Memorable Dates and Symbolic Spaces: Lotman and Dante by Inna Merkoulova

The article proposes to consider the space of the Divine Comedy from the standpoint of Lotman’s semiotics of culture, in connection with the philosophical hypotheses of Pavel Florensky, as well as with the later reflections of European semioticians of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Editorial Issue 15

Is it a pleasure to introduce Issue 15 of the journal. Contributions include two developed and well argued pieces by two long standing supporters of the journal – Susan Petrilli and Nicoleta Popa Blanariu. It is good to have papers reflecting professional commitments, in education by Haroula Hatzimihail and Ioannis Pantelidis, in cognitive science by Marcus Oliveira and Rosana Pinto, and in visual design by Jacqueline Hill. Oliveira and Pinto, along with Adewale Adelakun and Olusegun Oladosu, and Amalia Nurma Dewi, help fulfil a geographic spread (Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia respectively) in line with an original goal of the publication.

The National Anthem as a Symbol of Religiosity in Nigeria by Adewale Adelakun and Olusegun Oladosu

A quick glance at the second stanza of Nigeria national anthem attests to the fact that religion is valued by Nigeria. The whole stanza is a prayer to God to guide Nigeria into the right path and is sung intermittently with the first stanza which contains an appeal to all citizens to uphold the unity and sanctity of the nation. The second stanza of the national anthem implies that public practice of religion is not a problem as the stanza is publicly sung in both government and private organisations

On the Relation between Memory and Language from a Cultural-historical Perspective in Neurolinguistics by Marcus Oliveira and Rosana Pinto

In this essay, we reflect about the relationship between memory and language, conceiving both as complex functional systems, developed along the human history and strongly influenced by culture. We give special emphasis to the mediating role of signs, mainly based on the (neuro)psychological principles postulated by Vygotsky and Luria, but also in dialogue with several authors from the fields of Linguistics, Philosophy of Language and Semiotics, among which Mikhail Bakhtin, Aleida Assmann, Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli. Two data are presented in order to contribute to our reflection – the first is extracted of a dialogical episode with a subject diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and the second episode with an aphasic individual. In sum, we argue that the cultural-historical approach may provide a better understanding of the interdependent and constitutive nature of the relationship between language and memory. 

Jules Verne’s ‘Around the World in 80 Days’: Multilingualism, Multiculturalism and Symbols by Haroula Hatzimihail and Ioannis Pantelidis

In this announcement, the various –linguistic and non-linguistic- symbols used in the literary work ‘Around the World in 80 days’, written by Jules Verne, are examined from an intertemporal and contemporary point of view. The references through these points of view, in matters of multiculturalism and multilingualism, are becoming classical in nature: they concern the necessity of the applied ability to communicate between individuals who belong to different social classes and age groups, speak the same or different languages, come from different cultures, with rights and obligations in their various areas of life, etc.