denotation

en-noun

denotation (countable and uncountable, plural denotations)

From Late Latin dēnotātiō, from Latin dēnotāre (“to denote, mark out”) + -tiō (suffix forming nouns of action), from dē- (“completely”) + notāre (“to mark”); equivalent to denote + -ation.

The denotations of the two expressions "the morning star" and "the evening star" are the same (i.e. both expressions denote the planet Venus), but their connotations are different.

Regarding denotation, the terms were generally used to refer to a wide range of language contact varieties and features.

2018, James Lambert, “A multitude of ‘lishes’: The nomenclature of hybridity”, in English World-Wide, page 6:

(logic, linguistics, semiotics) The primary, surface, literal, or explicit meaning of a signifier such as a word, phrase, or symbol; that which a word denotes, as contrasted with its connotation; the aggregate or set of objects of which a word may be predicated.


seme

Learned borrowing from Ancient Greek σῆμα (sêma).

lbor

(linguistics, semiotics) Anything which serves for any purpose as a substitute for an object of which it is, in some sense, a representation, sign, or symbol.


icon

From Latin īcōn, from Ancient Greek εἰκών (eikṓn, “likeness, image, portrait”). Eastern Orthodox Church sense is attested from 1833. Computing sense first recorded in 1982.

der

(linguistics, semiotics) A word, character, or sign whose form reflects and is determined by the referent; onomatopoeic words are necessarily all icons.


felicity

en-noun

felicity (countable and uncountable, plural felicities)

From Middle English felicite (“bliss, happiness, joy; delight, pleasure; a source of happiness; good fortune; prosperity; well-being; of a planet: in an influential position”) [and other forms], borrowed from Old French felicité (modern French félicité (“bliss, happiness; felicity”)), from Latin fēlīcitātem, the accusative singular of fēlīcitās (“fertility, fruitfulness; happiness, felicity; good fortune; success”), from fēlix (“happy; blessed, fortunate, lucky; fertile, fruitful; prosperous; auspicious, favourable”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁(y)- (“to nurse, suckle”)) + -itās (a variant of -tās (suffix forming nouns indicating a state of being)).

nb...

felicitee, felicyte, felycite, felycitee, felycyte

der

The quotation was rendered with felicity.

(uncountable, semiotics) Reproduction of a sign with fidelity.


iconic

en-adj

iconic (comparative more iconic, superlative most iconic)

more iconic (comparative)
most iconic (superlative)

From Late Latin īconicus, from Ancient Greek εἰκονικός (eikonikós). By surface analysis, icon + -ic.

an iconic gesture in sign language

A portrait of a person is to a considerable extent iconic, but is not completely so since the painted canvas does not have the texture of the skin, or the capacities for speech and motion, […]

1955 [1946], Charles William Morris, Signs, Language, and Behavior, G. Braziller, →ISBN, page 23:

(linguistics, semiotics) Representing something; symbolic.


figura

From Latin figūra. Coined by Louis Hjelmslev.

Letters of the alphabet are the figurae that make up a written word.

(semiotics) Any of the non-signifying constituents of signifiers.


modality

en-noun

modality (countable and uncountable, plural modalities)

(semiotics) A particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i.e. to the type of sign and to the status of reality ascribed to or claimed by a sign, text or genre.


syntagma

syntagma (plural syntagmata or syntagmas)

From Late Latin syntagma, from Ancient Greek σύνταγμα (súntagma, “orderly arrangement”), from συντάσσω (suntássō, “arrange together”, “to order”).

uder

To combine a sequence of shots into a larger syntagma, there has to be a connection between the successive shots.

The Gospel is not a system of Theology, nor a Syntagma of theoretical propositions and conclusions for the enlargement of speculative knowledge, ethical or metaphysical.

1825, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Aphorisms on that which is indeed spiritual religion”, in Aids to Reflection, page 198:

(semiotics) An arrangement of units that together bears a meaning.


signified

Here things are getting better and better for women and people of color, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open, and all you can think about is some stupid, lame problem with signifiers and signifieds.

