Marcel Danesi
Biographic Data
| ID | 146364 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marcel Danesi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marcel |
| FAMILY NAME | Danesi |
| SIGNATURE | DANESI M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1826-013X |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 133 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 78 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 130 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Organized Crime: A Cultural Introduction
Symbols, myths, traditions
The Semiotics of Fast and Junk Food
This article takes a critical look at the phenomenon of fast and junk food from the standpoint of its meanings and why it originated in the first place. It envisions fast and junk food as sign systems with inherent meanings that change and adapt to cultural shifts. In fact, the unusual aspect of fast food and, certainly, of junk food is that they are semiotic artifacts dovetailing with the emergence of consumerist societies, not continuations or …
AI-Generated Popular Culture: A Semiotic Perspective
This book gives a general overview of artificial intelligence as it is impacting on the world of the arts and culture
The passions as seen through the lens of Greimassian semiotics and cognitive science
This paper aims to incorporate Greimassian semiotics of passions in current cognitive science. Concepts such as passional codes, the canonical passional schema, and other central Greimassian notions in the domain of passions are mapped against ideas such as frames and layers of meaning within cognitive science. By integrating the two fields artificially kept apart, the authors endeavour to show how the resulting synergy could shed new light on th…
Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective
Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective shows how language influences mechanisms of cognition, perception, and belief, and by extension its power to manipulate thoughts and beliefs. This exciting and original work is the first to apply cognitive linguistics to the analysis of political lies and conspiracy theories, both of which have flourished in the internet age and which many argue are threatening democracy. …
The Dark Mafia: Organized Crime in the Age of the Internet
This book explores how organized crime has adapted and evolved in sync with ever-expanding technologies to update its popular image and to conduct its covert operations. It shows how organized crime operates in dark virtual spaces and how it can now form a dynamic interactive system with legitimate online spaces, solidifying its criminal exploits and resources, and making them attractive to a new generation of computer users. Focusing on Italian …
Handbook of Cognitive Mathematics
This handbook is the first large collection of various aspects of cognitive mathematics to be amassed into a single title.
Jazz and American Popular Culture
The four books reviewed here deal with the role that jazz has played in the origins and evolution of American popular culture and society more generally. The common subtext is that jazz initiated a veritable cultural revolution, providing America with its first true musical art form, as well as igniting the slow process towards the acceptance of African Americans as artists and cultural innovators, becoming the musical voice of the Civil Rights M…
The Language of Power: Casini and Bancheri's In-Depth Analysis of Italian in Immigration and Global Contexts
This review article looks at a groundbreaking book in sociolinguistics by Simone Casini and Salvatore Bancheri, What Is the Language of Power? Theoretical Reflections on Italian, Italiese and Other Languages, which focuses on the forms and uses of Italian in immigrant communities, as well as the role of the Italian language in the global village in which we now reside. Based on research conducted on the kind of Italian that takes shape in immigra…
Saussurean Sign Theory in the Human Sciences Today
As is well known, modern semiotic theory is based on two models of the sign-the Saussurean and the Peircean. While the latter has been shown to be much more tenable as a theory of semiosis, the Saussurean model cannot be totally ignored, not only because it was an initial attempt to define signs in a social-conventional way, but was also a basis upon which signification has been extended today in the human sciences. This paper looks at the latter…
Saussure’s View of Language as a System of Arbitrary Signs
Saussure's view that signs stand for their referents in an arbitrary fashion reflects a view of semiosis that separates sensory-bodily processes from cognitive ones. It remains Saussure's most controversial assertion within semiotics, even though it is a perspective that is found as an axiom in various cognitive sciences. This paper revisits Saussurean arbitrariness theory, showing how it breaks down in various ways when considering concrete semi…
