Editorial
Editorial: A Sleeping Beauty
It is useful to be reminded from time to time that dogmas are the opium of intelligence. They literally stop the inquiry and put the critical mind to sleep or lead it to wander into wishful landscapes. It seems that semiotics has entered an epistemological coma. The whole discourse that is marketed under this name [...]
Semiotics in the Age of Transformation
At the very least, semiotics is a good idea. Trying to understand how humans make sense of their lives, their environment, and the ways in which they interact with, and influence each other through signs is a fundamental endeavour. Semiotics, under any other name, is bound to have emerged when early humans evolved the cognitive capacity to encompass more than a single point of view and represent others as a source of signs, and discriminated between intentional and non-intentional signs with considerable adaptive consequences.
Notices
"Metaphor studies" has over the past 30 years become a discipline in its own right, mainly because of the cognitive linguistic claim that metaphors characterize thought, not just language. But most metaphor scholars hitherto focus exclusively on its purely verbal expressions. Since both persuasive and narrative discourses in contemporary society increasingly draw on modalities other than language alone, sustained research into a broader range of manifestations of metaphor is imperative. This volume is the first book-length study to investigate multimodal occurrences of metaphor, and is of interest to scholars interested in metaphor as well as in multimodal discourse.