The 3rd International Forum on Linguistic Cognitive Science, a lecture series entitled “ Approaches to Cultural Semiotics”, is to be held in September, with Roland Posner from Berlin University of Technology as the main speaker. Below are the details about the ten lectures:
Lecture 1:
What is Culture?
Key words: semiotics and anthropology; society, civilization, mentality; institutions, artifacts, mentifacts, instruments, texts; sign, message, recipient, channel, context; sender, code, signifier, signified, medium; indication, signification, communication; intercultural relations.
Lecture 2:
Culture Change and Culture Clash
Key words: evolution, history, tradition; culture, non-culture, counter-culture; center and periphery; semiotizing and desemiotizing on the basis of modeling, elaboration, standardization, and automatization; information storage, individual and collective memory,ritual, genre, code; genes, memes, survival-machines.
Lecture 3:
Cultural Texts – Semantic and Pragmatic Coherence
Keywords: semantics, meaning maximizing, literal versus transposed meaning, semantic features, presuppositions; pragmatics, monism of use, rules and violation of rules, conditions of use; cooperation principal, conversational maxims, variability, cancellability, and detachability of suggestions; duality of semantic and pragmatic interpretation.
Lecture 4:
Numbers and Number Representation
Key words: semiosphere and logosphere; writing systems: logogram scripts, syllabic scripts, alphabetic scripts; sign production and sign reception; learning effort and system economy, performance effort and performance economy; additive, multiplicative, lexicalized, and positional systems of number representation.
Lecture 5:
Sounds and Music Notation
Key words: speech, song, chant; pitch, duration, volume, timbre; absolute, relative, approximate, and marginal fixation of sounds by scripts and scores; dominant sound dimensions, inverse dimension hierarchies, division of labor of sound systems, balance of complexity; singing in rhythm-based and sound-based languages.
Lecture 6:
Objects and Pictures
Key words: visual perception as a sign process; object perception versus picture perception; sender signs versus recipient signs; the definition of „picture“: image area, color-form constellation, frame; perceiving something as something; direct versus indirect perception; perception forms, prototypes, and simulation; expressing something by indicating expressing.
Lecture 7:
Actions and Theatrical Performance
Key words: models of communication applied to humans; humans functioning not only as senders and recipients, but also as signs in the sense of signifiers, utterances, and images; hierarchies of personal credibility, and discrepancies occurring in them; iconic reference and indexical supplementation; the relationship between doubles and their originals.
Lecture 8:
Emotions and Verbalization
Key words: the spectrum of emotions and their verbalization in fairy tales; impersonal, patient-oriented, and agent-oriented anxiety reports; case grammar, valency, and the syntax of emotion expression; historical changes in the anxiety constellation and its constituents; consequences for the communication about anxiety today.
Lecture 9:
Literature and Interpretation
Key words: linguistic relations between literary texts and their interpretations; interpretation as recital and as text transformation; strategies of interpretive text transformation in the ages of Enlightenment, Biedermeier, Romanticism, Impressionism, Realism, Symbolism, Neue Sachlichkeit; types of text transformation: nominalization, agent deletion, abstraction, reordering; functions of text transformation: contextualization, objectivization, de-metaphorization, generalization, identification with protagonist or author, symbol construction; understanding through variation.
Lecture 10: (Public Lecture):
The City as a Center of Reflection
Key words: urban communication, city structure, and identity creation; media of image production; the passenger car as a sign vehicle and its transformation into a mirror reflecting the city quarters through which it happens to be moved; results of reflection depending on car design and city structure; ways of redesigning a city on the basis of its deconstruction through the reflections on the car bodies.