Books by Susan Petrilli

The series focuses on the state of contemporary semiotics and its current applications. It is intended to produce a number of concise interventions in semiotics, by which is meant studies of discrete areas of nature and culture that are interrogated using sign theory (in particular, as derived from the example of Peirce, Saussure, Sebeok, Lotman, von Uexkull, Greimas, Eco). Semiotics has undergone exciting sea changes in recent years. It has also been supplemented and reinvigorated by developments in media and theory and new areas of application. The series is designed to present developments in contemporary semiotics by focusing primarily on specific areas of its application. In addition to their specific focus, the books in this series give a rounded picture of current semiotics. Their emphasis is on current theory and the possibilities offered by the implementation of such theory. Each volume in the series places its topic within a general understanding of today's semiotics, a disciplinary field which comprises not just the study of culture but also the study of nature. Given the interdisciplinary character of this field and the spread of the target audience, the books are accessibly written and communicate with an academic readership that is not overspecialized. SCC is a peer-reviewed series of international scope.

The theory of signifying (significs), formulated and introduced by Victoria Welby for the first time in 1890s, is at the basis of much of twentieth-century linguistics, as well as in other language and communication sciences such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, translation theory and semiotics. Indirectly, the origins of approaches, methods and categories elaborated by analytical philosophy, Wittgenstein himself, Anglo-American speech act theory, and pragmatics are largely found with Victoria Lady Welby. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say, in addition, that Welby is the "e;founding mother"e; of semiotics. Some of Peirce's most innovative writings - for example, those on existential graphs - are effectively letters to Lady Welby. She was an esteemed correspondent of scholars such as Bertrand Russell, Charles K. Ogden, Herbert G. Wells, Ferdinand S. C. Schiller, Michel Breal, Andre Lalande, the brothers Henry and William James, and Peirce, as well as Frederik van Eeden, Mary Everst Boole, Ferdinand Tonnies, and Giovanni Vailati. Her writings directly inspired the Signific Movement in the Netherlands, important for psycholinguistics, linguistics and semantics and inaugurated by van Eeden and developed by such authors as Gerrit Mannoury. This volume, containing introductions and commentaries, presents a selection from Welby's published and unpublished writings delineating the whole course of her research through to developments with the Significs Movement in the Netherlands and still other ramifications, contemporary and subsequent to her. A selection of essays by first-generation significians contributing to the Signific Movement in the Netherlands completes the collection, testifying to the progress of significs after Welby and even independently from her. This volume contributes to the reconstruction on both the historical and theoretical levels of an important period in the history of ideas. The aim of the volume is to convey a sense of the theoretical topicality of significs and its developments, especially in semiotics, and in particular its thematization of the question of values and the connection with signs, meaning, and understanding, therefore with human verbal and nonverbal behavior, language and communication.

The Global World is a pivotal formula in present-day Newspeak The book's leitmotif - if it is true that the faces of today's global world are manifold - is that language opens to the other, that the word's boundaries are the multiple boundaries of the relation to others, of encounter among differences. Otherness logic is in language and life. The aim is to evidence how, contrary to implications of the newspeak order, new worlds are possible, critical linguistic consciousness is possible - a word revolution and pathway to social change. The method is linguistic and concerns the language and communication sciences. But to avoid that the limits of the latter influence our perspective on the global world and its manifold faces, this method is located at the intersection of different scientific perspectives. As such it pertains to philosophy of language, but in dialogue with the science of verbal and nonverbal signs, today global semiotics, therefore it is also semiotic And given that how to understand the global world is not just a theoretical issue, but concerns how we relate to others, to differences in all their forms and aspects, the method proposed with this book is also semioethic