This article discusses how law is produced semiotically as a category of social action through a study of jury decision making and the production of jury verdicts. In the US criminal justice system, citizens called for jury duty are interpellated as jurors and instructed in legal reasoning through encounters with a variety of texts. Jurors respond to the state’s hailing by producing themselves as competent jurors who can reason according to specifically legal forms of objectivity that may diverge from their everyday assessments of facts in reaching verdicts: for example, they can find a defendant legally “not guilty” while maintaining a belief in the defendant’s guilt. In ethnographic data discussed in this article, jurors affirm their competence as legal reasoners via the “enregisterment” of a style of reasoning that they link indexically to the constitutionally enshrined ideal of “impartiality.” In so doing, jurors recontextualize a style of reasoning, grounded in a logic of a “moralized objectivity of self-restraint” (Daston and Galison 1992), entextualized in the texts used to instruct them in legal reasoning during the trial process. Tracing these processes of enregisterment illustrates how legitimacy of law is semiotically mediated.

Interlingual translation, intersemiotic translation, and mediation seem to be the main means by which students who are learning English as a foreign language in Greece connect the learning of English as a foreign language and Greek as a mother tongue. This research probes into the teaching of English in Greek state schools and more specifically the teaching of English, as a foreign language, in the first year of junior high school. The research attempts to evaluate the authors’ choices of visual iconic messages that promote the Greek culture and language, the students’ mother tongue, as a means of mediation—mostly through interlingual translation—to familiarize them with the target language and culture, namely, the English language and culture. The fact that the visual iconic and verbal signs under scrutiny are all derived from a textbook published by the Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs gives more significance to the specific signs (thus legitimizing them).

In June 2012, student activists in Nepal declared a campaign against private, for-profit colleges with foreign names, simultaneously decrying the schools’ names and their exorbitant tuition fees. During the campaign, members of multiple student unions vandalized signboards, buildings, computers, and buses belonging to various colleges and filed a court case demanding stricter management of private schools. These activists claimed control of the linguistic landscape of Kathmandu, objecting not to English in the classroom but to the material emblems of branded educational institutions. This article explores the semiotic implications of this movement through analysis of newspaper coverage of the protests. The school names and talk about appropriate names delineate two competing cultural chronotopes that students employed to promote a particular vision of proper Nepali behavior and to contest what they depicted as inappropriate commodification of higher education.

Few sources exist from which to form impressions of how Indigenous Australians have made sense of the questions put to them by linguists. For one survey, conducted by Summer Institute of Linguistics linguists in 1970, we have a transcript of conversations between linguists and speakers. The linguists were asking for information about the mutual intelligibility and geographic extent of the named speech forms they had been tasked with documenting. Linguists and speakers brought to the encounter mutually incompatible visions of how linguistic variation unfolds in space. For speakers, speech-form geography was characterized by reticulation, rather than tessellation, and the mutual intelligibility of neighboring speech forms was to be characterized not in terms of basic vocabulary cognacy but in terms of histories of recurring encounters among speakers of different codes. The 1970 East Kimberley transcript makes audible speakers’ and linguists’ efforts to negotiate a shared way of talking about language.

Based on the cultural and linguistic analysis of a sample of posts written on Facebook by twenty Italian mothers-to-be, this article discusses the practice of online posting as a form of storytelling, this being considered one of the privileged human ways of processing and assigning a meaning to experiences by weaving them into plots and formulas. Facebook is defined as a narrative device that promotes not only the production of user-generated content but also its framing according to typical narrative patterns. Pregnancy is a beloved theme on Facebook because it lends itself to a reiterated formulation in the form of a personal story. Developed against the specific background of the Italian sociocultural context, a narratological consideration of the sample identifies the most recurrent plots through which pregnant women shape and share the phases of their experience, stressing both their similarities to, and differences from, offline stories of pregnancy. A closer look at the semiotic and rhetorical dimension of the posts finally allows us to explore the continuous interplay between verbal and visual codes and the semantic fields exploited to tell about pregnancy on Facebook. The combination of these two analytical perspectives in the study of online pregnancy narratives constitutes the theoretical and methodological purpose of this article.

Societies should be analyzed not only from the point of view of what they talk about but also from the point of view of what they are quiet about. Areas of silence in the semiosphere vary across cultures and history and stem from a complex interaction of historical circumstances and social agencies. Implicit norms of taciturnity are often codified into explicit legal frameworks, whose enforcement, though, substantially relies on state and government propaganda. Citizens must interiorize as a second nature the ideology of taciturnity that leads them not to share any content about certain topics. This mechanism of hegemonic silencing is macroscopically visible in times of war, when national interests solidify into specific rhetorics of taciturnity. This article is a comparative analysis of World War II silence propaganda. However, in times of relative peace both autocratic regimes and democratic states also need areas of silence and secrecy to pattern public discourse. Understanding how the creation of collective silence takes place is essential in an increasingly interconnected and global society in which limits to free disclosure and communication often give rise to tensions and conflicts.