman); "On the Degree of Motivation in Signs Used in Metaphors Involving Plant Symbolism" (Ralf…

A bibliography of 430 books, journal articles, papers, and other references on Acadian French written in English or French is divided into two principal sections: an annotated bibliography of works focusing on the Acadian French dialect spoken in the Canadian Maritime Provinces, and an unannotated bibliography pertaining to Louisiana Acadian…

Signs or signifiers, composing what Lacan in 1968 called the "symbolic order," provide a means for making sense of the world and form a network enabling the human mind to form concepts. The signifier "literacy," for example, is often taken to refer to a fixed, isolatable concept, but this term would not be intelligible were it…

A discussion of the field of contrastive linguistics (CL) begins by defining the relationship between theoretical and applied CL in terms of the concept of finalization, which originated in the philosophy of science. Then, the historical development of CL in the United States and Europe is sketched. This development is seen as characterized by a…

The essays in this book focus on the role of the reader in textual interpretation. Specifically, they examine "open" and "closed" texts. The three essays in Part I deal with both verbal and nonverbal texts. The first considers musical compositions that leave considerable autonomy to the individual performer and also discusses…

The interpretation semiotic system that governs interpretation performance pertains to a distinct code of stylized conventions and includes all of the visual and auditory aspects that are generally salient to the characteristics of a performance. The selection of a particular convention for the interpretation of a specific text involves an act of…

Questions as to the nature of sign and symbol processes and the functions and behavioral consequences of human significant phenomena are of central concern in semiotics and communication. These matters continue to be of critical importance and are still largely unresolved. Scholars in both areas of inquiry have sought unification of scientific…

A general model of the uses of symbolic systems is defined in terms of the use of two techniques of symbolization: transactional and presentational. These techniques in turn are shown to relate to underlying modes of experience, which Susanne Langer has discussed as objective and subjective feeling, respectively. The second half of the paper…

Argues that literacy, liberal education, higher learning, and similar terms should not be conceived as single or fixed ideas and should not be dissociated from the conversation of both scholars and ordinary people. (SRT)