Handbook of Cognitive Mathematics
Popular Culture
This review of three introductory textbooks in the field of popular culture published in 2018 and 2019 focuses on the different perspectives they provide on such culture, as a means for understanding its current state and future evolution. It is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Pop Culture, People, and Politics; 3. A Pastiche Approach to Cinema; 4. Pop Culture Theories; 5. Pop Culture and the Internet; 6. Conclusion. Pop culture is …
Pandemics and Popular Culture
The three books reviewed here deal with the interrelation between pandemics, society, and culture. The common subtext within them is that pandemics have always had a shattering effect on the social status quo. Published at the threshold of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, they bear concrete implications for assessing how American popular culture is being impacted by the outbreak, and how it might evolve. The review is divided into five sections: 1.…
Signs, forms, and models: Thomas A. Sebeok’s enduring legacy for semiotics
Thomas A. Sebeok has left semiotics a comprehensive theoretical apparatus for studying semiosis across species and across systems (biological and artificial). Uniting the notions of form , sign , and model into an integrative purview of meaning-making, known as modeling systems theory, Sebeok has provided a conceptual and terminological apparatus for studying all forms of meaning in terms of the fundamental “standing-for principle” that undergird…
The Law and Emojis: Emoji Forensics
Organized Crime: A Cultural Introduction
Symbols and myths
Book notes: Understanding Nonverbal Communication: A Semiotic Guide
Motivational Factors in Italian Enrollments
As Italian enrollments continue to decline in the second decade of the Millennium, proposals are being put forth to counteract this trend, which include designing Italian courses with relevancy to social issues that are deemed to be of general interest to students. Does this remedy truly address the problem of decline effectively, capable of attracting more students to Italianistica? This paper looks at the motivational factors that have always b…
Forensic Semiotics: A Note on Applying Semiotics to the Study of Crime
The scientific study of crime comes under the general categories of forensic science and criminology, which include a large set of related branches, from forensic psychology to computer forensics. The emergence of forensic semiotics as part of this interdisciplinary amalgam is relatively unknown among both criminologists and semioticians. This paper provides an overview of the main objectives of forensic semiotics and its importance to the study …
A sociosemiotic interpretation of cybersecurity in U.S. legislative discourse
Based on one specially created corpus of U.S. cybersecurity-related laws, this study employs the corpus approach to examine the referent objects and securitizing actors in U.S. cybersecurity legislative discourse, which are two critical issues in constructing security, including cybersecurity. Through corpus data analysis, it is found that unlike traditional security, cybersecurity has become more people-oriented in terms of referent objects with…
Exploring legal discourse: A sociosemiotic (re)construction
Legal discourse, as an umbrella term, could be used to address the whole spectrum studying legal phenomena, not only written, such as legislation, but also spoken, such as courtroom interaction, as
Fiction as semiotics
Semiotizing a product into a brand
A product is simply something that is material or substance of some kind. In order to be transformed into a brand with its own code of meanings and system of rhetorical allusions, it needs to be semiotized. And the marketing and advertising industries have become semioticians in this sense, semiotizing a product by assigning it a name, a visual sign (logo), a system of language forms (slogan, taglines, etc.), and then textualizing the brand by cr…
Opposition theory and the interconnectedness of language, culture, and cognition
The theory of opposition has always been viewed as the founding principle of structuralism within contemporary linguistics and semiotics. As an analytical technique, it has remained a staple within these disciplines, where it continues to be used as a means for identifying meaningful cues in the physical form of signs. However, as a theory of conceptual structure it was largely abandoned under the weight of post-structuralism starting in the 1960…
Metaphorical “networks” and verbal communication: A semiotic perspective of human discourse
