Marcel Danesi

The end of the freedom to smoke in public places in most western countries has been a boon to those of us who hate coming home in the evening smelling like an ashtray, but of course we know that it's created frustration for nicotine addicts and financial difficulties for people who run bars, kiosks, and small shops. But how many of us spare a thought for the poor old semioticians, left out on a limb after building their academic careers on painstaking studies of the meaning of smoking show more gestures, or elaborate deconstructions of the subtexts in cigarette advertising? You don't see any bars with a roped-off "semiotics area" outside the back door, do you...? Life has clearly been tough for many of them, forcing them to branch out into ephemeral and unproductive fields like emoji and cat-memes. Perhaps we should think of taking up a collection for them...

Using an imaginary dating couple, Ted and Cheryl — both of whom smoke like chimneys — for purposes of illustration, Danesi takes us reasonably briskly and painlessly through some of the main fields of study semiotics deals with: the cultural meanings tucked up in gesture and body-language, in dress and grooming, in language (with separate chapters on metaphor and narrative), in spaces, in the arts, in objects, and in popular culture. Jargon is kept to a minimum, whilst the history of ideas in each field is sketched out without going very deeply into the inevitable debates and disagreements. As it says on the tin, this is just an introduction, designed to give you an idea of what semiotics is and the sorts of things it works with. In this third edition, Danesi has taken account of new cultural phenomena like selfies, memes and emoji, but he doesn't seem to have pruned out things from earlier editions that have proved to be ephemeral (remember Pet Rocks and Cabbage-Patch dolls?).

The pace and the range of things covered means that the book sometimes comes across as a little slapdash, when he rushes into a subject and tries to summarise it in two or three pages. Thus, in the chapter on metaphor, he has the ardent lover Ted say “Your kisses are sweeter than wine, Cheryl,” and proceeds to examine this statement as though it's a straightforward association of the notions of sweetness and lovemaking, when of course it's really a phrase that Danesi (growing up in Canada in the fifties) has got from Pete Seeger, who adapted it from the Song of Songs. It's unlikely, after all, that the wine Ted and Cheryl were drinking on their date would have been sweet enough to provoke that particular comparison, unless it was meant ironically ("Your mouth tastes like the inside of a wine barrel, Cheryl."). Semiotics is all about being aware of that kind of cultural history, and it undermines what Danesi is trying to do if he elides it in his hurry to get to the end of the chapter. He gets into similar trouble in his chapter on clothing when he sees the modern business suit as the revenge of "Cromwell's descendants", the Puritans, for the Restoration. You can maybe get away with that sort of thing in a lecture, but if you're going to do it on paper, at least read the Wikipedia article on the English Civil War...

Readable and fun, but doesn't inspire much confidence. show less

It is an Orwellian wet dream of epic proportions, but The Art of the Lie is also one of those books which chillingly forewarns against the state's appropriation of language and effectively communication to disenfranchise human individuality-the fount of all civic powers. Well worth a read though the intermingling of simple language and academic jargon makes it a foray into headache territory at times.

~I've spent many hours in the last few years going through 5 or 6 books in the Practice Makes Perfect series. This was my first Italian PMP book but I knew what I should expect and this book did not disappoint.

~It is well organized, and organized in a way I've come to expect (explanation of the topic presented in the chapter, followed by examples in the form of sentences or phrases usually, followed by many exercises, in this case often translating sentences, filling in charts with the show more conjugation of verbs into a certain verb tense, answering questions [there is more but I won't list all the types of exercises here - but that's another thing I like: the variety of exercises and the wide range of topics the chapters cover]). Answers are in the answer key in the back of the book as usual, and at the back you'll also find the Italian - English and English - Italian glossaries as well as irregular verb tables.

~To let you get a better idea of what's covered in this book, the list of chapters is as follows:

1) Nouns and titles (common nouns, gender patterns, spelling adjustments in the plural, mass nouns, proper nouns and titles)
2) More about nouns (including nouns of Greek origin, altered nouns, compound nouns)
3) Articles (the indefinite article, the definite article, and uses of both)
4) Adjectives (descriptive adjectives, invariable adjectives, comparison of adjectives)
5) Pronouns (subject and object pronouns, stressed pronouns, other pronouns)
6) More pronouns (object pronouns with compound tenses, double pronouns, attached pronouns)
7) Demonstrative (the demonstrative of nearness, the demonstrative of farness, demonstrative pronouns, indicating words and expressions)
8) Possessives (possessive adjective forms, the third-person forms, possessives with kinship nouns, possessive pronouns)
9) Partitives (partitives with count nouns, alternative forms, partitives with mass nouns, partitives in
the negative, adjectives indicating quantity)
10) Present tenses (the present indicative of regular verbs, irregular verbs, using the present subjunctive, irregular verbs in the present subjunctive, and special uses of the subjunctive)
11) Past tenses (the present perfect, irregular past participles, the past subjunctive, the past absolute, irregular verbs in the past absolute)
12) The imperfect and pluperfect tenses (the imperfect indicative, the imperfect subjunctive, the pluperfect tenses)
13) The progressive tenses (the gerund, the present progressive tenses, the imperfect progressive tenses)
14) The future and conditional tenses (the future, future perfect, the conditional [past and present], hypothetical sentences)
15) The imperative (regular forms, the negative imperative, irregular forms of the imperative)
16) Reflexive verbs (forms, compound tenses, imperative forms)
17) Prepositions and adverbs (prepositional contractions, uses of the prepositions, adverbs of manner, other kinds of adverbs, comparison of adverbs)
18) Sentences (interrogative sentences, question words, negative sentences, objects, conjunctions and relative pronouns)
19) Numbers (the cardinal numbers, telling time, the ordinal numbers,numerical expressions, dates)
20) Miscellaneous topics (the verb "piacere", the passive and the impersonal si, other)
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~A chapter on a verb tense will introduce the new tense but the exercises that follow review the new material as well as material on other verb tenses from previous chapters so you build on what you learned earlier.

Some specific things that I liked most or were most useful to me:

~ practicing using negative sentences (non... affatto [not at all], non... mai [never], non...nessuno [no one], non...niente, nulla [nothing], non... più [no more, no longer], non...neanche/nemmeno/neppure [not even], non...né..né [neither...nor] and non...mica [not really, quite]

~how to use the relative pronouns correctly (che, cui, chi, ciò che, quel che, quello che)

~using adverbs like: allora, anche, ancora, anzi, appena, finora, fra/tra poco, già, invece, in fretta, insieme, lontano, male, nel frattempo oggigiorno, ormai, per caso, piuttosto, poi, presto, prima, purtroppo, quasi, sempre, solo, spesso, stamani, stasera, subito, tardi, vicino.

~suffixes in Italian and how to use them (-uccio/-uccia , -uzzo/-uzza, -one/-ona, -etto/-etta, -ino/-ina, -ello/-ella)

~basic math in Italian in the Numbers chapter (how to use +, - , ÷ , x, = )

~using piacere correctly

~using "fare" in causative constructions (example: Sara fa lavare i piatti a suo fratello = Sarah has her brother wash the dishes)

~how to say could, would, should, could have, would have, should have

~using the impersonal "si" ("Si beve quel caffè solo in Italia" = One drinks that coffee only in Italy, "Si è felici in Italia" = One is happy in Italy)
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Practice Makes Perfect did it again and published another awesome book for their series. I think any high-beginner to intermediate student of Italian should add this to their library. It's not particularly fun, but worth the several hours it takes to get through! The knowledge brought me more confidence. show less

My review of the cool skeleton book should make it clear that non-narrative nonfiction isn't really my cup of tea. But I keep trying, because that's what readers do.

This was actually one of the first manuscripts I worked on at Palgrave. I arrived right in time for the end-of-year crunch, so I was helping editors and EAs on a bunch of lists--though in this case I was only doing formatting and looking out for lyrics, poetry, and block quotes. I hadn't leveled up to permissions checking quite show more yet. Anyway, I read a few sentences here and there and thought it looked interesting, and then I found this copy on the take shelf and thought I'd check it out. This book published simultaneously in hardback and paperback, which means that it was/is targeted toward a more general audience than strictly researchers, academics, and upper-level grad students. In other words, I could understand it.

It will seem contradictory, but I won't actually say too much about the content--I'm a bit nervous about leaving a substantial review of a book from my own company, even if it's not a book from my list and was published several years ago. So I'll just say three things:

1. I found the first chapter, in which Danesi lays out his thesis, the most interesting part of the book. It had never occurred to me that the mouth to mouth kiss might be a relatively recent phenomenon--and I've been wondering what romance pre-1200s was like ever since.

2. A lot of the books and movies Danesi cited that I'd read and seen were just...very wrong. Plot points, timelines, and emotions were incorrect in ways that hampered Danesi's argument, and two Disney movies were actually mixed up with each other. Disclaimer: I can sometimes remember plots unusually well and I have won Disney Scene-It the only two times I've played. But still. This is an academic book. Research. (2.5 things: One of the author's surveys involved less than 50 people. Seriously. (To be fair, the economics and finance books I acquire are more likely to be more scientific than humanities and social sciences. But I have published books complaining that they're still not scientific enough, either.))

3. This book would have seriously benefited from some beta readers, if not coauthors or contributors, in other departments. Particularly women's studies. There were a few sentences that smelled strongly of MRA. show less