This book is aimed at investigating the consequences of epistemological positions for the foundation of linguistic semiotics with special reference to the concepts of sign and meaning. In the succeeding five chapters, the reader is provided with a panorama of theory-and-method related views that show how far the specification of the subject matter of semiotics is dependent upon the ontological and gnoseological commitments of scientists. Language as a system of shared means of signification and communication is discussed here with respect to its systemic and ecological properties constituting...

This collection of essays deals primarily with the idea of ugliness as represented in a variety of literary narratives in English. Shakespeare s Caliban and his depiction in The Tempest and its contemporary film adaptations are dealt with, just as Joseph Merrick s innocence of ugliness and Swinburne s aesthetic transgressions of the late-Victorian period are discussed. Moreover, D. H. Lawrence s monstrosity of agedness is examined, as well as postcolonial discourses of ugliness in Patrick White, J. M. Coetzee and the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. The volume also contains essays on...