Chapter 3 focuses on some of the signifiers that have long been argued to provide proof for how Punic culture survived and persisted through molk-style rites, especially the “sign of Tanit,” the crescent, and terms like sufete. Instead of continuities, these signs were appropriated and visibly transformed by the new elite of the first century BCE. It was not meanings, significances, or interpretations that bound togther these worshippers from Mauretania to Tripolitania, but rather the signs themselves. Rather than veneers that can be dismissed as epiphenomena, signifiers had the power to create imagined communities, and they did so within a Third Space distinct from the markers of prestige embraced by Numidian kings and Roman authorities.

Chapter 1 introduces the problems to which this book responds and proposes alternative pathways for understanding the archaeology of the Roman Empire. It shows how particular colonial ways-of-knowing continue to shape the stories told of North Africa’s people and their traditions of worship under the Roman Empire, setting these within the binary of “Romanization” or “resistance.” While approaches to the archaeology of other parts of the Roman Empire have begun to embrace New Materialism as a way of moving beyond “Romanization,” this chapter argues that semiotic approaches offer a more productive means of engaging with and explaining the material dimensions of imperial hegemony.

There are three slightly different ways that language and languages can be considered in relation to the idea of assemblage: assemblages as combinations of linguistic items (language assemblages), assemblages as semiotic gatherings (semiotic assemblages) and assemblages as material arrangements that involve language (sociomaterial assemblages). Looking at language in terms of assemblages emphasizes the processes of communication as people draw on varied resources to make meaning. The notion of semiotic assemblages opens up ways of thinking that focus not so much on language use in particular contexts – as if languages pre-exist their instantiation in particular places – but rather on the ways in which particular assemblages of objects, linguistic resources and places come together. This is to approach language not as a pregiven or circumscribed entity but rather as something that is constantly being put together from a range of semiotic and resources. Sociomaterial assemblages similarly focus on things and places in relation to linguistic resources and consider language to be embodied, embedded and distributed, where language is not so much an abstract system of signs as changing sets of material relations.

This chapter offers a toolbox of Methods for Gesture Analysis (MGA). Developed in the context of research on emerging protolinguistic structures in cospeech gestures, the present version of MGA differs from earlier publications (Bressem, Ladewig, Müller 2013; Bressem 2013) in offering sets of tools for gesture analysis that adapt flexibly to different research questions. Essential starting points for MGA are an understanding of hand gestures as temporal forms embedded in a dynamically unfolding context and an understanding of context that itself varies with the adopted framework. The baseline for any chosen tool is a microanalysis that entails some account of the form of the gesture (as temporal form), i.e. ‘form analysis’,and some analysis of how a gesture, a sequence of gestures, a multimodal sequence is placed in a given temporally unfolding context-of-use, i.e. context-analysis. Macroanalyses of gesture dynamics are briefly introduced. MGA offers a toolbox with a flexible set of tools that encourages critical reflection on the insight that can be gained from analyzing gestures in multimodal communication and interaction.

Geneviève Calbris’ semiotic study of French gestures began in the 1970s and shows how gestural signs interface between the concrete and the abstract. Created by analogical links originating in physical experience of the world via processes of mimesis and metonymy, they are activated by contexts of use and constitute diverse semantic constructions: Gesture is able to evoke several notions alternatively (polysemy) or simultaneously (polysign). As expressions of perceptual schemas extracted from physical experience, they prefigure concepts. A Saussurean perspective brings to light relations between physical features of gestures (signifiers) and the notions (signifieds) they are apt to evoke; it reveals signifiers that are common to different gestures (paradigmatic axis of substitution) and how signifiers interweave in gestural sequencing (syntagmatic axis of combination). Gesture expresses, animates, explains, synthesizes information, and anticipates speech. We highlight its utterance functions, its simultaneous multireferentiality, the gestural anticipation of verbal information, and the interplay of tension-relaxation between conversation partners that this can create.

