The aim of this article is to examine in the context of today a theory put forward by Umberto Eco in 1968 (in his book La struttura assente [The Absent Structure]). Eco stated that advertising does not increase public understanding and is simply a consolatory art. In this paper I shall analyse a number of advertisements (made between 2009 and 2014) for 5 different models of people carrier to see what type of families are portrayed and how, in order to see if Eco’s theory still holds true. The analyses in fact show that the way families are portrayed in advertising continues to favour traditional models and values, even though there are some indications of social changes that are taking place. In addition, as recent sociosemiotic studies have shown, advertising communication has a dual social and commercial status that obliges it to move slowly: so while it can portray innovations and increase public understanding, this must be done without any destabilizing effects and therefore must always take place very gradually.

This article studies the features of the visual enunciation involved in the production of works of art with a complex media status. It will confront the traces manifested within these works to their perceptual input by an enunciatee, an instance that perceives and interprets what he learns from the senses. Therefore, we propose to turn to the “forms still impregnated by the doing,” to consider the textual production of the work and make it dialogue with perceptual mechanisms generated by the footsteps of the productive doing. So we aim at highlighting the dynamics
of the perceptive semiosis aroused by such works.

To the question “what does translation mean?”, Eco responds translating. In Dire quasi la stessa cosa (Saying Almost the Same Thing) he resorts above all to his own “experiences in translation,” as recites the subtitle of his book. Of his experiences particularly important is his translation of Nerval’s Sylvie. The central problem is what the translating text must render. In Sylvie Eco contends with “rendering” its specific chronotope. The story begins in the imperfect recounting an irreparable loss which is only communicated to the reader at the end. Translation must experiment with this special temporal organization of the story. This is presented in first person and by naming the “narrating voice” Je-rard Eco ingeniously distinguishes it from the author Gérard Nerval. “Almost” in the title announces Eco’s position formulated towards the end of his book: fidelity in translation consists in recognizing that it is never final. In fact, the translated text is always the same, but other: the same other.

Through the description and analysis of the intervention “Nous sommes la solution” conducted by a coordination for Food Sovereignty in the context of conflicts over food production in Africa, the article presents a semiotic model suitable to examine the interventions conducted on the ground from NGOs and other social organisms considered as a text with author, reader, utterance, meaning, interpretation, interpretative cooperation. We examine the production of meaning in these texts according to the dynamics of pragmatic semantics and we present a model example of the use of the notion of “structure” to examine the intervention, intended for the economic and social redemption of women, in the rural communities of five nations of Central Africa, through the enhancement of their specific expertise in the selection, custody and transmission of cultivable seeds, central element in the conflicts on GMO seeds and agro-business in Africa.

From a semiotic perspective on the study of cultural memory, this article deals theoretically and methodologically with the category of event, with a case study on the so-called “strage di Ustica (Ustica massacre, a plane crash that happened in Italy in June 27, 1980). In the first part of the article, I will describe how interpretative and generative semiotics dealt with the notion of “event”. In particular, I will look at how in the 1960s and 1970s Eco and Greimas tackled the topic in their writings but without elaborating it further. Hence, I will elaborate a hypothesis on how to think events semiotically and how to analyze them, as historical, public or media events. In the second part, the article will develop a semiotic analysis of the Ustica event, looking at how it was narrated in the news (in particular on newspapers) during the 1980s, based on a corpus of 766 articles from La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera and La Stampa.

The article, by proving the importance of the analogy in the diagrams, aims to refute some of Jacques Bertin’s reflections within the field of graphics, with specific regard to what he stated in Sémiologie Graphique. It will be made use of the theoretical model provided by Louis Hjelmslev about the strata of the language, in order to better understand the scientific approach held by the French cartographer while studying the graphics. A section of the essay will therefore focus on the premises at the core of Bertin’s argumentation, according to which every graphic is based upon a symbolic relation to its content (sign as equivalence). Practical consequences depending on such a view of the discipline will be also taken into account and discussed. By referring to the topic of the analogy, a new interpretation of the discipline will be submitted in attempting to emancipate it from a theory which appears to be too strict, especially on the practical side. Once the iconic nature of the diagrams will be proven, as Charles Peirce argued, an alternative terminology will be introduced. The aforesaid terminology, coherently defined from what discussed, is intended to become an effective tool to (i) implement the means available to study and critique the graphics and (ii) to identify and widen the expressive potentiality of the diagrammatic language.

L’articolo propone un’analisi semiotica dello spot della campagna ministeriale #ioleggoetu, operando un confronto tra i valori messi in scena nella narrazione audiovisiva con quelli proclamati dalla comunicazione a stampa. L’analisi delle strutture semionarrative del messaggio pubblicitario, assieme a cenni di marketing esperienziale e al commento di alcuni dati significativi estratti dal rapporto AIE 2016 sulla lettura, ci consentirà di verificare l’efficacia e la coerenza valoriale della campagna promossa dal MiBACT.