In the southern Dutch province of North Brabant, local dialect use is declining sharply. Dialect leveling and loss lead to convergence to standard Dutch, and simultaneously to divergence that is reflected in increasing variation, that is, hyperdialectisms. This can be clearly observed in morphosyntactic features such as the adnominal masculine gender suffix -e(n). The current study investigates the sociolinguistic enregisterment of this suffix in 336 multimodal “tiles” with Brabantish aphorisms and jokes on Instagram. Based on digital and interview data, it shows how linguistic structure, situated use, and metalinguistic awareness (i.e., Silverstein’s total linguistic fact) are constantly interrelated. It is argued that the gender suffix acquires indexical social meaning at the expense of grammatical function, as its (hyperdialectal) use becomes associated with and recognizable for a place-based identity (“Brabantishness”). This research offers insights into how this meaning-making process is enhanced by co-occurring linguistic and nonlinguistic resources in mediated “languagecultural” practices.

The Madonna of Humility has been a subject of great interest in the twentieth century. Scholars such as Millard Meiss and H. W. van Os have long dwelled on the origin and dissemination of this emblematic iconography. Nevertheless, scholars have said little regarding its role and possible reverberation on women of the late Middle Ages. The need to domesticate the female gender inspired great orators like Saint Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444), who used humility as a means to control society. Not only could humility, if perceived as a virtue, keep women within their limited social spaces, it would have allowed them—by following a specific fabricated way of life—to spiritually lead their households, gaining the possibility of eternal salvation. This article explores the faith-based concept of humility to unlock the forces that pushed toward the diffusion of a religious iconography, capable of imposing a modest way of life that was more in keeping with the Catholic teachings of the late Trecento and early Quattrocento. Several portrayals of the Madonna of Humility are proposed to investigate the role these paintings might have played in Italy in exalting humility as a noble virtue.

The concept of otherworld is often conceived as a realm inhabited by supernatural beings or as a fantastic location where the possibilities of imagination are realities. It gets linked to concepts of otherness and the other, but the question of what makes something an otherworld generally remains unasked. Otherworlds are usually thought of as somehow outside of or beyond the empirical world, but the issue is not so simple.

Blood gains many distinct meanings from different modes of classification, some of which are calibrated by the representational capacities of sacrifice. The Priestly source from Hebrew scriptures and the early Jewish text Second Maccabees both reread ancient sacrifice traditions, articulating new meanings for blood as part of the transformation from a temple-based locative system of animal sacrifice to a utopian decentered model of human self-sacrifice. The Priestly writers created a new semiosis of blood as the purifying essence of temple sacrifice. Second Maccabees offers a temple-replacement ideology with one foot in the locative notion of temple, and the other in suffering and martyrdom—displaced animal sacrifice—as the path to an individual afterlife. Its new meanings for blood are stimulated by conflict over two competing locative systems (foreign and native) and the need to, even while renewing, ultimately replace the temple cult.

Behavioral science, once a hypernym for a collection of fields, is becoming a hyponym of itself. Nonacademic and academic practitioners alike increasingly discuss a “behavioral science,” a discipline that consolidates research from the other behavioral sciences to improve humans’ (and organizations’) predictive and manipulative powers. Despite the usefulness of a shared understanding of behavioral science, few can agree on a definition. After a brief overview of what behavioral scientists do and produce, I provide an inexhaustive list of the predicates behavioral scientists use to interpret the objects, people, and signs of their field and explore the grounding phase parts of objects’ or signs’ existence that behavioral scientists read to categorize objects or signs. I propose that behavioral scientists have begun to define behavioral science work by classifying objects or signs (which make up their work) using a partonomy in which a behavioral science-ness of a sign is directly positively correlated with the strength of its relation to the signs psychology and economics. Finally, I discuss what this definitional practice suggests for the behavioral science field now and in the future.

The present paper investigates discursive justification as a moderative device in Kalevala-metric incantations. It explores different uses of justification by Finno-Karelian ritual specialists and argues that justification functions differently with positively and negatively evaluated non-human agents. In addition, a typology of discursive units of justification is provided. The results of the analysis reveal that justification functions as a register-based feature within the incantation genre. Types of justification directed to differently evaluated agents work as register-emblematic features. These findings open up new directions in the research of registers in Kalevala-metric incantation genre as constituted of multiple registers of communication.

This article proposes the concept of “nationalness” to account for the persistent circulation of national labels as a tool of distinction. We argue that the concept expands on the traditional conception of nation as country of origin to include cultural notions of sensuous and aesthetic qualities that are semiotically tied to national “essence.” Nationalness connects products to nations not only through indexicality but also iconicity. It is made possible through “rhematization,” the process of appropriating signs whose interpretants are taken to be iconic. Talk of nationalness enables consumers to make sense of national labels in today’s world where the both ends of capitalism—manufacturing and consumption—are thoroughly global. Instead of confining our analytical focus to top-down national branding projects, we examine how consumers invoke the idea of a nation to describe their uses of industrial products. Our case study is the popular concept of “British sound” circulated among audiophiles. Drawing on online discussions of an internet community, the article shows that audiophiles refer to Britishness as a key mechanism to distinguish their consumption experiences from mass market consumption. We further show how the label “British sound” can be used to describe the experiences of consumer products that are no longer manufactured in Britain.

