Everyone gestures while speaking, in a specific and generally unconscious manner. What are the functions of gestures? What relationship do they have to speech? How do gestures work to create meaning? In this valuable book, Genevieve Calbris undertakes to answer those questions.

Based on the author's own extensive experimental research, The Semiotics of French Gestures presents a systematic description and a detailed semiotic analysis of French gestures. The book aims to establish a structual semantics of the set of gestures and facial expressions that accompany or replace spoken...

Semiotic theory, which has restricted its focus largely to human forms of significations, is transformed by Robert S. Corrington into a semiotics of nature itself. Corrington situates the divide between "nature naturing" and "nature natured" within the contest of classical American pragmaticism and postmodern psychoanalysis. At the heart of this new metaphysics is an insistence that all signs participate in larger orders of meaning that are natural and religious. Meanings embodied in nature point beyond nature to the mystery inherent in positioned codes and signs.

Richard Parmentier takes up Ferdinand de Saussure's challenge to study the "life of signs in society" by using semiotic tools proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce. He studies how semiotic theory can illuminate highly complex social and cultural practices.

From reviews for the bestselling Danish edition:

..". dashing and idiomatic language that is a pleasure to read." --Berlingske Tidende

..". an appetizer and eye opener... Hoffmeyer is a modernistic pioneer in the wide open spaces of the natural sciences... " --Politiken

..". extremely well written and interesting manifesto for a bioanthropology... " --Inf.

"It should be read by anyone who likes to be wiser and at the same time to be challenged in his habitual conception of the relations between culture and nature." --Weekend Avisen

On this tour of the...

Existential semiotics involves an a priori state of signs and their fixation into objective entities. These essays define this new philosophical field.

Note: Picture of Peirce available]

Charles S. Peirce's Philosophy of Signs
Essays in Comparative Semiotics
Gerard Deledalle

Peirce's semiotics and metaphysics compared to the thought of other leading philosophers.

"This is essential reading for anyone who wants to find common ground between the best of American semiotics and better-known European theories. Deledalle has done more than anyone else to introduce Peirce to European audiences, and now he sends Peirce home with some new flare."--Nathan Houser, Director, Peirce Edition Project

Charles S. Peirce's...

The study of semiotics underwent a gradual but radical paradigm shift during the past century, from a glottocentric (language-centered) enterprise to one that encompasses the whole terrestrial biosphere. In this collection of 17 essays, Thomas A. Sebeok, one of the seminal thinkers in the field, shows how this progression took place. His wide-ranging discussion of the evolution of the field covers many facets, including discussions of biosemiotics, semiotics as a bridge between the humanities and natural sciences, semiosis, nonverbal communication, cat and horse behavior, the semiotic...

..". excellent example... significant contribution... an important interdisciplinary work... " --Middle East Journal

..". an important contribution to aspects of Iranian social communication and interpersonal verbal behavior." --Language

By showing the reader the intricacies of face-to-face sociolinguistic interaction, William Beeman provides a key to understanding Iranian social and political life. Beeman's study in cross-cultural linguistics will clearly be a model for the study of different languages and cultures.

"This is an important book: original, erudite, useful and ambitious." --Quarterly Journal of Speech

"A remarkable book... sure to be of lasting interest... to be reckoned with by all rhetorical theorists." --Choice

This is the first contemporary attempt at a holistic theory of rhetoric, well grounded in the context of cultural and social history. Arguing that rhetoric has always been an independent, objective, essential factor in human interaction, Valesio views it as coextensive with human speech in use.