This paper presents the notion that verbal discourse is structured, in form and contents, by metaphorical reasoning. It discusses the concept of “metaphorical network” as a framework for relating the parts of a speech act to each other, since such an act seems to cohere into a meaningful text on the basis of “domains” that deliver common concepts. The basic finding of several research projects on this concept suggest that source domains allow spe…
What's in a Brand Name? A Note on the Onomastics of Brand Naming
This note looks at the main strategies used by marketers and manufacturers to name products. It gives an overview of these strategies, starting with the history of brand-naming and ending up with the current practice of using Internet-style strategies for naming products. The idea in brand-naming is to create a “code” of latent meanings for the product that the consumer can grasp either consciously or unconsciously
On the Metaphorical Connectivity of Cultural Sign Systems
Theories of culture based on signs and systems are found across the interdisciplinary spectrum. There seems to be a growing consensus across disciplines that the forms of culture (linguistic, material, aesthetic, ritualistic, etc.) are connected to each other in some way. With the advent of conceptual metaphor theory, this article claims that the cognitive mechanism (metaphor) connecting the forms can be found in this theoretical framework. It al…
Motivational Factors in Italian Enrollments
As Italian enrollments continue to decline in the second decade of the Millennium, proposals are being put forth to counteract this trend, which include designing Italian courses with relevancy to social issues that are deemed to be of general interest to students. Does this remedy truly address the problem of decline effectively, capable of attracting more students to Italianistica? This paper looks at the motivational factors that have always b…
X-Rated: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture
Many attack pop culture as a crude 'sexual' and 'celebrity-based' culture that is purportedly bringing about the end of moral values. Renowned semiotician Marcel Danesi adds his signature insight to t
Learning and teaching languages: The role of “conceptual fluency”
Despite considerable research in second language learning in classroom environments in this century, and despite the many pedagogical applications that such work has made possible, teachers and learners alike still complain about the fact that autonomous student discourse lacks the conceptual richness that characterizes native speaker discourse. The purpose of this essay is to suggest that the notion of “conceptual fluency”, which has been derive…
A sociosemiotic interpretation of cybersecurity in U.S. legislative discourse
Based on one specially created corpus of U.S. cybersecurity-related laws, this study employs the corpus approach to examine the referent objects and securitizing actors in U.S. cybersecurity legislative discourse, which are two critical issues in constructing security, including cybersecurity. Through corpus data analysis, it is found that unlike traditional security, cybersecurity has become more people-oriented in terms of referent objects with…
Exploring legal discourse: A sociosemiotic (re)construction
Legal discourse, as an umbrella term, could be used to address the whole spectrum studying legal phenomena, not only written, such as legislation, but also spoken, such as courtroom interaction, as
The Bidirectionality of Metaphor
Views on the role of metaphor in language have varied ever since Aristotle discovered it and described its features. Traditional accounts of metaphor have seen it as a form of comparison or substitution for literal language, or else a "deviant" form of semantics. This situation changed in the twentieth century, starting with the work of I. A. Richards and the early gestalt psychologists, who put forward arguments and evidence that led, by the lat…
Thinking is seeing: Visual metaphors and the nature of abstract thought
Metaphorical connectivity
Conceptual metaphor theory and the teaching of mathematics: Findings of a pilot project
Selon un grand nombre d'enseignants en mathematiques, les principales difficultes d'apprentissage resident dans la resolution de problemes. Cet article presente les resultats d'un projet de recherche visant a etudier les correlations entre verbalisation des problemes et facilite a les resoudre. Le cadre pedagogique sur lequel se base cette etude est la theorie des metaphores conceptuelles qui est une application de principes semiotiques dans le d…
A note on Vico and Lotman: "Semiotics as a "science of imagination
The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico foreshadowed many of the ideas currently being entertained by the modem cognitive and human sciences. By emphasizing the role of the imagination in the production of meaning, Vico showed how truly ingenious the fIrst forms of representation were. His view that these forms were "poetic" is only now being given serious attention, as more and more linguists and psychologists come to realize the role of metap…
