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The X figure is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, but attempts to explain our fixation with X are rare.This book argues that the origins and meanings of X go far beyond alphabets and archetypes to remembered feelings of body movements - movements best typified in the performance of "spread-eagleΓÇá? as a posture or gesture. These body memories are then projected onto other patterns and dynamics to help us make sense of the world. The argument is accomplished using a blend of insights from linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics, rhetoric culture and process semiotics to bring together revealing clues from languages, cultures and thinkers around the world.Chief among the uses and experiences of X are its tendencies to involve us in surprising reversals and blends. In ancient times the X-pattern was discussed as "chiasmusΓÇá?, a figure which, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, informs the most basic elements of our bodily experience, calling into question polarized dichotomies such as subject versus object. Pushed to extremes, presumed opposites like these tend to reverse suddenly. Likewise, blended experiences of our bodily extremities - arms and legs, toes and fingers, hands and feet - provide a plausible source of grounding for unique human abilities like analogy and double-scope conceptual integration. The book illustrates these dynamics by drawing attention to uses of X in history, prehistory and daily life, from sports and advertising to world mythology and languages around the world.The Semiotics of X is the first step towards developing a larger argument on the important but neglected role that chiasmus plays in cognition. It aims to inspire continued exploration on the figure, with the full expectation that chiasmus will become for the 21st century what metaphor became for the 20th century: a revolution in thinking about the way we think.

Why are things funny? How has humor changed over the centuries? How can humor be a political force?Featuring expert authors from across the globe, The Languages of Humor discusses three main types of humour: verbal, visual, and physical. Despite the differences between them, all have a common purpose, showing us in different ways the reality that we live in, and how we can reflect on that reality. To this end, the book shows how humor has been used to address such topics as the Holocaust and the Soviet Union, and why it has been controversial in cases including Charlie Hebdo.The Languages of Humor explores a subject that is of interest in a wide range of intellectual disciplines including sociology, psychology, communication, philosophy, history, social sciences, linguistics, computer science, literature, theatre, education, and cultural studies. This volume features contributions from world-leading academics, some of who have professional backgrounds in this field. This unique research-led book, which includes over 20 illustrations, offers a top-down analysis of humor studies.

We communicate multimodally. Everyday communication involves not only words, but gestures, images, videos, sounds and of course, music. Music has traditionally been viewed as a separate object that we can isolate, discuss, perform and listen to. However, much of music''s power lies in its use as multimodal communication. It is not just lyrics which lend songs their meaning, but images and musical sounds as well. This book considers musical sound as multimodal communication, examining the interacting meaning potential of sonic aspects such as rhythm, instrumentation, pitch, tonality, melody and their interrelationships with text, image and other modes. This draws upon and extends the conceptual territory occupied by social semiotics. In so doing, this book brings together research from scholars to explore questions around how we communicate through musical discourse, and in the discourses of music. Methods in this collection are drawn from critical discourse analysis, social semiotics and music studies to expose both the function and semiotic potential of the various modes used in songs and other musical texts. These analyses reveal how each mode works in various contexts from around the world, often articulating counter-hegemonic and subversive discourses of identity and belonging. This project extends the influential work of van Leeuwen (1999) and Machin (2010) on how music articulates discourse, offering up new conceptual methods for multimodal analysis of music and real world examples of music''s often powerful effects on listeners and performers.

Drawings and sequential images are an integral part of human expression dating back at least as far as cave paintings, and in contemporary society appear most prominently in comics. Despite this fundamental part of human identity, little work has explored the comprehension and cognitive underpinnings of visual narratives-until now. This work presents a provocative theory: that drawings and sequential images are structured the same as language. Building on contemporary theories from linguistics and cognitive psychology, it argues that comics are written in a visual language of sequential images that combines with text. Like spoken and signed languages, visual narratives use a lexicon of systematic patterns stored in memory, strategies for combining these patterns into meaningful units, and a hierarchic grammar governing the combination of sequential images into coherent expressions. Filled with examples and illustrations, this book details each of these levels of structure, explains how cross-cultural differences arise in diverse visual languages of the world, and describes what the newest neuroscience research reveals about the brain''s comprehension of visual narratives. From this emerges the foundation for a new line of research within the linguistic and cognitive sciences, raising intriguing questions about the connections between language and the diversity of humans'' expressive behaviours in the mind and brain.

Peircean introduction to visual rhetoric and a powerful system of semiotics quite distinct from the Saussurean structuralist tradition.

Integrates structural and historical perspectives on the semiotics of religion and gives an account of the distinctive features of religious language and symbolism.

The X figure is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, but attempts to explain our fixation with X are rare.This book argues that the origins and meanings of X go far beyond alphabets and archetypes to remembered feelings of body movements - movements best typified in the performance of "spread-eagle" as a posture or gesture. These body memories are then projected onto other patterns and dynamics to help us make sense of the world. The argument is accomplished using a blend of insights from linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics, rhetoric culture and process semiotics to bring together revealing clues from languages, cultures and thinkers around the world.Chief among the uses and experiences of X are its tendencies to involve us in surprising reversals and blends. In ancient times the X-pattern was discussed as "chiasmus", a figure which, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, informs the most basic elements of our bodily experience, calling into question polarized dichotomies such as subject versus object. Pushed to extremes, presumed opposites like these tend to reverse suddenly. Likewise, blended experiences of our bodily extremities - arms and legs, toes and fingers, hands and feet - provide a plausible source of grounding for unique human abilities like analogy and double-scope conceptual integration. The book illustrates these dynamics by drawing attention to uses of X in history, prehistory and daily life, from sports and advertising to world mythology and languages around the world.The Semiotics of X is the first step towards developing a larger argument on the important but neglected role that chiasmus plays in cognition. It aims to inspire continued exploration on the figure, with the full expectation that chiasmus will become for the 21st century what metaphor became for the 20th century: a revolution in thinking about the way we think.