Jordan Zlatev

Cognitive Semiotics (hence, CS) can be defined as an interdisciplinary matrix of disciplines and methods, focused on the multifaceted phenomenon of meaning or as an emerging field with the ambition of “…integrating methods and theories developed in the disciplines of cognitive science with methods and theories developed in semiotics and the humanities, with the ultimate aim of providing new insights into the realm of human signification and its manifestation in cultural practices” (www.cognitivesemiotics.com). This definition could be further extended since human cognitive-semiotic specificity can only be properly understood in a comparative and evolutionary framework. Thus understood, CS cuts through and stretches across existing disciplinary divisions and configurations. For example, it is not to be seen as a branch of the overall field of semiotics, defined either in terms of “domain” (in the manner of e.g. biosemiotics, semiotics  of culture or social semiotics), or “modality” (e.g. visual semiotics, text semiotics). Not belonging to a single discipline, it is not a particular semiotics “school” (e.g. Peircean, Saussurean, Greimasian), and even less a particular theory (e.g. Existential Semiotics). Unfortunately, these are common misinterpretations of the label “cognitive semiotics”, given its instantiation of the modifier-head construction. But labels, while useful for organizing both concepts and fields of knowledge, are not essential and many de facto CS practitioners do not attach the label “cognitive semiotics” to their research.  Finally, CS is not just a new and fancier name for (traditional) cognitive science. The relationship between the two interdisciplinary matrixes is complex and deserves more attention. But in a nutshell, cognitive science has from its onset in the 1950s adopted an explicitly physicalist (computational and/or neuroscientific) take on mind, connecting to the humanities quite selectively, and above all to philosophy of mind with a distinctly reductionist bent (e.g. Dennett 1991). CS is considerably more pluralist in its ontological and methodological commitments, and thus, with a firmer foot in the humanities.

History and ongoing research

Given that semiotics is usually defined as the study of signs, or more generally meaning, and the polysemy (and current popularity) of the term “cognitive”, just about any semiotic theory – from those of Peirce and Saussure to those of Eco (1999) and Hoffmeyer (1996) – could qualify as a “cognitive semiotics”. However, in the sense outlined above, CS truly appeared only in the mid-1990s. One of the pioneers was Thomas Daddesio. In On Minds and Symbols: The Relevance of Cognitive Science for Semiotics (Daddesio 1995)  he aims to “…demonstrate both the feasibility and utility of a cognitive approach to semiosis by setting forth a cognitive theory of symbols, which I will then apply to a particularly difficult area of inquiry, the development of symbolic communication in children” (ibid: 2). In a useful historical overview, Daddesio shows how persistent attempts to “de-mentalize” notions such as sign, semiosis and meaning in the 20th Century contributed to a separation between semiotics and cognitive science. While “computation” and “information-processing” were the central concepts of the latter, there was not much to draw on for a “cognitive approach to semiosis”. But in the last two decades of the century, researchers from developmental and cognitive psychology (Bates, Bruner, Tomasello) and linguistics (Langacker, Talmy, Lakoff) turned increasingly to “experiential” notions such as schematization, (joint) attention, metaphor, and narrative. The ground was thus set for a rapprochement.

Around the same time and apparently independently, CS emerged at the Center for Semiotics (CfS) in Århus, Denmark (http://www.hum.au.dk/semiotics/). Per Aage Brandt had in a number of publications combined ideas from the “dynamic semiotics” of René Thom and from cognitive linguistics involving notions such as “construal”, “force dynamics”, “image schemas”, and “conceptual blending”. In Spaces, Domains and Meanings: Essays in Cognitive Semiotics (2004) CS is described as “a new discipline dedicated to the analysis of meaning”. The current research director of the CfS, Frederik Stjernfelt, likewise pursues a more purely “qualitative” tradition of conceptual analysis (not in the narrow linguistic sense), including interpretations of Peirce’s ideas on icons and above all diagrams, linking these to Husserl’s phenomenology (Stjernfelt 2007). At the same time, he and Peer Bundgaard apply their semiotic analyses to empirical phenomena such as aesthetics, mental imagery, animal communication, and human gestures. Svend Østergaard, Kristian Tylén and Riccardo Fusaroli are currently pursuing a “dynamical account of linguistic meaning making” combining conceptual models from dynamical systems theory and distributed cognition with corpus linguistics and experimental methodologies. Language is investigated as a coordinative activity, where symbolic patterns are aligned and negotiated to facilitate and constrain social coordination (e.g. Tylén et al. 2010; Fusaroli & Tylén in press). Such work explicitly combines ideas from linguistics, semiotics, experimental psychology and neuroscience, thereby demonstrating that CS is ongoing practice and not just a programmatic enterprise.

At the beginning of the millennium, Per Aage Brandt relocated to Case Western Reserve, where the Department of Cognitive Science was headed by Mark Turner, one of the authors of the cognitive semantic “blending theory” (Fauconnier & Turner 2002) and collaborated actively with Todd Oakley, who in From Attention to Meaning: Explorations in Semiotics, Linguistics, and Rhetoric (Oakely 2008) analyzes a wider range of phenomena than the usual “blending” analyses of standard examples such as “my surgeon is a butcher”. Perhaps the most notable fruit for CS of this collaboration was the establishment of the journal Cognitive Semiotics, which began in 2007. The volumes published so far have been devoted to topics such as agency, consciousness, and cognitive poetics, and have featured prominent authors from both the cognitive sciences and the humanities.

Another interdisciplinary group was established in 2007 at the Copenhagen Business School, with Per-Durst Andersen as research director. Søren Brier joined the group, coming from a background in ethology and cybernetics and bringing in an evolutionary and system-theoretic perspective. Brier’s Cybersemiotics: Why Information is Not Enough (2008) presents an ambitious attempt to achieve a synthesis of Peircian semiotics and second-order cybernetics, with the aspiration of unifying all domains of human knowing: from those of the physical and biological to the subjective/personal and the intersubjective/cultural. Per Durst-Andersen’s Linguistic Supertypes: A Cognitive-Semiotic Theory of Human Communication (2011) is inspired by the trichotomies of Peirce and Bühler and proposes that the grammatical meanings of any particular language tend to orient towards one of the three semiotic poles: Reality, Speaker and Hearer and thus that all languages can be characterized as belonging to one of three “linguistic supertypes”. The research of Viktor Smith, a third prominent member of the group, is considerably more “bottom up”, with studies on the semantics and pragmatics of compound expressions, interpreted under different contextual conditions and experimental settings.

The Centre for Cognitive Semiotics (CCS) at Lund University brings together researchers from semiotics, linguistics, cognitive science, and related disciplines on a common meta-theoretical platform of concepts, methods, and shared empirical data (http://project.ht.lu.se/en/ccs/). A staff of 10-15 senior and post-doctoral researchers and a larger number of affiliates coordinate their research under five interrelated themes – evolution, ontogeny, history, typology, and experimental psychology. The research director of CCS, Göran Sonesson, states: “I have been involved with phenomenological cognitive semiotics from the very start of my career without knowing it – or rather, without using the term” (Sonesson 2009: 26). Sonesson’s Pictorial Concepts (1989) can indeed be seen as a forerunner of CS in several respects. Still, CS is not based only on a meta-analysis of the results of the cognitive sciences; for it to come into its own, it should go hand in hand with them to motivate specific empirical studies. In this sense, CS research at Lund University got underway during the first years of the millennium, thanks to collaboration between Sonesson and researchers from linguistics such as the present author and cognitive scientists, such as Tomas Persson, a primatologist who applies CS concepts to the study visual perception and pictorial competence in non-human primates (Persson 2008). Mats Andrén’s (2010) PhD Thesis Children’s Gestures Between 18 and 30 Months is perhaps CCS’ most synthetic fruit so far.

While the researchers mentioned above use the term “cognitive semiotics” explicitly, the following areas of research and scholars can be seen as belong to the CS-family as well, according to the definition given earlier, as well as the characteristics in the next section.

• Gesture studies

The study of gestures – involving various degrees and kinds of iconicity, indexicality, and conventionality – has from the start called for a more or less explicit semiotic analysis (cf. Kendon 2004). Efron (1941) and later Bouissac (1973) provided some early proposals for how such analyses could be made more systematic, in part through the availability of new technology for recording and analysis. During the 1980s, thanks to the concerted work of Adam Kendon (1980, 2004) and David McNeill (1992, 2005), gesture studies has emerged as a more or less independent interdisciplinary field, but as shown by Andrén (2010) is has much to gain by closer integration with CS, and vice versa.

• Child development

The pioneering figures in developmental psychology clearly adopted a cognitive-semiotic approach by investigating interrelations between sensorimotor skills, imitation, imagination, and communicative signs (Piaget); or between thought, “inner speech”, and the semiotic mediation of cognition and development by socio-culturally transmitted sign systems (Vygotsky). Subsequently, however, the child’s mind was “modularized” and “nativized” and it became unfashionable to look for “domain general” capacities, stages, and transitions. Communication – language in particular – and cognition were to be kept apart and studied separately. Fortunately, the picture looks quite different today, with body, affect, and socio-cultural environment all seen as indispensible for growing minds. Colwyn Trevarthen’s long-term research and theorizing on infant and child intersubjectivity (Trevarthen 1979; Bråten and Trevarthen 2007) has been one of the key inspirations for this turn. Somewhat less concerned with empathy and more with sharing cultural meanings are developmentalists such as Jerome Bruner – whose Acts of Meaning (1990) marked a turning point for some practitioners of cognitive science – and Chris Sinha, whose Language and Representation: A Socio-Naturalistic Approach to Human Development (1988) builds on Piagetian and Vygotskyan ideas to develop an experimentally supported “pragma-semiotic” account of language development and evolution within a general theoretical approach named “epigenetic socionaturalism”.

• Bio-cultural evolution

Modern concepts of evolution have moved beyond the (ex-) “modern synthesis” focused on gene selection, to consider that evolution can take place on many levels (such as groups): relaxing, if not erasing, the differences between biological and cultural evolution. Several theoreticians with a background in neuropsychology and developmental psychology have addressed the perennial question of the “descent of man” within an extended, bio-cultural perspective on evolution, often explicitly involving concepts from semiotics. An important publication in the area is Merlin Donald’s (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Human Culture, presenting an integrated bio-cultural theory of human evolution. A key idea is that a domain-general capacity for skill learning, imitation, and gestural communication lies at the roots of uniquely human cognition and semiosis: “Mimetic skills or mimesis rests on the ability to produce conscious, self-initiated, representational acts that are intentional but not linguistic” (Donald 1991: 168). Terry Deacon’s work in evolutionary anthropology relates explicitly to semiotic theory. His widely influential The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (1997) draws on ideas from Peirce to propose that interpretative processes follow a progression of iconism (i.e. recognition), indexicality (space-time contiguity, as in the pairing of stimulus and response in classical conditioning), and most complexly – indeed, unique to our species – symbols. What Deacon exactly means by “symbols” has been a matter of much discussion.