Following Bourdieu, the process of commoditization has been understood to be the most socially significant process that art undergoes. That understanding presupposes the power of economic value, the order of value that all other values must resist or be overtaken by. This article analyzes the Santa Fe Indian Market as a tournament of values, where various orders of value compete for legitimacy and authority. While opposed aesthetic and economic orders frame evaluations at Indian Market, they serve primarily as background. At Indian Market, evaluations that use an administrative order of value are the site of intense contest and have great social significance both to this art world and to broader social, political, and economic concerns. A social theory of art relevant to many different art forms and traditions must take into account multiple orders of value and provide a method for analyzing their potential significance to participants.

Among the most highly esteemed verbal artists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American society were preachers, some of whom attained a remarkable degree of celebrity. As Bakhtin has reminded us, however, ritual forms like the sermon are prime targets for carnivalesque rekeying. Sermon parodies were abundant in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American popular culture from the Jacksonian period onward. As the producers of early commercial sound recordings in the United States (ca. mid-1890s–1920) sought to build their market with expressive forms that would be attractive to consumers, they included sermon parodies in their catalogs. The most common sermon parodies in the early commercial record catalogs had a special edge. They were burlesque performances, drawn from the minstrel-show tradition, in which performers in blackface animated popular stereotypes of the traditional African-American preacher. In this essay, I examine a sampling of these parodies of the African-American oral sermon to suggest what we can learn from them about the popular entertainments of the day, the emergent culture of commercial sound recording, and the racial politics of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.

This article analyses an environmentalist activity known as forest therapy in a suburb of Tokyo and formulates qualia as a rhematic textual process semiotically calibrating an encounter with forests in such a way that its effects seem raw, natural, or “unmediated.” In particular, it ethnographically demonstrates how a distinctive cooccurrence style of Japanese language use, involving ideophones and euphonic forms with various diminutive effects during forest therapy interactions, becomes a perceivable object of the senses qua discursive form, whose effects—which are not natural but naturalizing—further equips participants in forest therapy sessions to apperceive and discursively specify the attributes of other perceivable things, now taken to be “immediate” sensuous truths, through a process whose effects Peirce captions as qualia, or facts of firstness. The article further reveals that such a naturalized—and thus therapeutic—encounter with forests is figurated through various rhematic, text-metrical patterns that rely on specific discursive resources, which cumulatively diagram agents’ affective attunements to a nonhuman forest world, while enacting transspecies engagement with animals and “fictionalizing” the (lost) animistic linkage in the Anthropocene with “wildness” through their bodies as phatic nexus.

This article explores the discourses produced, circulated, and enregistered by administrators, teachers, and parents around and about “good food” at an elite elementary school in New York City. The larger research goal was to understand how privileged school children are socialized into elite foodways (how to identify, procure, and consume food) and elite forms of food talk (the codes and registers used around and about food) that contribute to the social field within which they develop the cultural capital needed to succeed as privileged worker-consumers in the neoliberal, late-capitalist world their parents are building. Here the analytic focus is on the intertextuality and indexical stance-taking of adults at the school and how these contribute to the sedimentation of elite signs and values and their imbrication into a moral economy of food and language in this privileged setting. The negotiation of contradictory messaging holds some hope for the roles these children may play as late capitalism unravels.

The specialty coffee industry emphasizes the importance of personal relationships that span disparate levels of the supply chain and production models that focus on the wellbeing of coffee producers. This emphasis presents specialty coffee as a socially progressive form of consumption that is often represented as superior to mass-produced coffee. Discourses that emphasize relationships between baristas and professionals at other levels of the supply chain serve as a tool in marketing specialty coffee, with baristas serving as an interface between consumers and other levels of the supply chain. The somewhat recent elevation of baristas to professional status is due, in part, to the growth of barista competitions. This article takes barista competitions as a context for analysis, highlighting how baristas incorporate voices from across the supply chain into their competition performances. I argue that in voicing individuals from across the supply chain, baristas draw on the expertise and authority represented by coffee farmers and roasters to support the development of their own authentic professional persona. This article also shows that, by voicing the supply chain, baristas respond to consumer desires for more ethical forms of consumption through these narratives, providing the moral and emotional experience of coffee that consumers crave.

This essay compares representations of religious conversion in four Italian chivalric poems: Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Semiotically read, they cast new light on the Catholic idea of the religious self in its development from the late Middle Ages throughout the early modern era. In this evolution, the Council of Trent represents a fundamental watershed.

