Archives

  • Zeichen im öffentlichen Raum: Funktionalisierung, Ästhetisierung und Mediatisierung
    Vol. 38 No. 1-2 (2016)

    This issue deals with semiotic aspects of metropolitan studies. Urban signs range from traffic signs and street names to monuments, street art and advertising to semiotic aspects of architecture and urban design. The issue's contributions deal with the memory culture of monuments and street names, the changing aesthetic perception of neon signs, political protest communication, phonetic transcriptions in graffiti and advertising, and QR codes as a link between urban and digital or virtual spaces.

  • Kommunikation, Inferentialismus und Semiotik. Robert B. Brandoms „Expressive Vernunft“
    Vol. 36 No. 3-4 (2014)

    This special issue investigates the philosophical and linguistic pragmatism developed by Robert B. Brandom in his book Making It Explicit. From various perspectives, the contributions of the book investigate the connections between various aspects of Brandom’s pragmatism and semiotic theories and approaches.

  • Lachen als Zeichenprozess
    Vol. 37 No. 1-2 (2015)

    The thematic issue “Laughter as a sign process” examines laughter from different disciplinary perspectives, in view of its semiotic dimensions as a means of communication. It provides an overview of laughter research, combining approaches from psychology, linguistics, philosophy, comics research and other fields. The contributions investigate laughter as a symbolic and communicative phenomenon in its psychological, historical, literary, and cultural dimensions.

  • Biosemiotic Ethics
    Vol. 37 No. 3-4 (2015)

    This issue presents the rapidly growing field of biosemiotic ethics. In the past two decades, biosemioticians have began to tease out the ethical implications of semiosis as a capacity of living beings. The foundational argument is that if semiosis is a morally-relevant capacity, and if all living systems are semiotic, then biosemiosis can serve as the basis for justifying the attribution of moral status to humans, to animals and plants, and even to ecosystems. Biosemiotic ethics opens the road towards a perspective that connects ecological thinking with ethical perspectives.