• Enactive cognitive science

In parallel with – and similar to – the rapprochement between the cognitive sciences on the one hand and “semiotics and the humanities” on the other, as outlined above, there has been a movement of integrating ideas and methods from cybernetics, theoretical biology, and phenomenology since the publication of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991) by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. According to the broad definition involving “integrating methods and theories” offered in the introductory passage, this tradition could even be seen as falling under CS. Unfortunately there has been little interaction between these scholars and those more overtly involved in CS. Rejecting the excessive (unconscious) representationalism of standard cognitive science (i.e., cognitivism), enactivists were suspicious of any concept that sounded similar to representation, such as that of sign. Their empirical focus was on the direct experience of perception and action and on resolving the “hard problem” of consciousness – not on sign-mediated meaning. More recently, however, with the addressing of topics such as mental imagery and enculturation (Thompson 2007) as well as gesture (Gallagher 2005), it has become obvious that the classical phenomenological distinction between presentation and representation needs to be respected and theoretically addressed. From the CS side, phenomenologically oriented semioticians such as Sonesson (2011) have been making similar arguments, while focusing on the representational (e.g., pictorial) aspects of meaning. Given the mutually consistent, complementary and anti-reductionist orientations of the CS and enactive approaches, one should expect to see more interaction between them in the near future.

Characteristics of Cognitive Semiotics

On the basis of the brief review the previous section, we can discern a number of characteristics of CS research, which can serve to narrow down the broad definition of CS presented in the initial lines.

• A productive combination of (semiotic) theory and empirical research

In a broad (and trivial) sense, all research is both theoretical and empirical. However, semiotic theory is particularly concerned with explicating higher-order concepts such as meaning, sign use, representation, language, intersubjectivity, etc., along with their interrelations. It is anything but trivial to bring in empirical research that both contributes to such an explication and, at the same time, benefits from it in a way that produces new insights.  It is such “mutual enlightenment” – in the words of Evan Thompson – that is the central characteristic of CS. All who have been involved in the study of phenomena such as imagination, gesture, metaphor, etc. will know that it is far from trivial to combine conceptual and empirical analyses of their nature. There is a natural pull, one could say, to treat these as meaningful phenomena and explicate their features, constituent structures, types, etc. by engaging in systematic conceptual/eidetic analysis. On the other hand, psychologists tend to rush to “operationalize” the concepts, formulate hypotheses, perform experiments, and arrive at theoretical conclusions. But the outcome has often been that behind the same terms (e.g. “imagery”, “motion”, “symbol”) very different, and often diffuse, concepts have been lurking, with resultant cross-talk both across and within disciplines. How is CS to avoid this? The answer lies in formulating concrete research programs that not only state programmatically that the “methods and theories” of the humanities and sciences need to be integrated but actually go ahead and do it. This is important enough to be listed as separate feature.

• Methodological triangulation

At the heart of my own conception of CS is a kind of methodological “triangulation” (Zlatev 2009). Rather than fight wars on the proper methods for investigating the object of study, as has been done for over a century in linguistics (e.g., whether or not to use native-speaker intuitions), or define fields on the basis of their respective methods (philosophy as first-person, ethnomethodology as second-person, classical sociology and experimental psychology as third-person, etc.), the goals of methodological triangulation are (a) to acknowledge the validity of all methods within their respective domain of inquiry, (b) to acknowledge the epistemological priority of first- and second-person methods in the study of meaning (since what one wishes causally to explain must first be understood as well as possible, in order to avoid the cross-talk mentioned above), and (c) to integrate the three kinds of methods in the same project.

From the perspective of CS, the problem with the “classical” humanities has been a resolute rejection of third-person methods in the study of cultural world as, at best, limited, and at worse as “objectivist” and distorting of the phenomena. While much can be said in favor of such a critique, the steady progress of the sciences, including the study of the “mind/brain”, has given such an attitude a distinctly old-fashioned – if not reactionary – flavor. But on its side, (natural) science has tended to be myopic and dogmatic and has, unsurprisingly, hit a wall in extending the Galilean method to issues of value, meaning, norm and consciousness. It has also performed first-person and second-person methods implicitly, often without knowing it: you will not find sections on the use of intuition and empathy in the “methods” section of experimental psychology textbooks.  The challenges to success in practicing such non-reductive unification of knowledge are many – not the least institutional. CS runs the risk of being caught it the crossfire between the traditionalism of the humanities and the hubris of the sciences. But on the positive side, CS could make a contribution to “mending the gap between science and the humanities”: the subtitle of the last book of the evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould (2003).

• Influence of Phenomenology

Another common aspect to most CS research is a greater or lesser degree of indebtedness to the philosophical school of phenomenology, as founded by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the 20th century. There are multiple schools and types of phenomenology, but the basic idea is to depart from experience itself, and to provide descriptions of the phenomena of the world, including ourselves and others, as true to experience as possible – rather than constructing metaphysical doctrines, following formal procedures, or postulating invisible-to-consciousness causal mechanisms that would somehow “produce” experience.

There is continuity between the epistemological challenges of CS outlined above, and those dealt with by Husserl, leading him to develop phenomenology as a possible resolution to what he called the “crisis of European sciences”, caught between the extremes of positivism and relativism. From the standpoint of phenomenology, all meaning and knowledge is relative to a subject – or an “observer” as Humberto Maturana likes to phrase it (though not as dependent on language as assumed in his theory). However, this does not entail any form of “monadic” subjectivism for at least three reasons. First, we do not live in separate bubbles made up of “representations”, but in a meaningful lifeworld, co-constituted through our perceptions and actions. This is obvious for cultural meanings, such as those of language, but it applies also to the most basic layers of perception (e.g., of color). Second, even the most subjective experience is communicable – on the type if not token level – “to sympathetic others” (Trevarthen). Third, accepting that the structures of experience as elucidated by phenomenology are “prefigured” in the principles of life itself – as argued by Thompson and others – opens the way towards a naturalization of phenomenology without the reductionism that usually goes with that term.

Apart from an affinity in its epistemological foundations, CS has benefited from phenomenology with respect to specific topic areas: the above-mentioned distinction between presentation and representation, analyses of imagination and “picture consciousness” (Stjernfelt 2007; Sonesson 1989; 2011), analyses of the interrelations between the living body (Körper) and the lived body (Leib) (Gallagher 2005), intersubjectivity (Zlatev et al. 2008), etc. What would seem to be a natural next step is to take stock of the more dynamic “genetic” (individual) and “generative” (cultural) developments of phenomenology, including analyses of time consciousness (understood as the fundamentally temporal nature of all experience), passive synthesis (opening the door to analyses of the “unconscious”), sedimentation (i.e., of cultural knowledge), etc. That would be consistent with the otherwise strong emphasis on dynamics, prevalent enough to deserve to be listed as a characteristic of CS.

• Dynamism

At the risk of using a notion that has reached almost fetish status during the last decades (“everything changes, nothing is static”), one can make the generalization that CS studies meaning on all levels – from perception to language, along with the various forms of “external”, cultural representations (theatre, music, pictures, film, etc.) – primarily as dynamic processes rather than static products. Though the latter can be a convenient descriptive shorthand (e.g., of the “lexicon” of a language, or the “repertoire” of gestures in a community), nearly all CS scholars have made the point that viewing meaning in purely static, structural terms is insufficient for understanding the essentially relational, subject-relative, and (often) interpretive nature of semiosis. Unsurprisingly, various formulations have been used to capture the dynamic nature of meaning: sense making (Thompson), meaning construction (Oakley), languaging (Maturana), etc. It may also be reminded that the CfS scholars used the term “dynamic semiotics” prior to adopting “cognitive semiotics”. Thompson (2007) refers to the framework that he is developing as “embodied dynamism”.

There are at least five different time scales to the dynamic semiotic processes under study: (a) microseconds in the study of the emergence of the moment-to-moment experience of meaning(-fullness) as in vision or speech; (b) seconds in the study of the production and understanding of meaningful wholes such as scenes and (oral and gestural) utterances; (c) days, months, years in the study of semiotic development in ontogenesis; (d) decades, centuries in the study of cultural-historic processes, as in language change and sociogenesis; and (e) millennia in the study of biological evolution (i.e., phylogenesis). The levels on which these processes apply are also various, from those of “subpersonal” processes in brains to conscious experience in individuals to co-constructions of meaning in dyads and groups to changes in whole populations and environments.

These are fairly standard scales and levels, not specific to CS. Perhaps what could be seen as criterial for a CS approach to any particular phenomenon (e.g., visual perception, gesture interpretation, or identity formation) is not to focus on a single time scale – or ontological level (e.g., neural, experiential, social) – but to consider several scales/levels in relation to one another (cf. Andrén 2010). In line with the point about the relational character of meaning, a basic CS tenet is that meaning is not “inside” brains, minds, groups, or communities but is a result of processes of self/other/world interaction.

• Interdisciplinarity and/or transdisciplinarity

Innitially, CS was defined as an “interdisciplinary matrix of (sub-parts of) disciplines and methods”. Keeping to this definition, I discussed the combination of methods and levels of analysis. So: what are the “(sub-parts of) disciplines” involved? Judging from the background of CS practitioners, one can single out (1) semiotics (whether or not it should be seen as a single discipline), (2) linguistics (approaches viewing meaning as the essence of language), (3) psychology (mostly developmental, but also cultural, cognitive, and comparative), (4) anthropology (biological and, hopefully, cultural, despite its deeply ingrained resistance to “biologism”), (5) enactive cognitive science (including neuroscientific and dynamic modeling approaches), and (6) philosophy (above all, in the phenomenological tradition).

These are almost the same list of disciplines that combined forces to define cognitive science in the 1960s. The new synthesis of CS is quite different. For one thing, the “sub-parts of disciplines” involved in CS are often viewed as antagonistic to those that participated in the synthesis of cognitive science: so one finds cognitive vs. generative linguistics, epigenesis vs. nativism, enactivism vs. cognitivism, phenomenology vs. physicalism. At the same time, such oppositional thinking – and thus opposing CS to cognitive science – is much too schematic. After all, we are participants in ongoing processes of dynamic transformations of society, technology, and attitudes towards knowledge. While cognitive science may seem much more academically established than CS in terms of societies, journals, academic departments, and educational programs, it has not evolved into a self-sufficient discipline: it remains in essence an interdisciplinary program with various constellations crystalizing as “paradigms” for a limited period of time: Varela et al. (1991) portray its brief history as passing through the stages of cognitivism, connectionism, and enactivism. With a little good will, CS could even be seen as a fourth stage.

More important for the self-definition of CS is whether it should involve a lower or higher degree of interdisciplinarity. A higher degree is often called transdisciplinarity, especially by those who see “interdisciplinarity” as  a temporary coalition between members of different fields when something of considerable complexity is addressed (e.g., the brain as studied by neuroscience or evolution as studied by sociobiology) but without seriously affecting the participant disciplines or the broader field of knowledge.  In contrast, transdisciplinarity “concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond each individual discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the overarching unity of knowledge” (Transdisciplinarity, Wikipedia, August 17, 2011). From such a perspective, CS is more of an emerging transdisciplinary field: meaning does not constitute a specific empirical domain but rather cuts “between and across” disciplines. What has so far lain “beyond” is a coherent approach that “mends the gap between science and the humanities”, in the words of Gould. To the extent that CS lives up to the challenge of providing a coherent worldview uniting “biology, phenomenology and the sciences of mind” (in the words of Thompson) and even offering a foundation for the systematic study of fields such as visual art and music, it would deserve the label “transdisciplinary field”.