The Least Eligibility Principle (LEP) has been variously engaged throughout US history to sort service populations into the deserving and undeserving. The no-frills prison policy movement of the 1990s was heavily influenced by LEP morality. Food was one focal point of the discourses and policies that negotiated the floating signifier “least” to place prisoners at the bottom of the presumed hierarchy, encouraging a punitive penal diet. Based on ethnographic data collected from a US prison for women, I explore women’s practices that negotiate their relationship to this diet. Following Abu-Lughod’s (1990) suggestion, I consider these daily acts of resistance to reveal the workings of power. The hollowed-out diet disciplines as it presupposes the moral classification of LEP, indexing the unworthiness of those who must consume it. The impacts of the disciplinary diet are far-reaching, encouraging the accumulation of debt while incarcerated and placing unyielding financial pressure on incarcerated individuals’ kin networks. State and civil society are continuous in the ideological negotiation that supports the punitive penal diet. Women’s practices that challenge the moral implications of this diet claim humanity and dignity in a system that presupposes their unworthiness and positions them as morally bankrupt.

The role played by the artist and the nature of art are two of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy. Indeed, if we were to trace the history of aesthetics, it seems evident that the role of the artist and the effects of art have been called into question as history crosses over into another age. My concern in this study has to do with the function of art and the artist throughout Western history, which is not so much an emancipatory movement as it is a crisis of transcendence. Likewise, the secular intellectual dogmatism that, in our age, treats literary texts as open documents of linguistics analysis without consideration for the author’s intention is less a democratic endeavor than it is a crisis of religious belief.

This study presents an alternative interpretation of one of the most aesthetically charged objects known from southwestern Mesoamerica, a tripod vessel seemingly manufactured in the fifteenth century CE. The analysis links the content of the visual narrative painted on the vessel with the use of the object, a function glyphically described around its neck. I argue that the binary structure of the depicted imagery and of the myth of origin encoded in the narrative was dialectically projected into the historical social field that motivated the commissioning of the artifact: a marital alliance to unite two powerful noble houses in order to forge a new dynasty. The deployment of the vessel to drink cacao during a marriage ceremony helps explain how its inscribed surface was meant to be read, and the depicted archetypical toponyms are hypothetically identified with lived places in the valleys of Nochixtlan and Coixtlahuaca.

This article explores the conditions, possibilities, and meanings of the concept “winners’ generation” in Estonian art in the 1990s. Some of the artists who were labeled by this name had their triumph in the freedom to express ideas that did not serve the dominant discourse, that is, discourse that captured only the interests of those who became successful during the period of change while shutting down realities not in line with their newly constructed norms and values. The ideological transition from socialist to capitalist ways of life in the course of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was an opportunity for these artists to become successful via visualizing failure, thus bringing out, but also questioning, the variations within the “victorious” discourse.

This article focuses on strategies of discourse processing for the relay of Vedic truth-statements (mahāvākyas) in the context of globalization and secular modernity. Of primary interest is situational representation of communicative events and educational reforms surrounding the transmission of brahmajñāna, that is, knowledge (jñāna) of nondual reality (brahman). Culminating at the end of the Vedas, Upaniṣads codify contextual properties of teacher-student successions (guru-śiṣya-paramparās) structuring the transmission of brahmajñāna. Despite ongoing interest in Advaita Vedānta, there is still a need to conceptualize the teaching tradition (sampradāya) as a matter for empirical observation and thereby to propose a set of cognitive hypotheses that make it possible to account for the referential basis of discourse production and situation models representing Upaniṣads as a verbal means of knowledge (śabda-pramāṇa). Consequently, genre expectations in the Advaita sampradāya provide the starting point for further inquiry into variant discourses of Vedānta.

This is a case study of an official orthographic change in eastern India, which I approach as a debate about semiotic ideologies. In 2012, an Indian constitutional amendment changed the names of one of India’s eastern states, Odisha, and its state language, Odia, in Devanagari and Roman scripts. Building on recent studies of multilingual and multiscriptal orthographies on public signs, I examine official parliamentary and popular media arguments about the orthographic correspondences between Odia, English, and Hindi names for the state and its language. As the debaters propose contrasting models of official naming and justify them, they build on different orientations to the material embodiments of linguistic signs. These different assumptions also support contrasting social imaginaries of Odisha in relationship to the nation. This article proposes that orientations to the body and embodiment can be an important component of the semiotic ideologies of orthography.

In this special issue, we inspect material and nonhuman phenomena that contribute to interaction and meaning-making—among them sounds, visual signs, animals, images, digital devices, bodies, and movements—in order to stimulate new thinking surrounding the question of what language is from a posthumanist perspective. The contributors are language-oriented scholars who focus on material and technological environments in language. They interrogate how linguistic and nonlinguistic practices interrelate to produce meaning, concepts of the human, and social relations. The theoretical backgrounds of such posthumanist approaches to the sociomaterial practice of interaction are introduced in this article.