The "Dimensionality principle" and semiotic analysis
The "Dimensionality principle" and semiotic analysis
Recent Research on Metaphor and the Teaching of Italian
The Italian language classroom today has never before been so sophisticated from the standpoint of instructional methodology and in the use of advanced technology (audio-visual aids, computer-assisted learning materials, etc.). The teaching of Italian in classroom environments, like that of other modern languages, has been shaped throughout this century by theories and findings coming out of the cognitive and social sciences, especially psycholog…
Practical Applications of Current Brain Research to the Teaching of Italian
Paradoxically, the only real in language teaching methodology that has been gradually spreading its roots into the profession at large during the last two decades has been the very lack of some revolutionary coming forth and being proclaimed as the ultimate panacea. Until recently, the historiography of methodology in this century has recorded a succession of revolutions which always seemed to go through an initial period of enthusiastic implemen…
The Case for Andalucismo Re-Examined
Signs, Forms, and Models: Modeling Systems Theory and the Study of Semiosis
The approach to studying signs and sign systems, known as modeling systems theory, derives from the work of the Moscow-Tartu School of semiotics. After being largely excluded from mainstream semiotic theory and practice, it is now becoming more and more a major trend in semiotics. The theory envisions a sign structure (or form) as a model of some referent and that the models we make of the world become signs that elicit interpretation of that wor…
Opposition theory and computational semiotics
Opposition theory suggests that binary oppositions (e.g., high vs. low) underlie basic cognitive and linguistic processes. However, opposition theory has never been implemented in a computational cognitive-semiotics model. In this paper, we present a simple model of metaphor identification that relies on opposition theory. An algorithm instantiating the model has been tested on a data set of 100 phrases comprising adjective-noun pairs in which ap…
Forging a linguistic identity in the age of the Internet
Today, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has made written communication a prevalent form of daily interaction through e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, text messages and the like. As a consequence, languages (written and spoken) seem to be shaped more and more by the modalities of digital media and of an ‘instant communication response’ culture. Linguistic identity, or the use of language to portray oneself as part of a community, is being shaped a…
A note on cognitive branding and the value profile
The aim of this paper is to present a pragmatic inspired branding method called a value profile, within the theory of cognitive branding. The method is theoretical anchored in Charles S. Peirce's pragmatic theory and can be used to identify the core values of brands and also identify the possible consequences of how these values influence people to purchase products. Moreover, it can be used to analyze the values themselves
Creativity in the Language Classroom: Towards a "Vichian" Approach in Second Language Teaching
The science of linguistics has witnessed the spread of a deep dissatisfaction in the last two decades with what might be called rationalist models of language. This is due, in large part, to the everygrowing realization that there is much more to human language than its abstract, organizational structure-often conceptualized as existing on a universal cognitive platform that is not subject to alteration fromexternal forces such as acts. Indeed, t…
Teaching Standard Italian to Dialect Speakers: A Pedagogical Perspective of Linguistic Systems in Contact
In the period since World War II, the position of the Italian dialects in respect to the standard language has altered significantly. The awareness that a dialect reflects the ethos of a particular social group and that school Italian is an artificial standard has created an anti-puristic linguistic atmosphere in Italy.1 In the past, the association between dialect speakers and lower-class status had been frequently made. Quite predictably, some …
The Determiner in English and Italian
Teaching Standard Italian to Dialect Speakers: A Pedagogical Perspective of Linguistic Systems in Contact
In the period since World War II, the position of the Italian dialects in respect to the standard language has altered significantly. The awareness that a dialect reflects the ethos of a particular social group and that school Italian is an artificial standard has created an anti-puristic linguistic atmosphere in Italy.1 In the past, the association between dialect speakers and lower-class status had been frequently made. Quite predictably, some …