Furthermore, a feature often seen as crucial for transdisciplinary research is “the inclusion of stakeholders in defining research objectives and strategies in order to better incorporate the diffusion of learning produced by the research. Collaboration between stakeholders is deemed essential – not merely at an academic or disciplinary collaboration level, but through active collaboration with people affected by the research and community-based stakeholders” (Transdisciplinarity, Wikipedia, August 17, 2011). It is fair to say that, so far, CS has not achieved this, though there have been encouraging first attempts: Smith’s work with producers, consumer rights advocates, and legal experts in the Fairspeak project; work in Lund with minorities such as the Roma, on issues of group identity and integration; work in Århus on multiculturalism. Areas of crucial social significance, in which CS – with its participatory approach to knowledge – should be able to involve stakeholders include atypical development (e.g., autism), sex and gender, animal rights, and religion: notably all highly “sensitive” domains characterized by polarized views. Clearly, an approach such as CS, with its promise of mending the gap, could be beneficial.

In Conclusion: Why Cognitive Semiotics?

The fact that similar ideas – and even the term “cognitive semiotics” itself – have emerged in different places over the last decades is hardly a coincidence. At some risk of exaggeration, CS can be seen as called for by historical needs, such as those suggested in this article: the need to unify or at least to “defragment” our world-views, the need to come to terms with increasingly higher levels of dynamism and complexity, the need to understand better – and thus deal with – the dialectical relationship between individual freedom (autonomy) and collective dependence (sociality), etc.

In other words, if Cognitive Semiotics did not exist, we would need to invent it. Its potential as a transdisciplinary field integrating our understanding of life, mind, language and society is considerable. Furthermore, it can help integrate the participating disciplines internally – above all psychology and linguistics, divided as they are in conflicting sub-disciplines that treat their objects of study (i.e., mind and language) in, respectively, biological, mental, and socio-cultural terms. To emphasize again: CS is not a branch, school, or theory of semiotics, the latter understood as a self-contained discipline. It can make equal use of ideas from Peirce, Saussure, Jakobson, Greimas, von Uexküll – or from anywhere else – to the extent that those ideas are productive for empirical research leading to new insights into the nature (and culture) of human beings, as well as other meaning-seeking and meaning-making beings. It could perhaps be better called “semiotic cognitive/mind science”, if the phrase were not so cumbersome and “science” not so often taken to refer solely to natural science.

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Zlatev, J., Racine, T., Sinha, C., & Itkonen, E. (2008). The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Social Semiotics. Volume 21.4 (September 2011). Special Issue: Touch.

Among the crowded field of semiotics journals, Social Semiotics stands out as the most innovative outlet for original research exploring new frontiers in the realm of signs and meaning. Its latest issue, under Guest Editor Anne Cranny-Francis, is entirely devoted to the sense of touch. This volume deserves special attention because it brilliantly contributes to staking out a domain of inquiry which has been so far glossed over by semiotic research in spite of the fact that touch, in the form of direct or mediated contact, is the most fundamental channel of environmental and social information. The purpose of this collection of research articles is, in the Editor’s words, to offer “an overview of the social and cultural meanings of touch – including connection, engagement, contiguity, differentiation, positioning – and their contribution to our understanding of the world and of our own embodied subjectivity, along with their deployment in a range of contemporary technologies”. The eight articles which form this volume provide an intellectually exciting experience and a roadmap for future research. In the first article, Anne Cranny-Francis explores the multiple significances of touch and reviews the current relevant literature with special attention to touch-based technologies. Her abundant list of references (mostly from the past decade) is a precious bibliographical resource for whoever would be motivated to pursue this line of research.  In the next article, “Transfections of animal touch, techniques of biosecurity”, Nicole Shukin addresses the social construction of the ambiguous meaning of touch through examining both the issue of contagion (through contacts) and the various psychotherapies based on petting animals as a technology of feeling.  In “Losing touch: pedagogies of incorporation and the ability to write”, Megan Watkins and Greg Noble point to the importance of tactile experience in the acquisition of literacy by children who learn how to produce, use, and manipulate written texts. The fourth article describes and comments upon a sound art project by artists David Chapman and Louise K. Wilson. In “The caress of the audible: Re-sounding Falkland”, the co-authors explore the haptic dimension of their multimodal (audio and video) successive installations on the Falkland Estate in Fife, Scotland. How touch is linked to consumer decision-making is the topic of psychologist Cathrine V. Jansson-Boyd in “Touch matters: exploring the relationship between consumption and tactile interaction.” This new, provocative twist in a research field dominated by the role of vision in advertisement and marketing endeavours to explain why the tactile affect is also effective. Next, Kirsty Beilharz, from the DAB Sense-Aware Lab at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, looks at the use of embodied music controllers for gestural interaction with sounds. “Tele-touch embodied controllers: posthuman gestural interaction in music performance” expands the notion of the restricted body contacts between performers and musical instruments to the total intimate fusion which occurs when the interface is fully embodied through embedded sensors and actuators.  The last article, “Tactile aesthetics: toward a definition of its characteristics and neural correlates”, by experimental psychologists Alberto Gallace and Charles Spence, focuses on the neural basis of the hedonics of touch in art and life. The authors’ serious inquiry in this little explored domain is supported by an abundant and invaluable list of references. The volume concludes with a photographic essay by Anne Cranny-Francis which appropriately provides a visuo-tactile illustration for the cross-modal aesthetics of touch.

The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell. By Luca Turin. Faber & Faber, (2006).

In the context of this selective probe into studies of primal signals and signs, Luca Turin’s volume begs for more attention on the part of semioticians who do not deliberately restrict their concerns to the study of the production of intertextual meanings in discourse. The world of scents, odours, smell, perfumes, and flavours saturates our natural and cultural environment, and this constant input is ever active in the semiotic landscape in which we are immersed. A full semiotic treatment of the molecular medium which moulds our biological and social behaviour is still lacking. Discussing the poetics and rhetoric of the names given to commercial perfumes is the easy part of the task. Relating the chemistry and physiology of smell and taste to the cultural discourse which our primal sensations generate is a daunting challenge.  As a biophysicist who taught at University College London, Luca Turin clearly explains in his book how perfumes are composed and how they act upon our brain. As an expert who switched from an academic career to the world of trade – he became a scent designer for a commercial company a decade ago – Turin is fully conversant with the semiotics and pragmatics of the perfume industry. The book includes some fifty short chapters expertly written for non-specialists. It has been praised, though, in scientific journals such as Science. Sampling the titles of some chapters will give a flavour of the kind of information which can be found in this 200-page paperback: “The beginning of smell: chemical words”; “Smell becomes perfume: chemical poems”; “How molecules are made”; “A problem of nomenclature”; “The smell alphabet”; “Molecular chords”; “The future of fragrance”. The issues raised in these chapters are relevant to both biosemiotics and cultural semiotics. For those who would like to deepen and expand their understanding of the world of smell, an invaluable companion volume is Lyall Watson’ s Jacobson’s Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell (Penguin Books, 1999)

The Man Who Tasted Shapes. By Richard E. Cytowic. The MIT Press, (1998).

Synaesthesia is a well-documented, albeit shocking phenomenon for the vast majority of humans who do not experience the natural merging of two or more senses in a single perception: sounds which have colors, shapes which have sounds or taste, colors which have smells, and the like. Richard Cytowic published in1989 (New York, Springer Verlag) the first book in English to consider synaesthesia from both the neurological and psychological points of view. His second book on this topic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, is divided into two parts. The first one (A medical mystery tale) offers in narrative form a thorough account of the neurological architecture which creates the atypical perceptions diagnosed as synaesthesia. Although this phenomenon is considered pathological because of its rarity in its most extreme form, it nevertheless points to a potential of the human brain which may explain the propensity with which we create cross-modal metaphors. The complex logical and semantic models which have been constructed in order to justify on rational grounds such transgressions of sensorial categories, might find a better explanation in the very wiring of the brain and its genetic and developmental variations. The book is written for the general educated public but rests on scientific evidence. From an evolutionary point of view it can be noted that discriminating between shape and taste might have not been adaptive for predators hunting for their swimming preys. In human cultures, metaphors flourish in poetry which by many aspects evokes primal states of consciousness in which sensations and emotions merge. This is why, undoubtedly, the author devotes the second part of the book to the “primacy of emotion”. In brief, this is a thought-provoking work which could inspire further research and expand the vista of semiotics.

You may be wondering at this point exactly what I mean by using the words affective geography; how can I talk about geographic transformation when place is generally thought of in terms of simple ‘here and there’ distinctions and space is usually proceeded with a phrase such as ‘everything in its’… What do clowns and red noses have to do with any of this? I am going to begin to assemble my thoughts on these subjects by outlining very briefly what affective-geography is without providing an actual definition because there isn’t one (see Thrift 2004).  What does affective-thinking mean for geographers? I am going to do this partly because we all need to understand the affective-critique of geography, but also because my research is not so much about placing clowns as an object of study within geography as it is about throwing the discipline of geography to the clowns (literally!) and making use of the clown as a tool for re-conceptualizing geographic space.

I want to being with a brief overview of how geographers understand the terms ‘place’ and ‘space’. For geographers, the term ‘place’ has several meanings. ‘Place’ is the way in which we separate one object from another; for example, we are located here rather than over there, so place is ontological. But ‘place’ is also a way of knowing, seeing and sensing the world. So place is also epistemologically and metaphysically conceived and rather far removed from the simple ‘here and there’ distinctions (Cresswell 2004). The geographer, Doreen Massey (2005) notes that ‘place’ in our globalized and interconnected world is often evoked in a grounded sense or, in other words, in terms of localized places with a series of symbolic and political motivations attached. Geographers have used ‘place’ as a means of taming the world’s inherent spatialities: we retreat to ‘place’. In doing so, we, geographers, often unthink it, close it down.

Massey (2005) also notes that the way in which geographers typically conceptualize ‘space’ is also closed down. She argues that the way in which we imagine space—as a surface with cultures, people and places spread out upon it, is also ‘unthought’. So how can we geographers think about place and space in a way that leaves them open to greater possibilities? Well, we can think about these terms in ways that unsettle the neat mappings of representation(s) onto notions of space and place. Geographer’s Nigel Thrift (2008) and Doreen Massey (2005), among others (See Thrift 2004, 2008), have disrupted the neat relationship between “the spatial and the fixation of meaning” or representation (Massey 2005: 20) in part by shedding the language of representation. Without subscribing to established ‘representationalism’ (Lorimer 2005), geographers (e.g., Ashmore 2011; Doel 2000; McCormack 2003, 2008; Pile 2010, 2011; Thrift 2004) are able to focus on the processes and movements at play in space, or affects.

To do this for place we need to think of place in terms of a malleable construct. If I may quote geographer Tim Cresswell (2004: 39) “The work of Seamon, Pred, Thrift, de Certeau and others show us how place is constituted through reiterative social practice— place is made and remade on a daily basis. Place provides a template for practice— an unstable stage for performance…” For space, Doreen Massey (2005) has pushed our thinking in a similar direction. She argues that space, as a malleable construct, is produced through complex inter-relationships. To think of space in these terms is to think of it as something never finished and multiple, but, more importantly, it is to agree that the story of the world can never be fully written and that the future is open (Massey 2005).

