- The Peirce seminar papers: Essays in semiotic analysis by Michael Shapiro
This fifth volume of The Peirce seminar papers is a selection of nine papers originally presented at the Colloque International, Sémiotique peircienne: Etat de lieux/Peircean Semiotics: The State of the Art, held 27–30 June 2001 in France.
Nils B. Thelin (1–68) seesbiology as the very foundation of cognitive-pragmatic models of language semiosis (and thus the notion ‘biopragmatism’). The categories of space and time are argued to correlate with ‘the biological-regulative motive of reticular rhythmization’ (58).
João Queiroz Sidarta Ribeiro (69–78) presents an Peircean semiotic analysis of the meaning processes underlying the interpretation of alarm calls in vervet monkeys. He proposes a new research paradigm, ‘comparative neurosemiotics’, which should ‘permit the profitable study of many different cases of animal communication’ (76).
Dan Nesher (79–107) argues that Peirce’s work ‘Our senses as reasoning machines’ quasi-proves our perceptual judgments as our ‘simple truths’ and the basis of all of our knowledge (101).
Michael Shapiro (108–25) outlines as pects of neo-Peircean linguistics and argues language history as linguistic theory. This is accomplished through critical comparisons of Charles Peirce and Edward Sapir in their treatments of the telos of linguistic change, semeiosis and linguistic change, and diagrams and diagrammatization in language.
Tony Jappy (126–51), via three case studies of gonna, that, and metaphors, argues for the essential role of the Peircean category of secondness in our understanding of indication and grammaticalization.
Joëlle Réthoré (152–64) differentiates le langage from la langue and argues that the category of feeling is attached to the former, where as the category of cognition is related to the latter. Therefore the provocative title ‘The sense of languages (as langage) versus the nonsense of languages (as langues): Iconicity versus arbitrariness’.
Laura A. Janda (165–88) examines instances of the Russian case system that enable the speaker to express the same ‘perception of reality’ with alternative case constructions (170). The systematic and coherent choices of various case constructions are argued to be motivated and determined by the speaker’s construal of the physical realia.
Victor A. Friedman (189–203) talks about the intersection of interrogation and nonconfirmativity from a Peircean semiotic perspective. Examples from Albanian, Macedonian, and Aromanian are taken to show the intersection between expressive past and present.
Jørgen Dines Johansen (204–24), starting from the Peircean tripartite distinctions of iconic signs (i.e. images, diagrams, and metaphors), proposes imaginative reading, diagrammatic reading, and metaphoric reading as the three ways of iconizing the text, and argues that their interplay determines the nature and pace of the reading process.
This volume merits the same praise as the previous ones, namely that they are excellent collections ‘reflecting the ever-widening appeal and potential of Peirce’s logic of signs’ (Peirce project newsletter), particularly with respect to the modern study of language structure.