Warning Signs: The Semiotics of Danger
Ebook
Ebooks are designed for reading and have few connections to your library.
Overview
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.
Explores how the language of danger and its visual symbolism has imparted warnings of hazard, risk and peril across history, from ancient Egyptian tombs to nuclear waste.
The first book to offer a full examination of the nature of danger and warning signs from a semiotic perspective
Explores the means by which danger is encoded into human consciousness and offers insights into how warnings can be maximized for communicative efficacy
Builds on semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok’s influential 1981 US government report to put forward practical semiotic principles for the creation of warning signs
1. From Ancient to Current Warnings
2. Semiotic Principles
3. The Sebeok Study
4. Language
5. Visual Symbolism
6. Mythology and Popular Culture
7. Semiotizing the Message
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
In an elegant style and erudite manner, Danesi explores how the sense of danger has been built into human language, artistic works, and narratives, from the prehistory to the present. This book provides great insights on the cultural perception of current global crises, such as climate change and the rise of infectious diseases.
We live in dangerous times. People need to be warned. But how do you warn effectively? That is the essence of this book. From cave paintings to nuclear waste, from climate change to vaccines, from isolated pictorial signs that grab our attention to recurrent and abiding metaphorical frames that we use unnoticed. Enlightening, scholarly, entertaining. This is more than practical semiotics - this is semiotics for survival - the iconicity of warning signs, the representation of danger, the narratives, the myths, the interpretations and misinterpretations. Never has a book been more timely or more relevant to our everyday, interconnected world, with hidden dangers lurking around every corner.
Prof. Danesi is a master of clarity in presenting a semiotic analysis of danger, as entangled with various cultural, historical, and psychological threads. This book is a model of what a semiotic analysis should look like, for both students and scholars.
- Title: Warning Signs: The Semiotics of Danger
- Author: Marcel Danesi
- Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2021
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 192
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350178311, 9781350178304, 1350178306, 1350178314
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350178311
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T10:10:46Z