Here is a non-geographical but nonetheless affective example that I think will help us to think about open futures and possibilities. I have a little story drawn from Nassim Taleb’s (2010) book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, o, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books (1).

In the example above Umberto Eco’s books are all possible affects, each unread book a possibility.

We have already considered what affective thinking does to key geographic concepts such as ‘place’ and ‘space’, so I want to turn now towards understanding affect as it relates to the body. The key point that I want to make here is that affects — in the Deleuzian understanding of the term, are fundamentally different from emotions that can be defined within a known field. Affects are pre-cognitive and partially determine how and in what way bodies can act (Massumi 2002). It has been noted by geographers Bain and Nash (2006) that the research on the body in geography has progressed from definitions of ‘the body’ to examinations of embodiment, and finally to explorations of the role of space in constructing embodied subject. Geographers such as Nigel Thrift (2004, 2008) and Derek McCormack (2008) have looked at the affective body as an elusive, paradoxical, and often hard-to-define object of study that moves in different ways to produce space. To put this another way and quote McCormack (2008:1823) “[s]paces are — at least in part— as moving bodies do”.

Contrary to much of the contemporary scholarship in geography, affective geographers consider the non-psychological or transversal body-subject (Pile 2010; see also Massumi 2002). The transversal body-subject is a difficult concept to grasp; however, Brian Massumi (1992) suggests that to be transversal a body-subject can never be fully embodied in one body. This means that transversal body- subjects have emotions, thoughts, and even forms that are located “between”. For affective geographers,

[t]he body is not used to solicit telling testimony about people’s lives, instead it becomes a device that enables the researcher to reveal the trans-human, the non-cognitive, the inexpressible, that underlies and constitutes social life— albeit unknowingly…. affectual geography’s body is both universal and also prior to its constitution in social relations (Pile 2010: 11).

This view builds upon the central claims of Nigel Thrift (2008) which include that we do not always reflect consciously upon external representations; that intelligibility is distributed and held in a range of actors, including text, images, and bodies; and that affectivity is an important part of our spatial experience.

"Thinking Professor" by Alison Bain 2010

The presence of clown characters in urban public space opens significant opportunities for interactive encounters that re-configure understandings of space in the city (Joseph 2006). I argue that such transformative spaces of encounter are produced through techniques and actions that are unique to the clown art form and through the particular ways in which this art form can transgress both spatial and cultural norms. The use of the red nose in particular can (un)mask the habitual practices of spatial use.

So how can I make such a claim? Well, it comes back to the way we make sense of the clown— which is not often considered as an object of study in the discipline of geography, but is a much-studied figure outside of the discipline of geography. While such studies offer rich detail about particular historical clown characters and document the social roles of the clown within specific cultural contexts, they are dated assessments of the function of the clown in contemporary Western societies. In general, however, the social and moral roles played by clowns, as well as close relatives fools and jesters, are well documented, and are understood to originate from their marginal yet privileged oracular positions within society (Rémy 1962; Towsen 1976). Clowns, in recognizable form, have been traced as far back as Egypt’s Old Kingdom about 4,500 years ago. In their modern form, there is general agreement among scholars that clowns are embodied expressions of Carl Jung’s (1959) ‘trickster archetype’. The clown’s positioning as an archetypal expression and also as the performer-body help to make the clown an ideal figure for affective-inquiry.

Zoning in on the red nose—the world’s smallest mask as it is often called—we can begin to see with the donning of the nose the transformation of the human subject into something that, while still recognizably human, is also something more than human. The clown is a paradoxical figure, a contradiction if you will that is in many ways similar to its audience, yet an identifiable ‘other’ (Emigh 1996). So, too, do clowns stand out within the context of the circus or the theatrical show because they follow ‘clown logic’, breaking or inventing new rules as they see fit (MacManus 2003). In many ways, I am drawing partly from my own experience as a clown here—the clown’s nose is a great un-masker. The red nose is both liberating and protective. It grants the wearer a disguise while, at the same time, liberating the more raw or suppressed aspects of the self which would normally be controlled. In their 30, 000 year history within human cultures,  masks have been widely used as part of cultural rituals, theatrical productions and within the healing arts (Napier 1986). Like the clown itself, however, not a lot is known or written about the precise origins of the red nose (There is some suggestion that it is linked to the reddish nose of the drunk, who, being drunk, is apt to be foolish).

From my perspective, speaking now as a geographer, the masking of the human form with the red nose and the interactions of the clown can function as a temporary unmasking or raising to consciousness of the habitual practices or social conventions that come together to create space. The oscillation of space between the masked and the unmasked is possible because of the unique clown art-form. In theatrical terms, the clown has no fourth wall, which means the clown acts, or turns as they are called, engage directly with the audience. In urban public space the term ‘engagement’ can be extended to include those individuals who join into the clown antics, as well as those who carefully avoid the clown and continue about their business. Both of these actions can be considered affects, but, more importantly for the present discussion, they function as masking and unmasking moments. Donald McCmanus (2003) notes that the contradictory approach of the clown to things like social conventions, for example, constitute an alterative way of doing— which most clowns call ‘clown logic’.

The temporary break from ingrained patterns of spatial use and social convention that the red nose and ‘clown logic’ affords the clowns and also the audience, engaged or not, exposes for the audience the various habitual practices that make up a space.

If I may highlight this process for you, I shall turn to the University campus. Research on higher education suggests that university and college campus cultures, while each of a distinctive nature, are very much a reflection of the border social and cultural context in which they exist. Our university campuses and the spaces surrounding them are not immune from many of the currents of spectacle-based society, most notably choreographed spaces. In particular, campus spaces are choreographed in such a way that the rhythms and uses of space become ingrained overtime. This, as the work of geographer Tim Cresswell (1996) suggests, means that the habitual practices of and within particular spaces may only become apparent once they have been disrupted or transgressed. When spatial performance is transgressed, the actions of the transgressive individual or group of individuals are interpreted as ‘out of place’, both socially and spatially. This is because space/place are not simple geographical matters but rather complex ideas that intersect with a much broader range of social and cultural expectations (Cresswell 1996).

Research on university campus spaces also suggests that the ingrained patterns of spatial use have only become more pronounced— and this is particularly the case for urban campuses— as the use of/ and need for space intensifies (Griffith 1994). Gulson and Symes (2007) argue that school architecture is not merely background phenomena, and while many educational spaces are fluid and ephemeral, they are constantly being formed and deformed within a ‘determined repertoire of behaviour’.

Enter the U Clown Collective, a group of professionally trained clowns who intervene in and around campus spaces in the Greater Toronto Area. They create a space or set of spaces that are oscillating between being masked and unmasked. The U Clown Collective consists of 16 young clowns who come together, usually in smaller groups, on a fairly ad hoc basis to engage in public clowning. For the young clowns involved, the Collective provides an opportunity to further the development of their clown character (every person’s is unique) by connecting with people. And being clowns, they relish any and all opportunity to cause disruption. Within the spaces of the university, the red noses tend to be in stark contrast to the university population. Because of the potential of the clown to be a polarizing figure— people generally either love or fear them— the presence of a clown, especially in high traffic areas on a campus, can result in some remarkable moments of spatial and human transformation (unmasking) where individuals engage (or not) with the clown and temporarily step out of their role as student, faculty, or staff.

I want to suggest by way of a conclusion that the masking and unmasking of  human as well as habitual spatial practices, and the potential of the world’s smallest mask to affect, indeed transversalize geographic space, is only given strength because of the ways in which we understand the clown and its red nose. It is both masked and unmasked, more or less human, and almost recognizably normal in terms of its dress and actions. The clown plays within the tensions between its archetypal expression and its performer-body. It is between. It is an affective force within space and time that can, through its actions, like Prof. Eco’s library, open us towards greater possibilities.

Works Cited

Ashmore, P. 2011. Bedtime Material: recording becoming asleep. Area 43(2):211-217.

Bain, A.L. and Nash C.J. 2006. Undressing the researcher: feminism, embodiment, and sexuality at a queer bathhouse event. Area 39(1): 99-106.

Bouissac, P. 1976. Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.

Brown, G. 2008. Ceramics, clothing and other bodies: affective geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters. Social and Cultural Geography 9(8):915-932.

Cresswell, T. 1996. In Place/ Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1988. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.

Dewsbury, J-D. 2011. The Deleuze-Guattarian assemblage: plastic habits. Area 43(2):148-153.

Doel, M.A. 2000. Un-Glunking geography spatial science after Dr Seuss and Giles Deleuze. In M. Crang and N. Thrift 2000. Thinking space London: Routledge., P. 117-136.

Emigh, J. 1996. Masked Performance: The play of self and other in ritual and theatre. Phillidelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Griffith, J.C. 1994. Open space preservation: An imperative for quality campus environments. The Journal of Higher Education 65(6): 645-669.

Gulson, K.N., Symes, C. 2007. Knowing one’s place: educational theory, policy, and the spatial turn. Critical Studies in Education 48(1): 97-110.

Jung, C.G. 1959. Four Archetypes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Longhurst, R. 1995. The body and geography. Gender, Place and Culture (2)1:97-106.

Longhurst, R. 1998. (Re)presenting shopping centres and bodies. questions of  pregnancy. In, New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender, R. Ainsley (ed), 20-34. London: Routledge, pp.20-34.

Lorimer, H. 2005. Cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more-than representational’. Progress in Human Geography 29(1): 83-94.

Lorimer, H. 2008. Cultural geography: non-representational conditions and concerns. Progress in Human Geography 32(4):551-559.

Massey, D. 2005. For Space. SAGE Publications: London.

Massumi, B. 1992. A user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Massumi, B. 2002. Parables for the virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

McCmanus, D. 2003. No Kidding! Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

McCormack, D.P. 2003. An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28(4): 488-507.

Merriman, P. 2010. Architecture/dance: choreographing and inhabiting spaces with Anna and Lawrence Halprin. Cultural Geographies 17(4): 427-449.

Merriman, P. 2011. Human geography without time-space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Napier, A.D. 1986. Masks, transformation, and paradox. Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press.

Peacock, L. 2009. Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance. Chicago: Intellect Books.

Pile, S. 2010. Emotions and affect in recent human geography. Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers 35(1): 5-20.

Pile, S. 2011. Distant feelings: telepathy and the problem of affect transfer over distance.

Transactions of the Institute of Britsh Geographers.

Taleb, N.N. 2010. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. 2^nd Edition New York: Random House.

Thrift, N. 2004. Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect. Geografiska

Annaler 86 B (1):57-78.

Thrift, N. 2008. Non-representational theory. Space, politics, affect. London and New York: Routledge.

Towsen, J. H. 1976. Clowns. New York: Hawthorn Books.

Ulanov, A., and Ulanov, B. 1987. The Witch and the Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality. Chiron Publications: Illinois.

Portions of this paper were given as part of ‘Festive fogs the spectacle(s): urban campus culture(s) and the U-Clown Collective’ at the June 2011 meeting of the Canadian Association of Geographer’s in Calgary, Alberta.

