Semiótica Aplicada Ao Ensino De Línguas

Este libro es una recopilación de escritos elaborados durante varios años, en diferentes plataformas digitales. Leerlos resultará de utilidad para cualquier persona interesado en la vida social y política, porque representan esquemas analíticos que pueden ser aplicados a la realidad cotidiana de cualquier sociedad; estos se enfocan concretamente a la Guatemala contemporánea y son ejercicios semiológicos que buscan compartirse con la comunidad académica del área de comunicación, y a la vez con quienes deseen iniciarse en este apasionante campo de esta aplicación teórica. Se abordan temáticas culturales, sociales y políticas, porque la semiótica permite estudiar, como dijo Eco, cualquier hecho cultural (en el amplio sentido de la palabra) como proceso comunicativo, pues prevalece todo un sistema de significación que lo soporta. La semiótica es una disciplina que bucea y escudriña en las redes simbólicas de la vida diaria, apoyándose en diversas áreas del conocimiento. Aplicar el escáner semiótico a estos temas fue una tarea fascinante, para resignificar los andamiajes de los poderes dominantes (y sus resquicios) siempre con la actitud académica de búsqueda.
El autor es Ramiro Mac Donald, reconocido semiólogo guatemalteco, doctorando en comunicación por UNIACC, Chile, profesor de semiótica, Opinión Pública y teorías de comunicación en universidades guatemaltecas. Autor del libro Funciones de Roman Jakobson en la Era Digital. Utiliza un agudo escáner semiótico en sus análisis. En la actualidad preside el Círculo Guatemalteco de Estudios Semióticos.

Semiotics (sometimes spelled “semeiotic”) is the name first given by John Locke, and later reprised by Charles S. Peirce, for the “doctrine of signs,” or the study of how some things can stand for other things to still other things. This deliberate inquiry can be contrasted with “folk semiotic” accounts, which assume that there is some intrinsic feature about, say, the human voice or a painted board that makes them capable of signifying. Such a naive assumption does not withstand serious scrutiny. From a philosophical standpoint, what makes something a sign is an involvement in a specific sort of triadic relation. This relation is found in human/nonhuman and deliberate/nondeliberate signs alike. Semiosis, the action of signs, is what permits communication, but it is wider than communication. For example, if while in an adjacent room I smell that the turkey in the oven is ready, my pet dog can smell it too, and the turkey is not trying to “tell” us anything. But if the cook in the kitchen tells me it is ready, I receive that message, while my dog hears the sounds but is none the wiser (in contemporary semiotic parlance, my dog and I couple our Umwelten via indices, but the symbols at hand generate interpretants only in my anthroposemiosis). In spite of the fact that it has a long and distinguished history (especially during the medieval period), general inquiry into signs became an organized research program only in the mid-20th century. Today, in addition to philosophers, semiotics attracts a wide range of scholars, such as ethologists, cognitive scientists, linguists, art historians, logicians, media theorists, literary critics, computer programmers, biologists, sociologists, and so on. From a methodological standpoint, then, parochialism is not an option. The scholarly literature can nevertheless be fruitfully divided into theoretical and applied strands. Not surprisingly, most philosophers drawn to semiotic questions work in the former strand. Semiotics is not to be confused with “semiology,” a (now largely defunct) project that originated in the lectures of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and which was active in the 1960s, mainly in France. Semiotics, by contrast, is a vibrant tradition that continues to flourish worldwide. Although some persist in employing the term “semiotics” when discussing narrow studies that focus exclusively on cultural codes, such terminological misuse masks the fact that a study of signs is broader than a study of language. A sustained philosophy of signs, then, promises (as Locke initially surmised) to yield truly novel insights.

The call for applications of the doctoral program in semiotics at the University of Turin has just been published.

Scholarships are available for both Italian and international candidates.

https://en.unito.it/postdegree/phd/arts-and-humanities

The traditional object of semiotics, the sign, stems from a selection. The signifying side of the sign never simply reproduces the signified one but singles out an aspect of it. “Aspect” (from the Latin “aspicere”, “to look at”) etymologically designates what appears, what presents itself to the eyes, as well as the way in which this presentation takes place. In English, “aspect” enters the language in the late 14th century as an astrological term, indicating the relative position of the planets as they appear from earth (i.e., how they ‘look at’ one another).
Generally speaking, the aspect in semiotics is everything that pushes reality to turn into signification “in some respect”. The word “respect”, famously chosen by Peirce in his canonical definition of the sign, may be regarded as a cognitive variant of the word “aspect”. If “aspect” is a particular way of looking at things, “respect” is a particular way of thinking of things. The respect is the inward counterpart of the aspect. The aspect is the outward counterpart of the respect. However, both refer to the same process: meaning derives from selection, and looking is the model and utmost metaphor of it. Peirce’s distinction between “dynamic object” and “immediate object” could not make sense without involving some form of aspect or respect. Indeed, most interpreters of Peirce describe the immediate object not as some additional object distinct from the dynamic one but merely as some “informationally incomplete facsimile of the dynamic object generated at some interim stage in a chain of signs” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The fact that this “facsimile” is incomplete is the consequence of the fact that some cognitive and cultural forces shape the sign into the result of a series of aspects and respects, highlighting certain qualities of the dynamic object while playing down or simply ignoring some other qualities.