December 2005

"Signs per se do not exist; rather they exist only as forms within the operations of a system that uses them".
Niklas Luhmann
("Signs as Forms" p. 48, in Problems of Form,edited by Dirk Baecker, Stanford University Press.1999)
Editor in Chief:
Paul Bouissac
Managing Editor:
Kasper Piatkowski
Assistant Editor:
Tom Wysocki

EDITORIAL
The Public Journal of Semiotics: A bottom-up organization for semiotics and semioticians
By Paul Bouissac, René Jorna and Winfried Nöth

The democratization of Internet communication has brought profound transformations in the way people communicate and interact in a wide range of private and public domains, including the creation, distribution, and management of scholarly knowledge... read more

WORLD REPORTS
Semiotics in Italy. From the origins to the recent sociosemiotic wave
By Gianfranco Marrone

Italy has probably been one of the first countries in the world where the idea of Ferdinand De Saussure of extending to systems of signs some of the results of the linguistic research has been taken seriously... read more

GUEST COLUMN
Psychology and Semiotics
By By Jaan Valsiner

Some things in life just do not make sense. Somehow the discourses about signs do not link with psychology's favorite stories about behavior, cognition, or affect... read more

SEMIOTIC PROFILE
Augusto Ponzio
By Susan Petrilli

Augusto Ponzio is a pivotal figure in semiotics and philosophy of language which he has shown to be closely interconnected, indeed inseparable... read more

A. Ponzio, A caricature from the 1990s
by Luciano Ponzio

WORLD REPORTS
Impression of the 9th International Pragmatics Association conference, 10-15 July 2005, Italy
By By Charles Forceville

Organizing an IPrA (www.ipra.be) conference has become an operation of military proportions. The founding father of IPrA, Jef Verschueren, told those present that some 1000 people had registered, while some 600+ papers and posters had found their way into the programme. The plenary lecture slots excepted, at each moment 12 parallel sessions were in full swing. Nostalgically, he reminisced about IPrA 1, in Viareggio (Italy1985), when the parallel sessions took place in opposite corners of the same room... read more


SEMIOTIC PROFILE
A Double Self-Profile: Irene Portis-Winner and Thomas G. Winner: Partners In The Search For Semiotics
By Irene Portis Winner

Irene Portis Winner
Irene Portis-Winner, a distinguished semiotic anthropologist, is the author of a double self-profile in which she retraces the intellectual quest that led her and her husband, Thomas G. Winner (1920-2004), to semiotics. Her latest book, Semiotics of Peasants in Transition (1999) has been acclaimed as an important contribution to the semiotics of culture... read more


STATE OF THE ART REPORT:
Rock Art and Semiotics
By By Robert Bednarik

Prehistoric rock art represents by far the largest body of evidence we possess of humanity's cultural, cognitive and artistic beginnings. Through its relative permanence, it has profoundly influenced the beliefs and cultural conventions of subsequent societies up to the present. It is therefore an integral part of humanity's collective memory, and the greatest surviving witness of our cultural evolution... read more