...and more semiotic principles!

MARKERS, METASIGNS, AND

STYLES

Markers

Markedness is opposed to unmarkedness.

It means that a given form is distinguishable from another on the basis of a special semiotic feature.

A marked form, in other words, is simply one that stands out from the rest.

Unmarked forms tend to be transparent--that is, you don’t notice them; they seem natural.

Unmarked forms are the “default” position.

Which is the marked form?

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Diane ArbusJewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970

Broad sets of markers that identify the same social group are called metasigns. They

are frequently empty of referential content; they are

used to create solidarity among those so marked and distance

from those who aren’t. (“Style,” “accent,” and “grammar” all

refer to the same phenomenon.)

What markers contribute to the two metasigns? (And, by the way, is one of them a marked form?)

William Eggleston. Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in the background. 1969-70.

Metasigns of gender: the logonomic rules ensure that men and women produce certain meanings

about themselves and the other, and only in certain contexts

Nadar Sarah Bernhardt 1865

Yousuf Karsh Winston Churchill 1941

Markers of the feminine

The following represents a gender-marked style - it doesn’t necessarily mean that only women obey it, or that even most women obey it

In fact, because gender is a site of contestation between dominant and oppositional interests, these markers are often in flux and are unstable

Lexical: hedges, tag questions, rising intonation, intensifiers, gossip, tentativeness, negotiation, fewer strong swearing words

Appearance: hair, makeup, jewelry, colours generally more articulated than in masculine form

Characteristically, these are negations of acceptable, dominant languages.Antilanguages generally serve to create and sustain solidarity among participants and distance from the dominant forms.Often appear among groups marginalized by the mainstream.The groups themselves come to constitute a kind of anti-society or anti-worldExamples: prisoners, criminal subcultures, secret societies

Antilanguages

Domains & Anti-worlds:Dominant regimes often tolerate and even support “bizarro”

spaces where normal logonomies are twisted and even inverted: the bad becomes good, the servants become

masters, the living envy become the dead.

Crossing the equator: gender swapping and rank reversals.

Hypotaxis and Parataxis

“Hypotaxis” : texts are marked by syntactic (syntagmatic) complexity

“Parataxis”: texts are marked syntactic simplicity

- Hypotaxis often observed in “high” languages and corresponds to the “organic solidarity” of highly structured societies (more rigid rules)

- Parataxis often observed in vernacular languages and corresponds to “mechanical solidarity” of less highly structured societies (lots of implicit rules)

Topic: respect to P.E in DublinName: shanegrafton (193.1.72.20)Date: 06-06-00 10:52respect to flavor Flav, Chuck D, "Melle"-chief of security!The buzz was so real-especially when my Irish public enemy flag was put on stage!"do the right thing.Public enemy posse are real people man

Topic: Re: NO DOUBT!!!Name: REZ (beckett.earlsfort.iol.ie)Date: 06-06-00 13:47Loved the show....still rockin fellas! Big ups to Chuck, Flav, Griff and the S1W's. That's how a hip hop show's supposed to be.....go back to NY and teach those other cats what they should be doing! Only complaint was that it should've been on later (I know not your fault) plus you should've let the guest emcees rock a little more....either way an excellent night, Public Enemy, Dublin salutes you....

Paratactic language

In examining the prospects for artificial intelligence and artificial life Samuel Butler (1835-1902) faced the same mysteries that permeate these two subjects today. "I first asked myself whether life might not, after all, resolve itself into the complexity of arrangement of an inconceivably intricate mechanism," he recalled in 1880, retracing the development of his ideas. "If, then, men were not really alive after all, but were only machines of so complicated a make that it was less trouble to us to cut the difficulty and say that that kind of mechanism was 'being alive,' why should not machines ultimately become as complicated as we are, or at any rate complicated enough to be called living, and to be indeed as living as it was in the nature of anything at all to be? If it was only a case of their becoming more complicated, we were certainly doing our best to make them so."

Hypotactic language

Transformations

A syntagm such as “The cat is on the mat” is said to be transformed when a new paradigm is inserted (”The cat is on the roof”) or the syntagm itself is changed (”There, on the mat, the cat lay”).Transformations are the way that messages, texts, discourses, codes, etc., change over time.Applying transformations to existing semiotic material is the motor of history.There is nothing new under the sun, only transformations of older signs and structures.