The emergent selectivity of semiotically playful utterances

Abstract

This chapter is about signs from different registers that are placed in contact with each other in creative ways and about what our readings of these complex configurations can tell us about semiotic processes more generally. The data are taken from playfully configured images and text that appear on souvenirs produced by the graphic design company, PT. Aseli Dagadu Djokdja. Building on Agha’s theories of the evaluations and effects of persona enregisterment and commodity registers, this chapter demonstrates how these creatively configured signs select their readers in the moment of their construal. It argues that non-stereotypic, or emergent, sign construals also generate proto-personae having the potential for future enregisterment. As the process of “in-the moment-construal … is essential to the construction of social meaning in variation,” the fact that sign selectivity is both emergent and material may have underutilized implications for our metasemiotic commentaries and models of contact.