One of the largely untapped potentials of Sausserian semiotics is the ability it provides to examine shifts in the cultural meanings attached to objects and ideasacross time. To explore this potentiality, we trace the intertextual evolution of one of the most enduring mythic figures, the vampire. Our analysis begins with ancient texts and moves forward in time to contemporary cinematic and televised depictions of the vampire. We document the deployment of the vampire as a vehicle carrying oppositional meanings as it moves through various eras. For example, vampires may connote both racism and racial resistance, homophobia and gay acceptance, women’s subjugation and women’s empowerment. By using the vampire to mediate contested, liminal regions of cultural discourse, storytellers have constructed increasingly complex and multivocal portraits of this figure. At present, vampire narratives have come to resemble an alternative universe of human morality and behavior, complete with family structures, emotional depth, and interpersonal conflicts.

Motivated by historical insights, the current study examines whether speech-concomitant nonverbal behavior differs between social classes. On the basisof widely accepted concepts relating to cognitive theories of nonverbal communication and a preliminary outline of a concept of ‘communicative physicality’, a TV corpus of autobiographical narratives is analyzed according to a set of working-hypotheses. The results confirm the leading assumption of class-specific differences.

Traditionally, psychologists have utilized rather large-grain, macro units to clarify and measure cognition. Favored units include psychometric factors (e.g., IQ,verbal ability, quantitative ability) and categories of cognition (e.g., inductive reasoning, inference, mental rotation). In this paper, we tested the hypothesis that specific language concepts can complement psychometric factors and cognitive categories as distinguishable units of human intelligence. We found that productive use of specific language in persuasive essays predicted cognitive ability scores on the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT). A simple sum of specific words used (ranging from 0 to 7) correlated with cognitive factors almost as highly as the ability tests intercorrelated. The proposed model speculates that, as semiotic signs, discrete language concepts compose in part the cultural heritage passed on with modification from generation to the next. Moreover, in contrast to other units of analysis, cognitive tools in the form of specific language are teachable in a direct and deliberate manner as one function of education.

Several facets of the “flimsy pretext” archetype “My dog ate my homework” are analysed. We do so by considering textual accounts of events from real life filteredthrough the media, and we resort to formalisms (episodic formulae, Wigmore Charts) to capture some aspects of their gist. We also analyse several gag cartoons,either one-panel or multi-panel, and either as produced by others, or ones authored by this writer for the very purpose of probing into potential uses of the archetype. Sometimes the archetype can even be used other than as standing for a pretext, but this is only possible when the ‘homework’ metaphor is somewhat overstretched, or then when different idioms are hybridized. Other important topics we consider are intertextuality (textual and possibly also visual); observation levels from Negrotti’s naturoid theory; and ALIBI, an automated inventor of pretexts.

Dozens of records attest to the fact that during the mid-seventeenth century politicized public nudity or “going naked as a sign” as it was known to early modernsubjects proliferated. This practice captured so much popular attention that Sir Charles Sedley along with other royalist libertines notoriously stripped in front of 1,000 spectators in 1663 and delivered a mock sermon in a grotesque parody of religious sectarians. I examine Quaker approaches to signification, focusing on their deployment of incarnational signs to advance a revolutionary challenge to the empty reified signs of a burgeoning secular and commercial culture. Although both men and women went naked as a sign, the creative potential of women’s bodies, I argue, constituted a doubly-threatening specter to observers. In the midst of a period that witnessed what James Holstun has characterized as “the sundering of human life from providential history,” women openly exposed their bodies in order to visually underscore their creative potential and to call attention to the sacred and incalculable promise of life itself.