Recensioni: Tuscan and Etruscan
The measurement of interference in old texts
As Bott (1970: 217-19) points out, one of the most successful applications of computer to language research has been in the production of concordances—alphabetical lists of all the words in a written corpus followed by a reference system (i.e., page and line number) and a context (i.e., the line in which the word occurs). This valuable tool has greatly facilitated the description of the language of old texts. The literature on the synchronic prob…
Recensioni: Rätoromanisch: Die Sonderstellung des Rätoromanischen zwischen Italienisch und Französisch
The Case for Andalucismo Re-Examined
La lingua dei 'Sermoni subalpini
Italian Linguistics, 1976/I
La sociolinguistica in Italia, G. Politi e Dialetto e italiano
Ciu scienco devas havi ne nur epistemologiajn celojn sed ankau klare difinitan metodaron. La soci-lingvistiko, samkiel la lingvistiko generale, montras generalan disvolvigon de metodoj kaj celoj, sed ankoraŭ ne posedas aŭtonomion. Multaj traktas gin kiel subsciencon de la sociologio, aliaj, de la lingvistiko. Sed la lastatempaj esploroj de Labov, Fishman, Hymes kaj aliaj montris, ke temas pri sen-dependa scienco. En "La sociolingvistiko en Italuj…
Sociolinguistic Variation and the Description of the Italian /s
La socilingvistika variado kaj la priskribo de la itala /s/. Versajne pro la 'Labov-a' revolucio, la lingvistoj komencas atenti ankaù sociologiajn kriteriojn en la solvado de teknikaj priskribaj problemoj. La emfazo ne plu estas strikte lingvistika, au infrastruktura, sed makrolingvistika - atentante la oftecon, la dialektan variadon kaj la sociologie bazitan alternigon. Kompreneble, oni devas komenci per infrastruktura analizo, kolektante kaj en…
Introduzione alla fonetica
Giorgio Braga, Per una teoria della comunicazione verbale. Milano: Franco Angelo Editore, 1977. Pp. 240
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Phonological Variation and the Teaching of Italian Pronunciation
The Description of Spanish /b,d,g/ Revisited
to shift from a strictly literary or philosophical emphasis to preparing condensed career-specific courses for certain individuals who are unable to enjoy the luxury of several years of conventional foreign language study should plan a modified teaching approach. Primarily, this will involve concentrating on certain of the language skills, such as listening and speaking, and virtually ignoring the others. Relevancy is the keynote of all guidance …
Louis Deroy L'Emprunt linguistique
A Glossary of Lectal Terms for the Description of Language Variation
Un glossario di termini lettali per la descrizione della variazione linguistica L'esigenza di trovare una terminologia comune o standardizzata per descrivere i fenomeni appartenenti a un'area specifica di ricerca caratterizza tutte le scienze. Questo è vero, quindi, anche nel caso della linguistica. Data l'attuale tendenza a sviluppare una metodologia che mira ad incorporare parametri contestuali di carattere spaziale, sociale e psico-comunicativ…
Thinking in Italian: Problem-Solving Activities for the Italian Classroom
As the focus in second language pedagogy is becoming more and more communicative-based, some fundamental questions related both to the nature of the learning process in a classroom setting and to the appropriateness of instructional strategies are being asked now more than ever before. Perhaps the most crucial question pertains to the so-called ability to think in the target language and how best to stimulate thinking patterns that can truly be c…
Language and the Origin of the Human Imagination: A Vichian Perspective
Studies in Italian Applied Linguistics. Studi di linguistica applicata italiana
The Origin of Writing
A Vichian Footnote to Nietzsche’s Views on the Cognitive Primacy of Metaphor: An Addendum to Schrift
Loanwords and Phonological Methodology
Practical Applications of Current Brain Research to the Teaching of Italian
Paradoxically, the only real in language teaching methodology that has been gradually spreading its roots into the profession at large during the last two decades has been the very lack of some revolutionary coming forth and being proclaimed as the ultimate panacea. Until recently, the historiography of methodology in this century has recorded a succession of revolutions which always seemed to go through an initial period of enthusiastic implemen…
Mother-tongue training in school as a determinant of global language proficiency: A Belgian case study
Meaning and Mental Representation
Philosophy (87 works) · Linguistics (72 works) · Psychology (49 works) · Sociology (49 works) · Computer Science (38 works) · Epistemology (35 works) · Art (31 works) · Philosophy (31 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (27 works) · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition (26 works)