Intellectual Effort And Linguistic Work

The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics opens up the world of semiotics and linguistics for newcomers to the discipline, and provides a useful ready-reference for the more advanced student.

This book reveals the core features of digital culture, examined by means of semiotic models and theories. It positions commercial and market principles in the center of the digital semiosphere, avoiding the need to force the new cultural reality into the established textualist or pragmatist paradigms. The theoretic insights and case studies presented here argue for new semiotic models of inquiry that include working with big data, user experience and nethnography, along with conventional approaches. The book develops a new concept of identity in the digital age, analyzing the digital flows of recognition and value, which led to the tremendous success of Social Media and the Web 2.0 era. Self-expression, entertainment and consumerism are seen as the major drivers of identity formation in the post-truth era, where the self can no longer be considered independently of a given person’s communication devices, where a substantial part of it is stored and actualized. It will be of interest to semioticians and researchers working on digital culture.

Musical semiotics is a new discipline and paradigm of both semiotics and musicology. In its tradition, the current volume constitutes a radically new solution to the theoretical problem of how musical meanings emerge and how they are transmitted by musical signs even in most "absolute" and abstract musical works of Western classical heritage. Works from symphonies, lied, chamber music to opera are approached and studied here with methods of semiotic inspiration. Its analyses stem from systematic methods in the author's previous work, yet totally new analytic concepts are also launched in order to elucidate profound musical significations verbally. The book reflects the new phase in the author's semiotic approach, the one characterized by the so-called "existential semiotics" elaborated on the basis of philosophers from Kant , Hegel and Kierkegaard to Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre and Marcel. The key notions like musical subject, Schein, becoming, temporality, modalities, Dasein, transcendence put musical facts in a completely new light and perspectives of interpretation. The volume attempts to make explicit what is implicit in every musical interpretation, intuition and understanding: to explain how compositions and composers "talk" to us. Its analyses are accessible due to the book's universal approach. Music is experienced as a language, communicating from one subject to another.

Jorge Luis Borges is generally acknowledged to be one of the twentieth century's most significant writers. Yet in all the critical debates on his work, the fact that he is Argentinian is rarely discussed, as if his international reputation had somehow cleansed him of nationality. In this brilliant introduction to his work, Sarlo challenges these "universalist" readings, arguing that they leave aside vital aspects of Borges' writing, including his powerful vision of Argentina's past and its traditions, which placed both the writer and his country at the intersection of European and Latin American culture.

This book presents a collection of research papers from both experienced and emerging scholars, some of whom presented their work at the international conference ‘Language Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century: Linguistic, Educational and Intercultural Aspects’ held in June 2018 and organised by the Institute of Foreign Languages of the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University, the FIPLV Nordic-Baltic Region, and the Language Teachers’ Association of Lithuania. The book consists of three parts, the first being devoted to language teaching and teacher education. The second section explores literary and cultural issues, while the third part encompasses linguistic and media discourse studies.