Syllabus
Intersubjectivity. The phenomenology of pronouns: you as a me of the Other. Person as a grammatical and social category. A person who is able to speak and use grammar.
Social semiotics: language as a sign system - the classification of signs: icons, symbol, index. Biosemiotics: indexicality as corporeality. The point of view of reference linguistics - deictic as the opposite of symbolic.
Language constructions of people and social distance. Language and the social function of politeness.
Language and social position: personal, social and gender deixis.
The poetics of politics: genre, intertextuality and framing.
Public space as an arena of identity: the construction of social identities and mediated communication.
The philosophical aspects of identity: body, language, community and the world.
Annotation
In this course, students will become acquainted with the philosophical and semiotic aspects of human identity, which are shaped and reflected daily by our (mostly unconscious) speech practices and language behavior. The main emphasis is logically put on indexicality.
It fixes language in body and at the same time brings body into language, and is therefore one of the basic manifestations and constituents of the dynamic tension between the uniqueness and sociality of each of us. After the theoretical introduction, specific semiotic, philosophical and anthropological phenomena will be analyzed, which can serve as indicators of social imagination and collective identities in public space.
It is precisely these identities and feelings of collective belonging that, in their changing nature, show and co-create one of the problems of today's world- the threat of a lack of social cohesion and often accentuated group particularism, which hinders cooperation between different societal segments.