Judith Hanna

Visual and kinesthetic stimuli led Dr. Judith Lynne Hanna (Columbia University, PhD 1976) to begin an almost five decade interdisciplinary study on the semiotics of nonverbal communication.  At social dances in Los Angeles, she noticed that African university students had a distinctive “aura” as they danced, an energy that was different from their American classmates in a way that transcended simple movement variation.  She wondered why.  Since 1962, Hanna has been on an odyssey to understand the meaning of different kinds of dance through time and across cultural space. Adventures around the world raised questions that led to her scholarly research in disciplines such as anthropology, dance theory, political science, and sociolinguistics.   She has investigated the text and context of ritual and social dance in Nigeria and Uganda, the communication of race relations through dance in an American elementary school in Dallas, Texas, the expression of emotion and meaning of Western and nonwestern dance in conventional American theaters, the variety of American social dance styles, and debates about “exotic” dance in adult entertainment clubs. Cognitive science explorations of the mind-body interface substantiated many of the theories she first developed in the 1970s and as reported in To Dance Is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communication (University of Texas Press, 1979, revised edition, University of Chicago Press, 1987), along with articles in Semiotica (1979, 1984) and Current Anthropology (1979).

Columbia University’s anthropology doctoral program required courses in four fields: cultural, linguistic, physical, and archeological.  Hanna wrote university papers about how each of these sub-fields of anthropology could help explain the meaning of dance, but she discovered that linguistics was surprisingly appropriate. She applied sociolinguistic approaches to nonverbal dance to understand how dance is language-like and accordingly powerful, consequently discovering that both dance and verbal language have vocabulary (locomotion and gestures in dance) and grammar (rules for putting the vocabulary together and, in dance, justifying how one movement can follow another).  Both dance and verbal language also have semantics (meaning). Verbal language strings together sequences of words, and dance strings together sequences of movement to make phrases and sentences. However, dance is an autonomous system of communication. Because gesture and locomotion in dance rest on different representational devices from speech/writing and are not dictated by their standard linear and non-spatial form, dance offers a different view of the performer. Dance is also able to communicate content not easily communicated in verbal language. With its multiple, symbolic, and sometimes elusive meanings, dance more often resembles poetry than prose. Just as there are many verbal languages, Hanna has discovered that dance is not a universal “language.”  Hanna’s course papers at Columbia University evolved into the book, To Dance Is Human.  While the manuscript was in progress, the distinguished semiotician Thomas Sebeok lectured at the University of Texas where Hanna was then teaching.  Sebeok broadened Hanna’s comprehension of semiotics when he invited her to be on committees to review conference abstracts and papers for Semiotica.  Hanna later contributed articles to the journal and to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics (1986, edited by Sebeok).

In her semiotic approach, Hanna explores the meaning of dance in terms of the elements of dance itself (use of time, space, effort, locomotion, gesture, parts of body used, aesthetics, music, costume) and their relationship to other cultural, political, social, and historical considerations (see “African Dance Frame by Frame, 1989).  Although there were tools such as “Labanalysis” to describe the physical actions of dance (developed by Rudolf Laban and Irmgard Bartenieff, among others), there were none to probe for meaning in these physical actions.  So Hanna consulted with dancers from the diverse cultures living in New York City at the time and developed a semantic grid to help her analyze her first fieldwork data.  She discovered that dance uses a number of devices and spheres to encode meaning.  At least six symbolic devices are used for conveying meaning that dancers utilize in dance: concretization, icon, stylization, metonym, metaphor, and actualization. The devices for encapsulating meaning in dance operate within one or more of eight spheres: event, body in action, whole pattern of performance, sequence of unfolding movement, specific movement, intermesh of movement with another medium, vehicle for another medium, and presence. The devices and spheres represent various ways in which dancers embody the imagination of the choreographer and dancer.  Dancers create meaning in one or more “boxes” of the grid formed by the intersection of the vertical and horizontal lines separating devices and spheres.  Dancers may encode meaning singly, in various combinations, or in differing ratios.   The observer can impose the grid on the dance as a whole and then zoom in on smaller units of the dance to ask if meaning is related to one or more of units located in the grid boxes.  Hanna’s research demonstrated that among the Ubakala-Igbo in Nigeria, dance is a medium for fun, courtship, religion, politics, health, healing, and education. Through song and movement, dance teaches young and old alike what it is to be a good wife, husband or political leader.  Metaphor is the predominant device operating in the spheres of event and specific movement to communicate gender roles. When the social and biological roles of men and women are supposed to differ–women as life-giving mothers, and men as life-taking warriors–the dances of each gender contrast. Women dance slowly and effortlessly in circles, whereas men dance rapidly and forcefully in angular lines.

During an ethnographic study in Dallas, Texas, Hanna found that the metaphor device seen in the spheres of event and movement was also common in African American spontaneous dance in a desegregated magnet elementary school (whites volunteered to send their children to the school which had been all black).  This time, the metaphoric distinction was racialized instead of gendered.   In classrooms, hallways, and playgrounds, the children “discussed” stressful race relations, patterns of authority, and personal identity through physical expressions of dance.  In theme, participation criteria, and performance space in a white-controlled school system, African-American youngsters metaphorically identified themselves as distinct from the “shuffling black” stereotypes of earlier historical periods and from the whites of today. They attained a wished-for privileged status through dance in the way they performed in spaces where dance does not usually occur, excluded whites from dance activities, and made fun of ballet by performing steps in inappropriate places in defiance of white teachers (see “Interethnic Communication in Children’s Own Dance, Play, and Protest” 1986 and 1988).

The next stage of Hanna’s semiotic journey was at the University of Maryland.  A dance department chairperson asked her to speak to the faculty about the reciprocity of emotion and movement. Then she added, “But we don’t want you to talk about culture.” Implicit in her remark was the commonly accepted theoretical assumption of a universal way that humans, including dancers, express emotions through movement and, conversely how their emotions motivate (make happen) movement.  Having learned about different ways children nonverbally express emotion in her elementary school study, Hanna decided to test the notion of dancers’ universal expression of emotion.  To do so, she began by interviewing dancers and audience members.  At a series of eight concerts (American tap, modern dance, postmodern dance; Indian Kuchipudi and Kathakali, Japanese Kabuki, and Philippine dance), she asked dancers what emotions they wanted to get across and how they thought they expressed them.  Hanna surveyed audiences about what emotions they perceived, clues to how the emotions were conveyed, and how they felt in response. In addition, she explored whether the perception of emotion in movement and the use of different clues co-varied with an audience member’s age, gender, ethnicity, education, income, occupation, and knowledge about the genre. The study, reported in The Performer-Audience Connection: Emotion to Metaphor in Dance and Society (1983; see also “Dance” 1999), found diversity in emotional expression.
Hanna has been interested in applying her research to real world problems.  In addition to addressing problems in intercultural communication in schools, she wrote a book called Partnering Dance and Education (Human Kinetics, 1999).  Hanna’s arguments include (1) why dance education should be part of all youngsters’ schooling in K-12; (2) the intertwining of the cognitive, physical, and affective; and (3) the gap between the goals of the worlds of K-12 academic education and dance (dancers, dance teachers, university dance programs). The key point is that through the mind-body dynamic, dance has the power to benefit students in their academic, personal, and adult lives.  In, about, and through dance, students learn a language-like mode of expression that uses the same parts of the brain for creating dance and for language.

An unprecedented terror attack in the United States on 9/11/01 created new kinds of social stresses. Asked to discuss the role of dance in healing, Hanna’s semiotic research led to Dancing for Health: Conquering and Presenting Stress (2006). She describes the extraordinary role of dance as a healing art for all kinds of stress. Indeed, to dance in order to resist, reduce, and escape stress is human. Using examples from many different cultures and throughout history, she explains how dance is both exercise and aesthetic communication. While science has shown the mind/body integration and benefits of exercise, most cultures incorporate dance to come to terms with life crises, conflict resolution, revitalization of the past, and as a way to face future uncertainties. Hanna reveals how individuals expel spider venom, shake off death, and evade evil by using the power of dance.  Her case studies, including her own personal experiences as a dancer, reveal the potential of dance as a key strategy in the arsenal against stress.

In 1995, Hanna was asked to be an expert court witness in an adult entertainment exotic dance (striptease) case.   Debates in the courtroom involved the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that protects speech and expression. This case began a 15-year exploration into the semiotics of yet another genre of dance. Her research revealed that exotic dance was a form of dance, art and theatre that communicated various messages.  It was, and continues to be, a provocative lens to view a culture war in the United States in which a segment of the politically active Christian Right seeks to impose it Bible-based views on society.  See Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy and a Christian Right (University of Texas Press, 2012).
Currently an Affiliate Senior Research Scientist, Department of Anthropology, at the University of Maryland, College Park, Hanna has taught at Michigan State University, Fordham University, International College, University of Texas at Dallas, University of Maryland, and Université Libre de Bruxelles. She has lectured at more than 50 colleges and universities, addressed more than 30 association meetings and special conferences and seminars; published her work in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ghana, Jamaica, Netherlands, Poland, Santo Domingo, South Africa, Sweden, and United Kingdom; and appeared on radio and television in Canada, Nigeria, Sweden, and the United  States. In addition she has worked as an educational consultant and has given special workshops for educators and students. See www.judithhanna.com for a curriculum vitae and descriptions of her books and articles organized by these categories:  Africa/diaspora, America, criticism, education, striptease, gender, health, identity, method, and religion.

Judith Hanna’s CV can be downloaded here

Jeff Verschueren

25? There are different ways of calculating a person´s age: from birth, or from the moment of conception. The same goes for institutions, organizations, associations, though for the latter ‘conception’ is harder to pin down, as it takes place in the more abstract world of ideas.

A very brief history

The International Pragmatics Association (http://ipra.ua.ac.be), if its date of birth is considered criterial, is exactly 25 years old. It was established as a not-for-profit organization in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1986. Its acronym, IPrA, was meant to distinguish it from the International Phonetic Association or the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA – well-known among linguists). The small ‘r’ served the purpose of avoiding confusion with the International Peace Research Association (IPRA, an abbreviation that later turned out to stand for a wide range of organizations, from the International Public Relations Association to the International Professional Rodeo Assocation). But the idea on which its establishment was based has an older history. My own involvement in pragmatics-related organizational work dates back to 1979, when Herman Parret enlisted Marina Sbisà and me to co-organize a conference on “Possibilities and limitations of pragmatics” in Urbino, Italy (July 8-14, 1979). Another pivotal event was the 1984 workshop “Between semantics and pragmatics” which Johan van der Auwera co-organized with Svenka Savić in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia (May 7-18, 1984). This workshop led to the 1985 “International Pragmatics Conference”, co-organized with Marcella Bertuccelli Papi in Viareggio, Italy (September 1-7, 1985). Meanwhile, a Pragmatics Documentation Center had been established in 1984 at the University of Antwerp where, in collaboration with Jan Nuyts, a comprehensive bibliography of pragmatics was being produced, a 2197-page work, published in 1987 by John Benjamins Publishing Company (and still updated annually online, in editorial collaboration with Frank Brisard and Michael Meeuwis). The success of the Viareggio conference, in terms of the unexpected number of participants as well as the richness of content, confirmed the belief that, in spite of the fragmentary appearance of pragmatics as a science of language use, it provided a mobilizing idea for collaborative and trans-disciplinary research relevant for addressing true problems of human communication. This belief was the basis for the establishment of an International Pragmatics Association.IPrA immediately attracted hundreds of members. Its establishment also brought along critical reactions. Thus Thomas Sebeok wrote a note expressing his disapproval, as he did not see how a field of pragmatics could flourish outside of semiotics. In principle, he was right. How can one detach the use of signs from a close consideration of the signs themselves? Of course, one cannot. It is for the same reason that detaching a focus on cognition from social context is in principle impossible, just as most social issues cannot be dealt with without taking cognition into account. But would that be a sufficient reason to regard the notion of cognitive linguistics, as distinguishable from pragmatics, as a bad idea? Clearly, there is nothing wrong with highlighting a specific perspective, as long as one realizes that it is a perspective and that perspectivization requires full awareness of the defocused aspects of the ‘reality’ it bears on.