2001, Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections:

In Peircean terms, topics are interpretants: signifieds that become new signifiers in the endless semiotic chain of interpretations.

2012, Esti Sheinberg, Music Semiotics, page 9:

(linguistics, semiotics, philosophy) The concept, object or person that is referred to by a sign or signifier.


semiosphere

2003 Iu. M. Lotman, Edna Andrews - Conversations With Lotman: Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature, and Cognition
Lotman's conceptualization of the semiosphere was inspired by Vernadsky's and Teilhard de Chardin's vision of the biosphere and the noosphere.

The semiotic experience in the semiosphere, according to Lotman, precedes the production of discourses because it is one of their conditions. The semiosphere is above all the domain that allows culture to define itself and to situate itself, in order to be able to dialogue with other cultures; it is also a field whose dialogical functioning has as its principle task to regulate and resolve semio-cultural heterogeneities.

2006, Jacques Fontanille, The Semiotics of Discourse, →ISBN, page 205:

The category of boundary leads to two further characteristics of semiosphere: binarism and asymmetry. The translation mechanism responsible for the generation of new meaning in semiosphere presupposes at least two semiotically different participants that are mutually untranslatable.

2011, Claus Emmeche, Kalevi Kull, Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life is the Action of Signs, →ISBN, page 183:

(semiotics) The sphere of semiosis in which the sign processes operate in the set of all interconnected Umwelts; The domain of all signs that represent and define a culture.


signifying chain

en-noun

signifying chain (plural signifying chains)

(semiotics) An interlocking system of signifiers.


classeme

Given that "bark" has two classemes, human and canine, it is the presence of the dog or the commissioner that decides whether "bark" is taken in a literal or figurative sense.

1986, Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, →ISBN, page 190:

(semiotics) A generic or contextual seme, denoting a group of objects.


chrononym

requires that the simple stative make use of the reader's implicit knowledge and sense of periodization, here the chrononym of "loss of status" because Nixon had to vacate the world's most desirable position of political power

1986, Cohen, Sande, Historical culture : on the recoding of an academic discipline:

It’s important to remember that every chrononym (a word that refers to some particular time, such as “springtime” or “teatime”) is arbitrary; every calendar is based on cultural norms and sometimes curious assumptions.

2012, Blatner, David, Spectrums : our mindboggling universe from infinitesimal to infinity:

(semiotics) A term for a specific period of time, such as "summer" or "week."


biosemiotics

(semiotics) A growing field that studies the production, action and interpretation of signs in the biological realm.


semiosis

semiosis (countable and uncountable, plural semiosises)

Coined by Charles Sanders Peirce to describe a process that interprets signs as referring to their objects, as described in his theory of sign relations, or semiotics.

(semiotics) Any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning.


representamen

representamen (plural representamens or representamina)

representamens (plural)
representamina (plural)

The Leibnitzio-Wolfians distinguish three acts in the process of representative cognition: — 1° the act of representing a (mediate) object to the mind; 2° the representation, or, to speak more properly, representamen, itself as an (immediate or vicarious) object exhibited to the mind; 3° the act by which the mind is conscious, immediately of the representative object, and, through it, mediately of the remote object represented.

1861, Sir William Hamilton, The Metaphysics of Sir William Hamilton, page 318:

A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.

circa''' 1897: Charles Sanders Peirce [aut.] and Justus Buchler [ed.], Philosophical Writings of Peirce, chapter 7: “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs”, § 1: “What is a Sign? Three Divisions of Logic”, page 99 (from a circa 1897 manuscript (CP 2.227–9), first published in the 1940 selection The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings, and later reprinted sic in 1955 by Dover Publications, Inc., New York; →ISBN, 9780486202174)

(semiotics) A representation; a thing serving to represent something.


hyperreality

hyperreality (countable and uncountable, plural hyperrealities)

(semiotics, philosophy) The inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures.


copulant

The copulants are likewise indispensable and have the property of being Continuant.

