Semiotic Insights: The Data Do the Talking (Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication)

This collection of articles by Irmengard Rauch, a widely known and respected scholar of semiotics and linguistics, provides a lucid narrative on the nature of both subjects, revealing their symbiotic relationship through concrete, data-based application.

Rauch shows, with many practical examples, how to conduct semiotic analyses of language, narrative, texts, and discourse. In Part One, Semiotic Insights, she introduces the reader to the fundamental tenets and metatheory of the fields of linguistics and semiotics. She explores the multifaceted cooperation and tension between them, their shared threads and subthemes, the role of language in both, the tools of each discipline, and their relationship to other disciplines, especially biology and medicine. In Part Two, The Data Do the Talking, hard linguistic data are exposed and analysed within the semiotic paradigm. Using well-proven linguistic tools, Rauch's semiotic method lends insight into the dynamics of how language changes and grows.

Irmengard Rauch is Professor of Germanic Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley.