Persuasive Signs

Persuasive Signs
Author: Ron Beasley
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2010-12-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110888009

Using both verbal and nonverbal techniques to make its messages as persuasive as possible, advertising has become an integral component of modern-day social discourse designed to influence attitudes and lifestyle behaviors by covertly suggesting how we can best satisfy our innermost urges and aspirations through consumption. This book looks at the categories of this form of discourse from the standpoint of semiotic analysis. It deals with the signifying processes that underlie advertising messages in print, electronic, and digital form.

American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse

American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse
Author: J. Donald Ragsdale
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2009-01-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1443803928

In American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse, Professor Ragsdale assesses American museums as means of visual persuasion. He demonstrates that museums, their contents, and their manners of display are as capable of influencing visitors as speeches or advertisements and that an awareness of their social influence provides an insight into the cultural roles of museums. The book considers a diverse array of museums ranging from such national cultural icons as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute to such city museums as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, and includes separate chapters on museums devoted to modern and contemporary art and to the specialized collections of individual connoisseurs. In addition to these primarily art museums, Professor Ragsdale assesses museums devoted to collections, such as the National Air and Space Museum, and to commemoration and remembrance, such as the National World War II Museum and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse makes an important contribution to the theory of persuasion and to visual communication, art history, and museology. It utilizes a theory of visual signs based on the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce. In so doing, it demonstrates that museum buildings, the art and other objects contained within them, and the spaces used for display may all be thought of in terms of means of social influence.

Warning Signs

Warning Signs
Author: Marcel Danesi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350178314

Warning signs are all around us. In ancient Egypt, tombs were lavishly adorned with signs and symbols warning of the dire consequences that would befall any robbers and thieves. And yet these signs were often read as provocations and challenges. Why was this? And how could we more effectively communicate dangers from our world, such as toxic waste, to future civilizations? This book examines and evaluates the kinds of signs, symbols, narratives and other semiotic strategies humans have used across time to communicate the sense of danger. From paleolithic cave art and ancient monuments to the dangers of nuclear waste, carbon emissions and other pollution, Marcel Danesi explores how danger has been encoded in language, discourse, and symbolism. At the same time, the book puts forward a plan for a more effective 'semiotising' of risk and peril, calling on linguists, semioticians and agencies to face up our collective responsibilities, and work together to more clearly communicate vitally important warnings about the dangers we've left behind to civilizations beyond the semiotic gap.

Persuasion in Your Life

Persuasion in Your Life
Author: Shawn T. Wahl
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2021-09-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000442373

This accessible introductory textbook in persuasive communication speaks directly to the student by focusing on real-life experiences in personal, social, and professional contexts. Through its use of rhetoric, criticism, and social scientific research, this book helps readers understand, analyze, and use persuasion in their lives and careers. It explores techniques of verbal and visual persuasion for use in business and professional communication, health communication, and everyday life, as well as expanded coverage of persuasion in social movements and social advocacy. It also pays attention throughout to ethical considerations and to the significance of new media. This textbook is a student-friendly introduction suitable for use in undergraduate courses in persuasion, health communication, and business communication. The companion website includes an instructor’s manual with test questions, sample assignments, web links, and other resources, as well as PowerPoint slides. Visit www.routledge.com/wahl

Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism in Peirce

Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism in Peirce
Author: Frederik Stjernfelt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110793679

This book investigates a number of central problems in the philosophy of Charles Peirce grouped around the realism of his semiotics: the issue of how sign systems are developed and used in the investigation of reality. Thus, it deals with the precise character of Peirce's realism; with Peirce's special notion of propositions as signs which, at the same time, denote and describe the same object. It deals with diagrams as signs which depict more or less abstract states-of-affairs, facilitating reasoning about them; with assertions as public claims about the truth of propositions. It deals with iconicity in logic, the issue of self-control in reasoning, dependences between phenomena in their realist descriptions. A number of chapters deal with applied semiotics: with biosemiotic sign use among pre-human organisms: the multimedia combination of pictorial and linguistic information in human semiotic genres like cartoons, posters, poetry, monuments. All in all, the book makes a strong case for the actual relevance of Peirce's realist semiotics.

Christ in the Gospels of the Liturgical Year

Christ in the Gospels of the Liturgical Year
Author: Ronald D. Witherup
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2012-05-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0814635318

2009 Catholic Press Association Award Winner! A decade after the untimely death of renowned Scripture scholar Father Raymond E. Brown, SS, he continues to inspire and inform scholars and preachers, students and pastoral ministers, lay and ordained. It was only days after Father Brown's death that his final book was published by Liturgical Press. That book, Christ in the Gospels of the Ordinary Sundays, completed his six-volume series on preaching the Scriptures, a series that had begun in the mid-1970s with the publication of his popular An Adult Christ at Christmas. Those six volumes are collected here in one convenient commemorative edition to mark the tenth anniversary of Brown's death. Brown's work is left largely untouched, and readers will find that his wisdom is lasting. Yet Brown, being a scholar's scholar, would recognize the need for some enhancement in a work being republished some thirty years after the first volume appeared. Appropriately, then, this edition contains introductory essays by Brown's colleagues and friends John R. Donahue, SJ, and Ronald D. Witherup, SS, as well as useful indexes and a bibliography of resources for preaching the word of God in the context of the lectionary. As Witherup notes in his preface, Brown had the rare capacity to simplify complex biblical studies in a manner that did not 'dumb down ' the material but allowed it to be understood by a wide audience. . . . He did this in a fashion that was both inspiring and educational. That very broad audience 'those who grew up with Brown, so to speak, as well as a whole new generation of readers and preachers of the word 'will find this book to be a source of inspiration and knowledge that they will turn to again and again. Raymond E.Brown, S.S., (1928 -1998) was the Auburn Distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He was author of some forty books on the Bible and past president of three of the most important biblical societies in the world. By appointment of two popes (Pal VI in 1972, John Paul II in 1996) Brown was a member of the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission. Time magazine called him probably the premier Catholic Scripture scholar of the U.S.

Marketing Semiotics

Marketing Semiotics
Author: Laura R. Oswald
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2012-02-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019164790X

Everyday consumers buy into the concept of brands and their associated meanings - the perception of quality, a symbolic relationship, a vicarious experience, or even a sense of identity. Marketing Semiotics suggests that the extent to which consumers recognize, internalize, and relate to brand meanings is not only an academic question. These meanings contribute to 'brand equity', the financial value of intangible brand benefits that exceed the use value of goods, and impacts upon a firm's financial performance. Therefore, the management of brand equity demands first and foremost the management of brand meanings, or semiotics. The book uses structural semiotics, a discipline that extends the laws of structural linguistics to the analysis of verbal, visual, and spatial sign systems, to shed light on the cultural codes and discourse of brands. It proposes that semiotic research should form the cornerstone of brand equity management, since brands rely so heavily on sign systems that contribute to profitability by distinguishing brands from simple commodities, from competitors, and engaging consumers in the brand world. The book includes dozens of global business cases where semiotics has been used to refocus, reposition, or extend the brand to new products, customers, and markets. Drawing upon twenty years of academic and consulting experience, the book provides actionable direction for steering brands through technological and cultural change, differentiating brands in the competitive environment, and counteracting the natural depletion of brand meaning over time.