1974, Charles Sanders Peirce ·, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce - Volume 7, page 236:

Since the classes are yielded by a static typology and not a dynamic process such as semiosis, it might be wiser to conceive the relation between subjects in terms of compatibility rather than state categorically that collectives determine copulants, for example: collectives are not only with the copulant, but also with the designative and descriptive facets of signs..

2016, Tony Jappy, Peirce’s Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation:

Examples of such continuous immediate objects, with respect to which a sign is said to be a copulant, include :_is_," "if_then_," "_relatively to _ for _," "Whatever _," etc..

2017, Francesco Bellucci, Peirce's Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics:

(semiotics) A sign that represents the joining or unity of other signs.


copulant

By virtue of Oi, namely the identity of the weather on that occasion, the sign expresses a distributive relation —to each situation of utterance there corresponds an identifiable weather type: the sign is therefore Copulant.

1989, Gérard Deledalle, Semiotics and Pragmatics, page 149:

Copulant signs are, quite clearly, those signs whose immediate object is a continuous predicate.

If the sign is copulant it is necessarily collective, and if it is an action-producing token, it is necessarily also categorical and percussive.

2023, Tony Jappy, Developing a Neo-Peircean Approach to Signs, page 106:

(semiotics) Signifying combination, identity or union.


ANT

ANT (countable and uncountable, plural ANTs)

actor–network theory
w:actor–network theory

(anthropology, semiotics) Abbreviation of actor–network theory.


interpretant

(semiotics) The effect of a sign on someone who reads or comprehends it


formator

(semiotics) A symbol that indicates a relationship between designators.


acteme

A realisation of an acteme is called an act, and is the content of one semantically homogeneous verse series.

1970, Fritz Kramer, Literature among the Cuna Indians:

(psychology, semiotics) A unit of behavior.


supersign

LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-supersign.wav

Coordinate term: subsign


subsign

Coordinate term: supersign


antiverbal

en-adj

antiverbal (comparative more antiverbal, superlative most antiverbal)

more antiverbal (comparative)
most antiverbal (superlative)

Though in very different ways, Wolfe, Capote, Mailer, and Didion each define their subjects as somehow beyond words — antiverbal or nonverbal, threatening or sublime, overpowering and intense or private and intuitive […]

1987, Wayne (Chris) Anderson, Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction (page 5)

Othello, Horatio, and Brutus strike me as notable exemplars of laconicism, but in Hotspur's case Shakespeare creates an antiverbal bias that is not so much philosophical as it is bound up in gender stereotype.

1989, Ronald L. Dotterer, Shakespeare: Text, Subtext, and Context, page 206:

(literature, semiotics) Opposing or avoiding the use of speech or words.

antiverbal

opposing or avoiding the use of speech or words


semiography

en-noun

semiography (usually uncountable, plural semiographies)

Masson's semiography, rectifying millennia of scrptorial history, refers us not to origins (what do we care about origins?) but to the body: it imposes upon us not the form (banal proposition of all pointers) but the figure, i.e., the elliptical collision of two signifiers: the gesture beneath every ideogram as a kind of evaporated figurative outline, and the gesture of the painter, of the calligrapher, which makes the brush move according to his body.

2001, Roland Barthes, “Masson's semiography”, in Jed Rasula, Steve McCaffery, editor, Imagining Language: An Anthology, page 46:

As exemplified by the above quotes, both meaning-based writing, or semiography, and sound-based writing, or phonography, have been envisioned by influential thinkers who viewed the graphic expression of pure reason and pure sound, respectively, as ideals to be pursued in the design of writing systems.

2003, Florian Coulmas, Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis, page 18:

The fact that the semiography of French is specific and complex is due to its history, which, as we mentioned at the beginning, sets it apart from all the other Romance languages.