Conferences

Handbook of Pragmatics

The International Pragmatics Association (http://ipra.ua.ac.be), if its date of birth is considered criterial, is exactly 25 years old. It was established as a not-for-profit organization in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1986. Its acronym, IPrA, was meant to distinguish it from the International Phonetic Association or the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA – well-known among linguists). The small ‘r’ served the purpose of avoiding confusion with the International Peace Research Association (IPRA, an abbreviation that later turned out to stand for a wide range of organizations, from the International Public Relations Association to the International Professional Rodeo Assocation). But the idea on which its establishment was based has an older history. My own involvement in pragmatics-related organizational work dates back to 1979, when Herman Parret enlisted Marina Sbisà and me to co-organize a conference on “Possibilities and limitations of pragmatics” in Urbino, Italy (July 8-14, 1979). Another pivotal event was the 1984 workshop “Between semantics and pragmatics” which Johan van der Auwera co-organized with Svenka Savić in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia (May 7-18, 1984). This workshop led to the 1985 “International Pragmatics Conference”, co-organized with Marcella Bertuccelli Papi in Viareggio, Italy (September 1-7, 1985). Meanwhile, a Pragmatics Documentation Center had been established in 1984 at the University of Antwerp where, in collaboration with Jan Nuyts, a comprehensive bibliography of pragmatics was being produced, a 2197-page work, published in 1987 by John Benjamins Publishing Company (and still updated annually online, in editorial collaboration with Frank Brisard and Michael Meeuwis). The success of the Viareggio conference, in terms of the unexpected number of participants as well as the richness of content, confirmed the belief that, in spite of the fragmentary appearance of pragmatics as a science of language use, it provided a mobilizing idea for collaborative and trans-disciplinary research relevant for addressing true problems of human communication. This belief was the basis for the establishment of an International Pragmatics Association.

IPrA immediately attracted hundreds of members. Its establishment also brought along critical reactions. Thus Thomas Sebeok wrote a note expressing his disapproval, as he did not see how a field of pragmatics could flourish outside of semiotics. In principle, he was right. How can one detach the use of signs from a close consideration of the signs themselves? Of course, one cannot. It is for the same reason that detaching a focus on cognition from social context is in principle impossible, just as most social issues cannot be dealt with without taking cognition into account. But would that be a sufficient reason to regard the notion of cognitive linguistics, as distinguishable from pragmatics, as a bad idea? Clearly, there is nothing wrong with highlighting a specific perspective, as long as one realizes that it is a perspective and that perspectivization requires full awareness of the defocused aspects of the ‘reality’ it bears on.

A flux of ideas

Sachiko

While large conferences serve an important networking function, they also provide a prismatic view of developments in academic fields of inquiry and teaching. As to linguistic pragmatics, IPrA’s major strength has always been its ability to bring together a truly interdisciplinary community of scholars sharing an interest in problems of language use, approached from a multitude of different angles, in view of pure understanding of structures and processes as well as a wide range of fields of application, from language teaching to intercultural and international communication, language pathology, computer communication systems, and media old and new. This interdisciplinarity has been clearly in evidence during every one of the conferences, with participants from linguistics, (developmental) psychology, sociology, anthropology, computer science and philosophy. Conference announcements always state that, in addition to the special theme of the conference, presentations on any topic relevant to the field of pragmatics in its widest sense as the interdisciplinary (cognitive, social, and cultural) science of language use are welcome. Undoubtedly, it is the mix of backgrounds that remains one of the major appeals for participants. Though scholars with related interests tend to stay together, they cannot avoid learning from others as well. The special themes of the conferences themselves, for that matter, usually build in an aspect of interdisciplinarity. They have included, for instance, “Cognition and communication in an intercultural context” (Kobe 1993), “Language and ideology” (Reims 1998), “Linguistic pluralism: policies, practices, and pragmatics” (Toronto 2003), “Pragmatics and philosophy” (Riva del Garda 2005), “Language data, corpora, and computational pragmatics” (Göteborg 2007), to mention just a few.

Because of the constant flux of ideas, obliging an observer to look in innumerable directions at the same time, it is hard to identify clear patterns of development over the years. There are, however, a few things that can be pointed out quickly (leaving a detailed historical analysis to some overambitious future doctoral student).

First of all, pragmatics in the 1980s was already moving away from a speech acts oriented and sentence-level look at what it is to do things with words. Yet, speech acts, while taken out of the somewhat restrictive context of orthodox speech act theory, have survived as topical anchoring points. These days, it is specifically an interest in individual types of speech acts (apologies, compliments, complaints, etc.), often approached comparatively across linguistic communities, but almost always placed in an interactive context, that remain topics of discussion and research.

Second, the other pillar of linguistic pragmatics, Grice´s conversational logic, remains influential. It is rarely relied upon in its original formulation. But a variety of neo-Gricean pragmatic theories, mostly reducing the number of principles that are invoked to explain language use, flourish: Sperber & Wilson´s relevance theory (relying on one principle, relevance); Horn’s two-principled theory (replacing Grice´s maxims with a Quantity- and a Relation-principle: make your contribution sufficient, saying as much as you can, but also make your contribution necessary, saying no more than you must); Levinson´s three-principled pragmatic theory (hinging on the notions of Quantity, Informativeness, and Manner).

Third, the single most-used notion to define the field of pragmatics, the notion of ‘context’  (remember the rather simple opposition between semantics as meaning without context versus pragmatics as meaning in context) keeps permeating almost all of the work that calls itself pragmatic. Correspondingly, the single most-used reproach in criticism of others’  work is that context is not sufficiently, or wrongly, taken into account. This constant point of reference, however, does not mean the notion has not changed. In fact, while it is still too often used in a vague manner, the notion of context has been considerably enriched over the years. The main change has been growing emphasis on contextualization, a continuous process, in opposition to a static context-out-there. Potentially relevant context is endless, but a language user’s active orientation towards specific aspects of this borderless potentiality defines what is actually relevant context in a given situation. There is widely shared agreement on this principle, but the main current challenge is to turn this awareness into empirical ways of tracing language user´s orientations.

Fourth, armchair pragmatics is almost banned these days. Technical developments have had a profound effect on the ways in which actual language use can be investigated. On the one hand, audio- and video-recording has enabled the detailed scrutiny of real-world spoken interaction. The use of such tools has become mandatory for any scholar who wants to make empirical claims about conversation. On the other hand, computer tools have facilitated the study of large-scale corpora, often consisting of written data, but increasingly also spoken. The complexity is further increased by the growing demands of taking multi-modality into account. Somewhat ironically, the new media, which naturally attract more and more attention, favor a return to the armchair: for current research purposes it is sometimes no longer felt necessary to go out to collect data.

Fifth, whereas in the early 1980s it was still possible to draw a line between so-called Anglo-American and Continental European pragmatics (the former concentrating on a restricted set of meaning phenomena that were felt not to be explainable in purely semantic terms, the latter opening the doors of linguistics widely towards society, cognition, and culture),  such a distinction has become less and less tenable over the last couple of decades. If a distinction can still be made at all, it is by no means geographically anchored.

A sixth (and for the current purposes final) point also has to do with geography. Pragmatics, like so many other fields of inquiry, has been heavily dominated by a narrowly defined Western world (mostly North America and Europe). Though skepticism in relation to the universality of theories and findings, often assumed in spite of their localized origins, was already visible thirty years ago (mostly in the work of anthropological linguists), it has been steadily spreading. In this context, and ‘emancipatory pragmatics’ movement has emerged which focuses precisely on the cultural embeddedness of analytical concepts and which, by way of thought experiment, consciously applies specific non-western notions of language use in theory building and empirical research.

Publications

Such developments in the flow of ideas are reflected in the multitude of publications in the field of pragmatics. IPrA has not only been contributing in that area indirectly through the conferences with innumerable publication spin-offs, but also directly. From the start in 1986, the idea of a Handbook of Pragmatics was conceived “as a tool in the search for coherence, at least in the sense of cross-disciplinary intelligibility, in this necessarily interdisciplinary field of scholarship.” It was not until 1995 that the HoP ‘Manual’ was published (by John Benjamins Publishing Company, co-edited with Jan-Ola Östman and Jan Blommaert) with encyclopedic articles on a wide range of disciplines and research methods that had contributed to the field, as known by that time. This was followed by annual loose-leaf installments, gradually building up an overview of major topics and concepts relevant to pragmatics. Meanwhile, flexibility and expandability of the Handbook have been greatly increased by the production of an online version (see www.benjamins.nl/online), while accessibility has been improved with a ten-volume topically arranged paperback set of HoP ‘Highlights.’ The Handbook of Pragmatics is no longer the only tool of its kind; handbooks or encyclopedias of pragmatics have been published (at least) by Blackwell, Cambridge University Press, de Gruyter, Pergamon, and Routledge.

IPrA also launched its own non-commercial journal in 1987, the IPrA Papers in Pragmatics, published twice a year and edited by Sandro Duranti and Bambi Schieffelin. In 1991 this was converted into the quarterly Pragmatics, now in its 21st year of publication. Duranti and Schieffelin stayed on as editors through 1991. Among the editors who succeeded them, Gunter Senft has been in service uninterruptedly until today, making him effectively editor-in-chief. Others include Adriana Bolívar (since 2006), Charles Briggs (1998 until today), Frank Brisard (since 2010), Patricia Clancy (1996-1997), Walter De Mulder (2002-2009), Helmut Gruber (2002 until today), Chungmin Lee (1997-2005), Sophia Marmaridou (1998 until today), Marcyliena Morgan (1992-1995), Masayoshi Shibatani (1992-1996).

Throughout the history of IPrA, it has been painful to see the persistent inequality of access to academic information. Membership in the Association has always been geographically biased, with very few paying members from the poorer parts of the world. The same is of course true for conference participation. That is why the IPrA publication, Pragmatics, has been kept away from commercial publishing interests. Its completely independent and non-commercial nature allowed us to look for means of distribution that could reach more people than through paying membership. In a wide range of countries, non-paying membership was installed in combination with local distribution centers where the IPrA publications could be reproduced without limitations. This worked well in some countries, but not so well in others, depending on the local availability (and accessibility and cost) of means of reproduction. Going online (see http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=*HOME&n=1360) turned out to be a partial solution. Non-paying members can now be given direct access to the most recent issues. Another recent move has been to place all issues of IPrA Papers in Pragmatics and of Pragmatics in open access as soon as they are one year old. The platform that is used for open access is eLanguage (see http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/pragmatics/issue/archive), operated under the flag of the Linguistic Society of America from Germany (on the initiative of Dieter Stein and administered by Cornelius Puschmann). A one-year embargo period is handled to safeguard the income that IPrA needs for its own functioning.

