Situated, Historical, Embodied Semiosis: A Unified Framework for Semiotic Activity

This book addresses disciplinary gaps between work in semiotics and multimodality (fields that have typically centered on the nature of signs/modes or on semiotic artifacts) and situated observational research (traditions that have focused on particular semiotic resources such as talk, gesture, and inscription). Situated, Historical, Embodied Semiosis (SHES) rearticulates these lines of work around understanding semiosis as action, communication, and becoming across temporal-spatial scales. With particular attention to laminated indexical fields, the book offers a multidisciplinary synthesis of Peircean biosemiotics, flat materialist ontologies, dialogic and cultural-historical theory, empirical traditions studying talk, nonverbal communication, and inscriptional practices. It illustrates the SHES framework with examples from the literature and the authors’ studies of disciplinary literate activity and communicative diversity (e.g., individuals with aphasia). This unified account of semiotic activity tackles a knotty set of conceptual, methodological, disciplinary, and ideological roadblocks. These roadblocks have impeded a fuller understanding and exploration of semiosis as situated, embodied becoming in material practices in the world.

Paul A. Prior and Julie A. Hengst, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA; Andrea R. Olinger, University of Louisville, USA.