2013, R. Malatesha Joshi, P.G. Aaron, Handbook of Orthography and Literacy:

Semiography may be very useful for studies of landscape pathology.

2013, Vittorio Ingegnoli, Landscape Ecology: A Widening Foundation, page 171:

(linguistics, semiotics) A system of symbolic notation, especially (but not always) as opposed to phonetic notation.


esthesic

(semiotics) Relating to the reconstruction by the receiver of a message created by a sender


detotalize

en-verb

detotalize (third-person singular simple present detotalizes, present participle detotalizing, simple past and past participle detotalized)

detotalizes (present singular third-person)
detotalizing (participle present)
detotalized (participle past)
detotalized (past)

(transitive, philosophy, semiotics) To cause (something) no longer to be the total state of things, by means of adding something further that is not a part of it; to make incomplete by addition.


mediary

All is continuous, as Thirdness, generality, a temporal and mediary collusion of the values of the possible (as Firstness) and the singular (as Secondness).

1991, Floyd Merrell, Signs Becoming Signs: Our Perfusive, Pervasive Universe, page 93:

Thirdness can be tentatively qualified as that which brings about mediation between two other entities in such a manner that they are related to each other in the same way they are related to the third entity as a result of its mediary act.

2000, Susan Petrilli, La traduzione, →ISBN, page 86:

Due to the mediary role of thirdness, each of the categories can intermittently play the role of any of the other categories. Yet at a given space-time juncture, one of the three will be a first, one a second, and one a third.

2005, Paul Cobley, The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics, →ISBN, page 33:

(semiotics) Defining or inferring a generalization or category of meaning.


copulable

But the copula is related to the copulable, so the copula itself cannot be the abstractest representation

2013, O.K. Wiegand, Robert J. Dostal, Lester Embree, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic, page 277:


overcode

Instead of overlaying secondary images by alluding to an existing literary or oral tradition, structural overcodes overlay the secondary images by using technical vocabulary from a different frame of reference.

2006, Jerry Camery-Hoggatt, Speaking of God: Reading and Preaching the Word of God, →ISBN, page 126:

Opposed to codes that qualify, and overcodes that bring codes into a single resonance, axioms function by directly conjugating unqualified and decoded flows themselves.

2012, Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo, →ISBN, page 94:

Codes and overcodes refer to qualitative differences and similarities between entities; the circulation and distribution of social goods, as Eugene W.Holland points out, is still dependent onthe symbolic system of conduct, meaning, and belief.

2014, Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, Laci Mattison, Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism, →ISBN:

(semiotics) An established code (signifier) that also acts as a new code, either representing additional (related) meanings, or dividing into various nuances of the original meaning.


overcode

overcode (third-person singular simple present overcodes, present participle overcoding, simple past and past participle overcoded)

overcodes (present singular third-person)
overcoding (participle present)
overcoded (participle past)
overcoded (past)

Social interaction would be the place to study how people learn these cultural codes or reasoning structures, which is related to the human ability to overcode meaning in ways that become conventional (Eco 1976).

1984, Semiotica - Volumes 50-51, page 367:

It is equally self-defeating to reduce people to objects that may be possessed, or to interpret (i.e., overcode, classify, categorize) people or books.

1998, Vicki Mahaffey, States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment, →ISBN:

After Skyler asks Walt if he brought his cellphone and he responds, “Which one,” she tells him that she wants him out of the house. In so doing, she tries to subdivide the domestic home and overcode their relationship with rigid divisions.

2015, Bridget Roussell Cowlishaw, Masculinity in Breaking Bad: Critical Perspectives, →ISBN, page 177:

Humans will never completely overcode non-human multiplicities.

2017, Jean Hillier, Stretching Beyond the Horizon, →ISBN:

In one example, she describes an advertisement depictin a nude female torso in profile. Wegenstein suggests that in this particular advertisement, the breasts overcode the body in a way that the face previously had reign.

