Signata Annales des sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics The Year in Semiotics (2010): The United States and Beyond

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1 Signata Annales des sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics 2010 États-Unis The Year in Semiotics (2010): The United States and Beyond Thomas F. Broden Electronic version URL: Publisher Presses universitaires de Liège (PULg) Electronic reference Thomas F. Broden, «États-Unis», Signata [Online], 2010, Online since 31 December 2010, connection on 09 March URL : This text was automatically generated on 9 March Signata - PULg

2 1 États-Unis The Year in Semiotics (2010): The United States and Beyond Thomas F. Broden The Semiotic Society of America 1 The Semiotic Society of America (SSA) has met annually since 1975 at venues in the USA and Canada. Over the last decade, while Francophone Canadian semioticians have enjoyed the opportunity to gather at a number of special meetings organized in Québec, the SSA conference has provided the only forum in the USA at which their Anglophone counterparts can assemble to share their research. The scientific focus varies according to the colleagues most active in organizing the event on a given year, but the meeting mainly attracts scholars whose research emphasizes the humanities. The proceedings of the 2008 and 2009 SSA colloquia have been published within the last 18 months (references below) and those for 2010 should be available for purchase at the late-october 2011 meeting in Pittsburgh (call for papers below). The following areas of research have been prominent over the last three years: Classical or continental philosophy, including C.S. Peirce, and the history of philosophical semiotics since the Greeks, Scholastics, etc. (this research runs counter to the strong bias in favor of analytical philosophy in the USA). Papers also apply Peircean semiotics to cultural productions ranging from literature to music and photography. Semiotics in the realms of cultural studies and anthropology: the physical and cultural structures and practices of humans and other organisms in the environment. Biosemiotics, including anthroposemiotics, zoosemiotics, phytosemiotics. New approaches study the relations between semiotics and the rapidly changing life sciences and natural sciences. Research examines whether and how communication, exchange, and transformation via signs operate at different levels, such as that of the organism as a whole; interactions among organisms; parts of organisms such as organs, cells, and genes; and molecular structures like DNA and RNA.

3 2 Romance-language colleagues have presented papers that supply much-needed studies of visual semiotics, utterly absent otherwise at the SSA. The semiotics of music is relatively vibrant, and some papers study film. A handful of contributions pursue research in the professions, such as marketing, clinical psychology, and architecture, and creative artists occasionally provide unique perspectives, including musical composers and creative writers. The once-strong area of legal semiotics has fallen silent. 2 Frank Nuessel served as program chair for the 35 th annual SSA meeting in Louisville in 2010 and reports that the conference featured papers by approximately 100 colleagues from the USA and abroad, including plenary addresses by Marcel Danesi, Ivo A. Ibri, Carl Hausman, and then SSA President W. John Coletta. The theme of the conference was The Semiotics of Space, but conferees were invited to speak on any topic relevant to semiotics, and indeed covered the range of the intellectual landscape. 3 Deely, John and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, eds. Semiotics 2008, Selected Proceedings of the 33 rd Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, October Ottawa: Legas, p. 4 Sbrocchi, Leonard G., Jason Hogue, and Karen Ann Haworth, eds. Semiotics 2009: The semiotics of time. Proceedings of the 34 th Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, October Ottawa: Legas, Call for Papers for the 2011 SSA meeting in Pittsburg on the (optional) topic "Worldviews": Plenary speakers: Robert Innis, John Deely, Kelly Oliver, and SSA President Frank Nuessel. Report on the year in biosemiotics, by Don Favereau saw the continued growth of biosemiotics, with the 10 th Annual International Gatherings in Biosemiotics conference taking place at Catholic University of Portugal in Braga in June, the Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Information Science held in Beijing, China in August, and a conference entitled Language as Social Coordination: An Evolutionary Perspective held at the University of Warsaw, Poland in September. Three new titles in Springer Publishers Book Series in Biosemiotics were also published in 2010: Dario Martinelli s Critical Companion to Zoosemiotics, Anton Markoš and colleagues Life as its own Designer, and Donald Favareau s Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary. Selected New Titles in Cognitive Studies, by Howard Mancing 7 Babuts, Nicolae Memory, Metaphors, and Meaning: Reading Literary Texts. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. 8 Bloom, Paul How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. New York W.W. Norton. 9 Boyd, Brian On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP. 10 Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, eds Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. New York: Columbia UP.

4 3 11 de Waal, Frans The Age of Empathy: Nature s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Harmony Books. 12 Gopnik, Alison The Philosophical Baby: What Children s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Live, and the Meaning of Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 13 Holland, Norman N Literature and the Brain. Gainesville, FL: The PsyArt Foundation. 14 Leverage, Paula, Howard Mancing, Richard Schweickert, and Jennifer Marston William, eds Theory of Mind and Literature. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP. 15 Leverage, Paula Reception and Memory: A Cognitive Approach to the Chansons de Geste. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 16 Noë, Alva Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. 17 Vermeule, Blakey Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. 18 Zunshine, Lisa, ed Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore; Johns Hopkins UP. Linguistics Publications (2009, 2010), Selected by John Sundquist 19 John Beavers (2010). The structure of lexical meaning: Why semantics really matters. Language, 86(4), Biberauer, T., Holmberg, A., Roberts, I., & Sheehan, M. (2010). Parametric Variation: Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory (1 st ed.). Cambridge University Press. 21 Bickerton, D. (2010). Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans (1 st ed.). Hill and Wang. 22 Deutscher, G. (2010). Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (First Edition.). Metropolitan Books. 23 Evans, N., & Levinson, S.C. (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(05), Fitch, W.T. (2010). The Evolution of Language (1 st ed.). Cambridge University Press. 25 Geeraerts, D. & Cuyckens, H., eds. (2007). The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford University Press. XXX, 1334 p. 26 Holmberg, A. (2010). Parameters in minimalist theory: The case of Scandinavian. Theoretical Linguistics, 36(1), Kayne, R.S. (2010). Comparisons and Contrasts. Oxford University Press, USA. 28 Larson, R.K., Déprez, V., & Yamakido, H. (2010a). The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives (1 st ed.). Cambridge University Press. 29 Larson, R.K., Déprez, V., & Yamakido, H. (2010b). The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives (1 st ed.). Cambridge University Press. 30 Nevins, A., D. Pesetsky, & C. Rodrigues (2009). Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment. Language, 85(2), O'Grady, W. (2010). Fundamental universals of language. Lingua, 120(12),

5 4 32 Sciullo, A.M.D., & Boeckx, C. (2011). The Biolinguistic Enterprise: New Perspectives on the Evolution and Nature of the Human Language Faculty. Oxford University Press, USA. 33 Wechsler, Stephen (2010). What 'you' and 'I' mean to each other: Person indexicals, selfascription, and theory of mind. Language, 86(2), doi: /lan AUTHOR THOMAS F. BRODEN Purdue University