Manchester 2011

The 12th International Pragmatics Conference, held in Manchester, July 3-8, 2011, and chaired by Maj-Britt Mosegaard-Hansen, could not have chosen a theme more suitable to the IPrA mentality: “Pragmatics and its interfaces.” A quick glance at the program (downloadable – with the full set of abstracts – from  http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CONFERENCE12&n=1411) will convince anyone that interfaces, looked at in an intradisciplinary as well as an interdisciplinary way, are a key issue of present-day pragmatics as represented by IPrA. The choice of plenaries, for instance, speaks for itself: Laurel Brinton on historical pragmatics, Nick Enfield on the way in which communicative practices create and maintain social statuses (‘distributed agency’), Sachiko Ide with suggestions on how to use the Japanese concept of ‘ba’ (field) for a better understanding of the interactive creation of a story, Hans Kamp on where and how to draw a line between semantics and pragmatics, Sotaro Kita on gesture and culture in language use, Rosina Marquez Reiter on negotiating strategies in telesales, and Wes Sharrock on the role of ethnomethodology for an understanding of lay and professional discourses.

At the intradisciplinary level, the interfaces of pragmatics with a variety of other angles from which to look at language linguistically pass the review. Selecting just a few (and looking for this purpose only at pre-organized panels) we find:

• The interface with morphology (as in Nana Aba Appiah Amfo & Clement Appiah’s “Morphopragmatics of diminutives in African languages”)
• The interface with grammar and typology (as in Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti’s “The pragmatics of negation”)
• The interface with semantics (as in Patricia Mayes’ “The limits of agency: Exploring the interface between semantic and social constructs of agency”)
• The interface with studies of language change (as in Kate Beeching’s “The role of the left and right periphery in semantic change”, Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen’s “Diachronic corpus pragmatics”, Celeste Rodriguez Louro and Chad Howe’s “Perfect evolution across languages and dialects: Semantic change and pragmatic motivations”)

At the interdisciplinary level, we find (amongst other examples, and with the same restriction as above):

• The interface with cognitive science (as in Stavros Assimakopoulos’ “Cognitive pragmatics and its interfaces in linguistics”, or Iris Bachmann, Christina Anders, and Martina Schrader-Kniffki’s “Perception of language”)
• The interface with developmental psycholinguistics (as in Asta Cekaite and Ann-Carita Evaldsson’s “Affective stances, accountability and moral order in adult-child interaction”)
• The interface with a wide range of socio-cultural and socio-political approaches (as in Xinren Chen and Dániel Kádár’s ”Identity as resource in Chinese discourse”, Charles Coleman’s “The Obamas and an American identity dilemma”, Cornelia Ilie’s “Gendering discourses at the private-public sphere interface”, Jacob Mey and Hermine Penz’ “Situating societal pragmatics culturally and interculturally”, Ruth Wodak, Michal Krzyzanowski and Helmut Gruber’s “The pragmatics of (new) genres in political communication”)
• The interface with literary stylistics (as in Siobhan Chapman and Billy Clark’s panel by that name)

In addition, a lot of attention was paid to areas of application which are by definition at the interdisciplinary end of the scale, in particular in teaching (as in Jan Berenst, Fritjof Sahlström, and Myrte Gosen’s “Joint reasoning in educational settings”), therapy (as in Charles Antaki’s “The conversational practices of psychotherapy”), courtrooms (as in Susan Berk-Seligsen’s “Language and criminal justice systems” and Sigurd D’hondt and Fleur van den Houwen’s “Quoting from the case file: Intertextual practices in courtroom discourse”), computer-mediated communication (as in Wolfram Bublitz and Christian Hoffmann’s “The pragmatics of quoting in computer-mediated communication”), news media (as in Svetlana Kurtes and Teodora Popescu’s “Breaking the news on European televisions: Cross-cultural perspectives”), translation (as in Anne Mäntynen and Hélène Buzelin’s “Language policy, editorial processes, and translation”)

Methodologically, conversation-analytical approaches found themselves very much in the spotlight (with panels ranging from Jack Bilmes, Edward Reynolds, and Richard Fitzgerald’s “Lies and liars: A conversation analytic approach”, Galina Bolden and Jenny Mandelbaum’s “Numbers in (inter)action”, and Arnulf Deppermann and Susanne Günthner’s “Temporality in interaction”, to Paul Drew, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and John Heritage’s “Constructing social action in conversation”, which attracted such a large audience that a larger auditorium had to be found and that there was a shortage of handouts, slightly compensated later by their being placed on the conference website – see  http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CONFERENCE12&n=1422).

Needless to say that all the classics were also present (speech acts, speaker meaning, aspect, evidentiality, modality, discourse markers, modal particles, genres, discourse coherence, narrative, humor, silence, to name just a few), as well as all the relative newcomers (such as multimodality and new media).

In addition, a serious amount of reflection on the practice of doing pragmatics was also present. Like on at least two earlier occasions, there was an ‘emancipatory pragmatics’ panel (running for a full day), namely Scott Saft and Sachiko Ide’s “Emancipatory pragmatics: Cultural and interactional context revisited”. As suggested before, this endeavor aims at the development of perspectives and theories that are based on languages other than the ones whose language-, culture-, or community-internal notions have determined much of pragmatic thinking in the past. Some of the accepted beliefs about concepts such as turn-taking, politeness, deixis, speech acts, and the like, are thus reflexively questioned. One of the main ideas behind this edition was that analyses of the proposed kind could also shed light on the very notion of context, taking it – where necessary – beyond the contextual details that are ‘visible’ in interaction.

Another reflexive endeavor was represented by Jan-Ola Östman and Michael Bamberg’s “Responsibility and ethics” panel. In addition to looking at responsibility, accountability, and agency in discourse practices (especially narratives and institutional interactions), the purpose was to also address responsibility and ethics with respect to the positioning of the linguistic researcher, as insider or outsider, in relation to data gathering, data interpretation, and intervention. In a way, the questions asked follow almost directly and quite naturally from a much more general question, namely “What is pragmatics good for?”

In spite of a clear concern with the position of pragmatics as a relevant academic perspective, there were not many foundational philosophical papers. This is somewhat strange, and certainly regrettable, given the fact that so many of the basic notions in pragmatics have their origin in the philosophy of language. Marina Sbisà tried to revive a strong interest in philosophical issues when she chaired the 9th International Pragmatics Conference in Riva del Garda. But this must remain a point of attention for the future.

A final remark about the Manchester meeting: posters were a great success. From 1987 onwards, IPrA has been struggling with the search for a good formula to include posters in the conference programs. The present formula, which after its second or third implementation can be said to work well, consists in putting up the posters in a centrally located area that is often visited by conference participants (because that is where they have coffee, and/or that is where the book exhibit is). They stay up for the whole week. But on one specific day a poster period is reserved during which no other conference activities take place and authors are expected to be physically present close to their posters. The result is that interesting discussions are generated and lasting contacts are made, often providing posters with more exposure and a stronger impact than the more traditional presentations.

The road to Delhi

Ann Verhaert

On September 8-13, 2013, New Delhi will host the 13th edition of the International Pragmatics Conferences (note the numbers!), chaired this time by Rukmini Bhaya Nair. The special theme will be “Narrative pragmatics: Culture, cognition, context”, but as always the conference will welcome any topic relevant to pragmatics in its widest sense.

On the road to Delhi, not much will change in the management of IPrA affairs (handled almost single-handedly by Ann Verhaert in the Antwerp secretariat). But a new President will be elected soon, to succeed Sachiko Ide (Tokyo, see http://sachikoide.com), who was preceded from 2000 to 2005 by Susan Ervin-Tripp (Psychology, Berkeley), from 1995 to 1999 by Ferenc Kiefer (Linguistic Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest), from 1991 to 1994 by Sandra Thompson (Linguistics, Santa Barbara), and from 1986 to 1990 by John Gumperz (Anthropology, Berkeley).

In part, our more enlightened understanding of the social lives of wolves was facilitated by opportunities to do observational research on captive wolves in their “natural” environment in facilities such as the Canadian Center for Wolf Research (CCWR).   Founded by John Fentress in the 1970s, CCWR was a remote forested compound (3.8 ha) where several generations of wolves lived, bred, reared pups and died. These wolves were pack-reared in their natal enclosure, were not socialized to humans, and were not handled except in the rare veterinary emergency.  The facility was not open to the public. Wolf activities were observed and videotaped several times a week from one of two observation structures located outside the enclosure next to a clearing that was used frequently by wolves.  In sharp contrast to the early notions about wolf social behaviour, the daily life of the wolves at CCWR was generally amicable, with the occasional spat or fight when someone was out of line.  Wolves (parents, aunts and uncles) were exceedingly solicitous of their pups (Fentress & Ryon, 1982) and they played throughout adulthood. The style of pack leadership depended strongly on the personalities of the parent wolves and ranged from despot to benign dictator.  In other words, pack life was mostly devoid of the heavy-pawed dominance activities previously reported.

Since the 1990s, field biologists have been able to observe wild wolf packs more directly in Yellowstone National Park (Smith & Ferguson, 2006) and on Ellesmere Island (Mech, 2008).  Not surprisingly, their reports about wolf social behaviors confirmed observations made at CCWR to a remarkable degree.  Free-ranging wolf packs are generally family groups composed of parents (i.e., the breeding pair), young of the year and sometimes off-spring from previous years.  This family group works together to rear their young and provision the pack; cooperation among pack members is critical to survival.

VIDEO

In keeping with current views of pack life, studies of close-range vocal communication at CCWR have revealed that squeaking, a friendly close-range vocalization that was first described by Crisler (1958) and Fentress (1967), is one of the most frequently heard vocalizations within the pack. Jacqueline Weir (1999) recorded and videotaped the wolves at CCWR when they were in the clearing to study the characteristics of squeaking and its function role in a wolf pack. The squeaking vocalization occurs in a wide range of social situations (e.g., playing, greeting, feeding, parenting, aggression) and is made by all members of the pack. Squeaking vocalizations consist of a series of individual squeaks organized hierarchically into phrases.  Individual squeaks are brief, soft, tonal, high frequency (2-4 kHz) sounds. This close-range vocalization contains acoustic information about individual identity, the context, and the friendly motivation of the squeaking wolf.  The ubiquity of this affiliative vocalization within a wolf pack underscores the generally amiable, cooperative reality of life in a wolf pack. This is not to say that wolf society is always peaceable; daily life within a pack depends on the situation and the natures of the individuals involved.

Video shows CCWR wolves at food and squeaking can be heard.  The wolf trotting in from the woods is squeaking, perhaps to announce its identity and friendly intention as it approaches the other wolves at the food.

References

Crisler, L. (1958). Arctic wild.  NY: Harper and Row.

Fentress, J. C. (1967).  Observations on the behavioral development of a hand-reared male timber wolf.  American Zoologist, 7, 339 – 351.

Fentress, J.C. & Ryon, J. (1982).  A long-term study of distributed pup feeding in captive wolves.  In F. H. Harrington & P. C. Paquet (Eds.).  Wolves of the world:  Perspectives of behavior, ecology, and conservation.  Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Publications.