2007, M. Fenske, Tattoos in American Visual Culture, →ISBN, page 105:

Disability suties in education, as an academic field, or the disability rights movement, might be considered molar discourses that overcode the affective everyday experience of disability education.

2014, Anna Hickey-Moody, Vicki Crowley, Disability Matters: Pedagogy, Media and Affect, →ISBN, page 4:

Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 9) also recognise that although powerful sign systems may dominate or overcode a multiplicity, such overcoding will inevitably be temporary as 'multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialisation according to which they change in nature'.


overcoding

en-noun

overcoding (countable and uncountable, plural overcodings)

The reason lies in the peculiar efficacy of the state in utilizing overcoding and rendering its principles and categories society-wide.

1994, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, →ISBN, page 107:

Stylistic and ideological conventions are examples of such rules used in overcoding.

1995, Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics, →ISBN, page 212:

The scientific world (Welt, as opposed to the Umwelt of the animal) is the translation of all of the flows, particles, codes, and territorialities of the other strata into a sufficiently deterritorialized system of signs, in other words, into an overcoding specific to language.

2004, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, EPZ Thousand Plateaus, →ISBN, pages 69–70:

(semiotics) The use of established codes to take on new meanings, often thereby obscuring distinctions.

Identification of the semantic status of overcodings is a necessary preliminary to translation because it serves to identify those inferences which it will be necessary to supply in the shape of informal translation (in this case, in the shape of supplementation of the formal translation).

1987, Occasional Papers in Translation and Textlinguistics: OPTAT.:

Representation is established through successive overcodings, and the meaning of a phenomenon is given by the dominant overcoding, through a process of one code (or signifier) replacing another.

1996, Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, →ISBN:

The story of Sade reminds us of the overcodings of eroticism and politics, particularly in turbulent times and acrss highly contested political terrain.

2002, Samuel Lyndon Gladden, Shelley's Textual Seductions: Plotting Utopia in the Erotic and Political Works, →ISBN, page 1:


undercode

LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-undercode.wav

The anthropologist will tend to react more in terms of denotative overcoding, while the mass audience may respond more to connotative undercodes in terms of the ideological perspectives.

1986, Keyan G. Tomaselli, Myth, Race and Power: South Africans Imaged on Film and TV, page 17:

Kier Elam, in distinguishing these undercodes from generally understood dramatic codes, describes them as the "potent dramatic and theatrical conventions ruling the structure and understanding of plays and performances ..."

1995, W. F. H. Nicolaisen, Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, page 125:

This study also seeks to discover the motivation behind the desire of potential warriors to emulate the persona of traditional, idealized heroic icons. It argues that both a 'male undercode' and a 'religious undercode' exist at the root of military culture, shunning all 'feminising' influences, and stimulating a strong drive to achieve a type of 'supermasculine' identity.

2002, Dissertation Abstracts International: The humanities and social sciences:

(semiotics) A subtext; ideas or information that are assumed or implied but not explicitly coded.


undercode

en-verb

undercode (third-person singular simple present undercodes, present participle undercoding, simple past and past participle undercoded)

undercodes (present singular third-person)
undercoding (participle present)
undercoded (participle past)
undercoded (past)

The immature committee — possibly a zero-history group — may express itself simply and emotionally, and thereby undercodes.

1984, The Journal of the American Forensic Association:

Unlike the case of overcoding, undercoding occurs when the receiver somehow attempts to interpret an unfamiliar or unknown message without knowing the necessary codes.

1996, Kyong Liong Kim -, Caged in Our Own Signs: A Book about Semiotics, →ISBN, page 70:

The productive nature of this novel may lie in the uneasy cohabitation of these various discursive fields and in the variability of their coding – it may undercode at times and overcode at others.

2002, Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire, →ISBN, page 65:

Since musicians do not have native competence in producing the style from which they have appropriated, they have to 'undercode' to some extent. (Eco. 1976: 135—6).

