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The main focus of this volume is on urbanity as a discursive way of human life in the city. Discourse is specified here in terms of semiotic codes and processes that link city dwellers as communicating selves into interpersonal and intersubjective collectivities when they create and interpret similar meanings embodied in material bearers. Accordingly, the unfolding of the semiotic web is understood, firstly, as detecting and evaluating the growth and manifestation of the sphere of meaning-bearers or a sequence of meaning-bearing events, and secondly, as identifying and explaining the constituents and aspects of discourse in the light of signs and/or sign-processes that aggregate individual participants of communication into discursive linkages on a lower level and discursive communities - on a higher level of social grouping. Some contributions deal with the discursive properties of human individuals in urban environments, and some others are devoted either to the meta-discourses on the city or discourses in the city.
List of contents
Contents: Richard L. Lanigan: On homeworld and community models of the city: The communicology of egocentric and sociocentric cultures in urban semiotics - Zdzislaw Wasik: Towards an idea of urbanity as a discursive way of human life in the city - developing a conceptual framework - Daina Teters: The city as a space and the space in the city: A semiotic inquiry into the formation of Riga - Zdzislaw Wasik: Roots and varieties of functionalist discourses in the understanding of linguistic functions - Elzbieta Wasik: Linguistic functionalism and the principle of abstractive relevance in the metaurbanist discourse on art and architecture - Richard L. Lanigan: Slugging: The nonce sign in an urban communicology of transportation - Camelia Cmeciu/Doina Cmeciu: New insights into corporate social responsibility: The semiotic act of experiencing a city through street naming - Daina Teters: Imaginary architecture and the verbal description of emptiness: Paths, roads, and streets - a research communiqué - Ioana Boghian: The semiotics of urban space and architecture in literary discourse of the Victorian period - Józef Zaprucki: On the historical interference in the urban discourse - a research communiqué (on the basis of Jelenia Góra and Karkonosze mountains region).
About the author
Zdzis¿aw W¿sik is Professor of Linguistic Semiotics and Rector of Philological School of Higher Education in Wroc¿aw (Poland). His didactic experience has been enriched through the cooperation with universities and vocational schools of higher education in Wroc¿aw, Opole, Poznä, and Toru¿, as well as in Wäbrzych, and Jelenia Góra. He has published several books and articles on the typology of interrogative utterancees, semiotic and ecological properties of language, and history of linguistic ideas.