The chapter explores the anxious cultural construction of women as intergenerational mediators that emerges from several epistles in Pliny’s collection (3.3 and 4.19; 4.2 and 4.7; 2.7 and 3.10). At once expected to be bearers of their father’s imprint and vehicle for the transmission of their husband’s identity, Roman women were the object of a discourse in which notions of biological filiation significantly intersected with issues of artistic reproduction and literary allusion. Building a typology of intra-, inter-, extra-, and alter-textual relations which connect Pliny’s topic and diction to relevant passages in Martial (6.37 and 38) and Tacitus (Dial. 28-29), my argument illuminates some crucial, common semiotic practices in his age.

8. From early formulations of this theory, Moscovici viewed ‘meaning’ and ‘knowledge’ as semiotic processes and expressed them as a triadic model in two formulations. The two formulations of the triadic model are complementary. First, in the figurative equation ‘representation = figure/signification’, Moscovici foregrounded the infinite meaning- and knowledge-making processes of social representations through objectification and anchoring. The figurative equation can be represented as a triad involving representation, figure, and signification. Both Peirce’s and Moscovici’s triadic models form wholes in which their elements are linked in and through indivisible relations. Signs and symbols are expressed through various means, among which name-giving is particularly notable. Changing the name implies a symbolic effort to change the identity of the bearer of that name and signifies the Self’s attempt to belong to a group or to specific Others. Divergencies between ‘meanings’ and ‘knowledge’ in professional practices have the potential to inspire intervention practices in fields such as health, education, and therapies.

The second formulation of the triadic model is expressed in the Ego–Alter–Object, which refers to the theory of social representations and communication as a theory of social knowledge.

This chapter provides a critical review of the blossoming of Linguistic Landscape (LL) as a research field in the early 21st century. Arguing that the LL itself is at least as old as written language, the chapter examines the multiple sources of contemporary LL research in such fields as onomastics, the visual arts, language policy and planning, and examinations of the social and linguistic outcomes of multilingualism, globalisation, and population movement. The chapter argues that the field of LL research did not stem from any one source, but instead developed from bringing together researchers from different interests and parts of the world. The chapter reviews terminology in the field from English and French, and argues for the use of LL as one which is broad enough to include a wide range of modes of expressing meaning, but retains a focus on language that gives it a distinct conceptual identity.

Many Indigenous lowland South American peoples treat the thinking, feeling self as constituted by the process of relating to a panoply of others, including enemies. This need for alterity in the constitution of selves is arguably part of a loose but widespread and enduring pattern – an ‘Amazonian package’ – that also tends to feature claims to the effect that the collective fabrication of beautiful, competent, human bodies is a central purpose of human social life, in the context of a cosmos in which beings with similar bodies perceive each other as human and those with different bodies as non-human. I examine practices and speech genres in which people attribute an evaluative gaze to murdered enemies, sorcerers, would-be lovers, and fishhooks, among other figures of alterity, and I argue that such attributions reflect and reproduce motivating pictures of moral subjects. Over time and motivated by these pictures, people have gone about living their lives such that their evaluative deployments have more or less felicitously interpellated new generations. Morality has thus been central in the reproduction of the Amazonian package. The process, however, is not teleological.

The chapter ’Da Kittehz’ focusses on semiotics and syntax with examples from LOLcats and LOLspeak. The section on semiotics shows us the difference between image macros (memes) and vernacular photos, both of which are present in the cat-related digital spaces. The chapter continues with a description of LOLspeak as a special internet language variety (SILV) in relation to pidgins, play language, and ludlings. Based on the methods of the existing studies on LOLspeak, it analyses the spelling, vocabulary, and grammar of LOLspeak. The final section shows us more cat-related language varieties that have developed in the cat-related digital spaces on the Internet, like Hambspeak and other cat-inspired idiolects.

This chapter introduces some language concepts at the semiotic level. This helps to see language systems as socially constructed and also as responding to communicative need. It is foundational in our exploration of critical thinking; it helps us to question assumptions made about how we frame our communicative world as ‘natural’ or ‘given’. If we can see language as the mechanism of representation and referentiality, then we can consider alternatives and we can see how the use of language is often at the heart of conflicting narratives and perceptions. Indeed, sometimes language is the problem. Being articulate in Academic English enables us to express our ideas, to understand, to analyse and respond to, other people’s usage of language. First, let’s look at the fundamentals of referentiality and language use.