Mech, L. D. (2008).  Whatever happened to the term alpha?  International Wolf Magazine, 4 – 8.  Available at: www.wolf.org

Smith, D. W. & Ferguson, G. (2005). Decade of the wolf.  Guilford, CT: Lyons Press.

Weir, J. N. (1999).  The contexts and sounds of the squeaking vocalizations of wolves (Canis lupus).  M.Sc. thesis, Biopsychology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program, Memorial University of Newfoundland. (Manuscript in preparation).

Gurdeep Mattu

I have always been interested in semiotics, if we are to take ‘an interest in semiotics’ to mean an ‘interest in how things mean’.  That’s perhaps a difficult and rather tortuous phrase to begin with, but sentences like that have always interested me, and those books that refuse easy definition, but hint at great things within them, both in academia and fiction, prosper through their many re-readings.  Throughout school and university, the idea of meaning and meanings was central to me – a pluralism of identity seemed very appropriate at the turn of the millennium – and I spent my time there extrapolating meaning, and meanings, from texts, to discuss and use in essays.  It was only when I arrived in academic publishing, and even then only when I begin in earnest to try to develop the semiotics list at Continuum, that it became clear to me what a huge and diverse field semiotics is and that ‘how things mean’ was only the start.

Some words on Continuum and Bloomsbury Academic.

It might be easier to start this recap at the end, that is to say, that in summer 2011, Continuum Books were taken over by Bloomsbury to form a part of the Bloomsbury Academic division.  It is a logical next step for a company formed in 1999, with a London and New York office, international in size, outlook and scope.  We now have an even better platform to build on.  Our linguistics list has had a dedicated editor since at least 2004, possessing a backlist assembled from the well-respected output of Pinter Publishers, Athlone Press (the university press of the University of London) and Cassell Academic.  Through the early part of the 2000s, the list grew in size and ambition, and one of the most impressive milestones in that growth was the publication of the Collected Works of M. A. K. Halliday.  Systemic Functional Linguistics, which formed a theoretical backdrop to much of the list during the mid 2000s, has always concerned itself with meaning and function.  I felt it only natural to expand our publishing in a proactive (and, I hope, provocative) way into a discipline that could well understand this: semiotics. And in doing so, it is evident that the boundaries between linguistics as a science and as a humanities discipline, and those of semiotics, are grey areas, and are porous, and the two disciplines stand very well side by side, talking with each other.

Some words on our new series.

Advances in Semiotics, edited by Professor Paul Bouissac, forms the spearhead of our efforts to publish vibrant new voices in the field.  We began our publishing relationship talking over a proposal that would eventually become the book Saussure: A Guide for The Perplexed (Continuum, 2010).  Our discussions eventually led to the founding of a new series which would publish cutting-edge work in semiotics – something that the list at Continuum lacked, and something that indeed the field of semiotics lacked, to some extent.  Our remit has always been to give series editors freedom and to be supportive in their efforts to attract quality scholarship, and Professor Bouissac came to me with an excellent range of topics that we could think about commissioning in.  We’re rapidly moving it forward, with books on the way on The Semiotics of Religion (Robert Yelle) and The Semiotics of Drink and Drinking (Paul Manning).  Our design team has come up with an excellent series cover that is clear, striking and bold.  I would actively encourage readers to get in touch with me or Paul about possible proposals.

Our series aim.

In the next year or so we hope to bring out the first wave of publications on the Advances in Semiotics series, and I hope to deepen my awareness of the discipline of semiotics and how it functions.  Most importantly, I feel, is try to and understand how semiotics and linguistics sit together, and I think that some valuable publishing lies in that direction. As a list, I continue to function as editor and advocate, and we are increasing in size and scope.  We now publish nearly 60 books a year in linguistics, and each one I think helps us get closer to where we want to be.  Every once in a while there is a book that everyone wants to read, and feels they have to read, in order to participate in the great debate.  It is that book that we are searching for, and what we want is to be the natural port of call for the someone who is out there, somewhere, writing it.

Gurdeep Mattu

I have always been interested in semiotics, if we are to take ‘an interest in semiotics’ to mean an ‘interest in how things mean’. That’s perhaps a difficult and rather tortuous phrase to begin with, but sentences like that have always interested me, and those books that refuse easy definition, but hint at great things within them, both in academia and fiction, prosper through their many re-readings. Throughout school and university, the idea of meaning and meanings was central to me – a pluralism of identity seemed very appropriate at the turn of the millennium – and I spent my time there extrapolating meaning, and meanings, from texts, to discuss and use in essays. It was only when I arrived in academic publishing, and even then only when I begin in earnest to try to develop the semiotics list at Continuum, that it became clear to me what a huge and diverse field semiotics is and that ‘how things mean’ was only the start.

Some words on Continuum and Bloomsbury Academic

It might be easier to start this recap at the end, that is to say, that in summer 2011, Continuum Books were taken over by Bloomsbury to form a part of the Bloomsbury Academic division. It is a logical next step for a company formed in 1999, with a London and New York office, international in size, outlook and scope. We now have an even better platform to build on. Our linguistics list has had a dedicated editor since at least 2004, possessing a backlist assembled from the well-respected output of Pinter Publishers, Athlone Press (the university press of the University of London) and Cassell Academic. Through the early part of the 2000s, the list grew in size and ambition, and one of the most impressive milestones in that growth was the publication of the Collected Works of M. A. K. Halliday. Systemic Functional Linguistics, which formed a theoretical backdrop to much of the list during the mid 2000s, has always concerned itself with meaning and function. I felt it only natural to expand our publishing in a proactive (and, I hope, provocative) way into a discipline that could well understand this: semiotics. And in doing so, it is evident that the boundaries between linguistics as a science and as a humanities discipline, and those of semiotics, are grey areas, and are porous, and the two disciplines stand very well side by side, talking with each other.

Some words on our new series

Advances in Semiotics, edited by Professor Paul Bouissac, forms the spearhead of our efforts to publish vibrant new voices in the field. We began our publishing relationship talking over a proposal that would eventually become the book Saussure: A Guide for The Perplexed (Continuum, 2010). Our discussions eventually led to the founding of a new series which would publish cutting-edge work in semiotics – something that the list at Continuum lacked, and something that indeed the field of semiotics lacked, to some extent. Our remit has always been to give series editors freedom and to be supportive in their efforts to attract quality scholarship, and Professor Bouissac came to me with an excellent range of topics that we could think about commissioning in. We’re rapidly moving it forward, with books on the way on The Semiotics of Religion (Robert Yelle) and The Semiotics of Drink and Drinking (Paul Manning). Our design team has come up with an excellent series cover that is clear, striking and bold. I would actively encourage readers to get in touch with me or Paul about possible proposals.

Our series aim

In the next year or so we hope to bring out the first wave of publications on the Advances in Semiotics series, and I hope to deepen my awareness of the discipline of semiotics and how it functions. Most importantly, I feel, is try to and understand how semiotics and linguistics sit together, and I think that some valuable publishing lies in that direction. As a list, I continue to function as editor and advocate, and we are increasing in size and scope. We now publish nearly 60 books a year in linguistics, and each one I think helps us get closer to where we want to be. Every once in a while there is a book that everyone wants to read, and feels they have to read, in order to participate in the great debate. It is that book that we are searching for, and what we want is to be the natural port of call for the someone who is out there, somewhere, writing it.

Continuum Linguistics

Advances in Semiotics

In part, our more enlightened understanding of the social lives of wolves was facilitated by opportunities to do observational research on captive wolves in their “natural” environment in facilities such as the Canadian Center for Wolf Research (CCWR).   Founded by John Fentress in the 1970s, CCWR was a remote forested compound (3.8 ha) where several generations of wolves lived, bred, reared pups and died. These wolves were pack-reared in their natal enclosure, were not socialized to humans, and were not handled except in the rare veterinary emergency.  The facility was not open to the public. Wolf activities were observed and videotaped several times a week from one of two observation structures located outside the enclosure next to a clearing that was used frequently by wolves.  In sharp contrast to the early notions about wolf social behaviour, the daily life of the wolves at CCWR was generally amicable, with the occasional spat or fight when someone was out of line.  Wolves (parents, aunts and uncles) were exceedingly solicitous of their pups (Fentress & Ryon, 1982) and they played throughout adulthood. The style of pack leadership depended strongly on the personalities of the parent wolves and ranged from despot to benign dictator.  In other words, pack life was mostly devoid of the heavy-pawed dominance activities previously reported.

Since the 1990s, field biologists have been able to observe wild wolf packs more directly in Yellowstone National Park (Smith & Ferguson, 2006) and on Ellesmere Island (Mech, 2008).  Not surprisingly, their reports about wolf social behaviors confirmed observations made at CCWR to a remarkable degree.  Free-ranging wolf packs are generally family groups composed of parents (i.e., the breeding pair), young of the year and sometimes off-spring from previous years.  This family group works together to rear their young and provision the pack; cooperation among pack members is critical to survival.

In keeping with current views of pack life, studies of close-range vocal communication at CCWR have revealed that squeaking, a friendly close-range vocalization that was first described by Crisler (1958) and Fentress (1967), is one of the most frequently heard vocalizations within the pack. Jacqueline Weir (1999) recorded and videotaped the wolves at CCWR when they were in the clearing to study the characteristics of squeaking and its function role in a wolf pack.   The squeaking vocalization occurs in a wide range of social situations (e.g., playing, greeting, feeding, parenting, aggression) and is made by all members of the pack. Squeaking vocalizations consist of a series of individual squeaks organized hierarchically into phrases.  Individual squeaks are brief, soft, tonal, high frequency (2-4 kHz) sounds. This close-range vocalization contains acoustic information about individual identity, the context, and the friendly motivation of the squeaking wolf.  The ubiquity of this affiliative vocalization within a wolf pack underscores the generally amiable, cooperative reality of life in a wolf pack. This is not to say that wolf society is always peaceable; daily life within a pack depends on the situation and the natures of the individuals involved.

The video shows CCWR wolves at food and squeaking can be heard.  The wolf trotting in from the woods is squeaking, perhaps to announce its identity and friendly intention as it approaches the other wolves at the food.

References

Crisler, L. (1958). Arctic wild.  NY: Harper and Row.

Fentress, J. C. (1967).  Observations on the behavioral development of a hand-reared male timber wolf.  American Zoologist, 7, 339 – 351.

Fentress, J.C. & Ryon, J. (1982).  A long-term study of distributed pup feeding in captive wolves.  In F. H. Harrington & P. C. Paquet (Eds.).  Wolves of the world:  Perspectives of behavior, ecology, and conservation.  Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Publications.

Mech, L. D. (2008).  Whatever happened to the term alpha?  International Wolf Magazine, 4 – 8.  Available at:  HYPERLINK “http://www.wolf.org” www.wolf.org.

Smith, D. W. & Ferguson, G. (2005). Decade of the wolf.  Guilford, CT: Lyons Press.

Weir, J. N. (1999).  The contexts and sounds of the squeaking vocalizations of wolves (Canis lupus).  M.Sc. thesis, Biopsychology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program, Memorial University of Newfoundland. (Manuscript in preparation).

For more on wolves, see the Google Books preview of Barbara Keevil Parker’s book.