2013, Jason Toynbee, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World?, →ISBN:

(semiotics, intransitive) To communicate using codes that do not convey the entire message, but which rely on the recipient's construction of meaning through connotation or subtexts.

To officers and dispatchers it also connotes "good police work" and "crime work" that is honorable and important. Each message is undercoded in respect of police ideology (Eco 1979:135ff., Manning 1986).

1992, Peter K. Manning, Organizational Communication, →ISBN, page 63:

In another sense it provides a deficit: some key knowledge necessary to read a word correctly is missing. One might alternatively say that the syllabary simultaneously undercodes and overcodes the spoken language, making it particularly ripe as a location for local language ideology.

2002, Margaret Clelland Bender, Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life, →ISBN:

By withholding information, thereby abnegating the textual strategies of the storyteller by undercoding the text, Calvino augments the duties of the concerned reader.

2006, Franco Ricci, Difficult Games: A Reading of I Racconti by Italo Calvino, →ISBN, page 110:

(semiotics, transitive) To use or convey (a message) in a way that requires the recipient to construct part of the meaning.

Thus theology is also a logocentric system that undercodes mythology.

1996 -, Kyong Liong Kim, Caged in Our Own Signs: A Book about Semiotics, →ISBN, page 70:

Instead of either stylizing the violence out of sight or repressing representation entirely, she undercodes the violence so that its presence in the resulting work, which is partly representational and partly anti-representational, is all the more tenacious and acute.

2010, Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art, →ISBN, page 62:

Ken Gelder argues in a psychoanalytic reading of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula that the text 'overcodes sexuality at the level of performance, but undercodes it at the level of utterance.

2013, Samantha George, Bill Hughes, Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead, →ISBN:

(semiotics, transitive) To communicate (information) indirectly, by means of an undercode.


hypotext

Such a practice (which is autosonic, by the way) could be viewed as a “mega-editing” process; but I would like to draw a distinction between plunderphonics and edited versions, because the former clearly aim to denature the hypotext.

2007, Allan F. Moore, Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, Routledge:

For example, what is the significance of changing the 'Pride'‚ to 'Bride', in Gurinder Chadha's film adaptation? Genette defines 'hypertextuality' as a hypertext's relation to its hypotext and instances of this are approaches to Austen that reflect […]

2010, Deborah Cartmell, Screen Adaptations: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: A close study of the relationship between text and film, A&C Black, →ISBN:

Citation is as much a recognition of, and tribute to, a source as it is a new version, but Gérard Genette's study of palimpsests is critical here, especially in his view that a new hypertext alters, expands, and extends the old one, the hypotext.

2014, Gordon E. Slethaug, Adaptation Theory and Criticism: Postmodern Literature and Cinema in the USA, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, →ISBN, page 192:

(semiotics) An earlier text which serves as the source of a subsequent piece of literature.


zoosemy

From zoo- + sem- (from Ancient Greek σῆμα "token, sign") + -y.

af

It must be emphasised that in this case the working of the mechanism of zoosemy was so intense that already in the first half of the 16th century — in disparaging use — mongrel started to be used in the sense 'the offspring of parents of different nationalities or of high and low birth' (1542>1898).

2010, Robert Kiełtyka, “Selected aspects of zoosemy: the conceptual dimension origin/social status at work”, in Philologia Hispalensis, page 174:

Migration is another aspect of social relations wherein zoosemy seems to have a notable presence, since animal metaphors can be an effective discursive strategy of othering, denigration and, in extreme cases, even dehumanization.

2022, Alisa Egorova, Hunting Down Animal Verbs: An Investigation into the Mechanisms of Meaning Transfer Underlying English Verbal Zoosemy, page 24:

(linguistics, semiotics) The metaphorical use of animal names or animal-related terms to denote human qualities, e.g. chicken, sly fox, mother hen etc. as epithets for human individuals.