(SHS) Science of Man and Society
Published Thursday 12 June 2008, updated Thursday 29 October 2009

Director: Jean-François BORDRON
Tel. (33) (0)5 55 43 56 00
E-mail: bordron@club-internet.fr / jean-françois.bordron@unilim.fr
Secretarial offices:ceres@unilim.fr
Assistant director: Pierre-Yves RACCAH
E-mail: pierre-yves.raccah@unilim.fr
Detailed presentation on the Faculty of Arts and Humanities site

The Semiotics Research Centre is a multidisciplinary team, working mainly at the point where two fields intersect. These fields are the Sciences of Language and the Sciences of Information and Communication, semiotics and semantics being also rooted in both of them. The team is made up of 24 permanent staff (23 research lecturers 7 th , 11 th , 14 th and 71 st section, 1 CR1 CNRS); 3 permanent post-doctoral students (1 Prag, 1 PRCE, 1 Past) and 1 or 2 post-doctoral students per year; 2 associate researchers; 30 doctoral students, in other words a total of 27 permanent staff, 30 doctoral students and 1 or 2 post-docs per year.

Research subjects:

- Semiotic practices: this programme drives all of the others, since it attempts, from an epistemological and methodological point of view, to articulate the various levels of relevance on the plane of the expression of semiotics-objects explicitly and formally, from "signs" and "texts" to "practices" and "ways of living", from the point of view of cultural semiotics. The following, in particular, are involved: texts, bodies and ways of living; signs, ideology and strategies; practices and ways of living; objects-supports and writings. As for the actual practices themselves, the research relates more precisely to their semiotic forms and especially the principles upon which their effectiveness is based, syntactic (affordance, sequential conduct, procedures, rituals, strategies, etc.)
- Semiotics of the body: sensations, emotions and passions:
. the semiotic figures and roles of the body (envelopes, prints, memories)
. sensation and signification: semiotic mode of the sensitive, perception and semiosis
. emotion, passionate enunciation and putting into discourse.
. semiotics of the passions: history of passion systems; myths, passions and literature; passions, emotions and social interactions.

- Discursive strategies and montages: topoi, ideologies and axiologies:
. discursive lexical topoi: ideology in language and in discourse.
. textual and discursive strategies: rhetorical connections, montages and tensions.
. socio-semiotics: strategies and management of the direction in communication and marketing.
. semantic positioning studies; design and assessments of strategies.

- Time and discourse:
. temporal theories and models, from the philosophical discourse to the literary discourse.
. temporal systems of practices, social time and ways of life.
. time in contrastive linguistics.
. forms of memory in culture.

- Writings, supports, substrata and gestures:
. writing objects as interfaces: objects and their signifying prints, the role of interfaces in ICTs.
. multimodal semiotics and their interactive and syncretic enunciations: semiotic forms and ICT, web design, hypertext.
. writings, supports and gestures: history and semiology of support objects, scriptural writings and practices.
In addition to academic scientific production, the work of the Semiotics Research Centre has two original features:

- The production of theoretical and methodological work which enjoys an international reputation in the fields of general semiotics and semantics; theoretical models created in Limoges a dozen or so years ago are used and developed in research centres and theses in North and South America, in Asia, in Europe and in Africa, which means that two international programmes are currently being managed in Limoges, one of them European, in the field of visual semiotics and the other with a consortium of Brazilian universities, in the field of linguistic and non-linguistic expressions.

- An ability to respond to socio-economic demand which is currently expressed through three main lines of applied and finalised research: socio-semiotic applications to marketing strategies; semantic and cognitive applications to experimental scientific reasoning; semiotic applications to usages of ICTs and to the various types of resulting communication.

Centre de Recherches sur l’Entreprise, les Organisations et le Patrimoine (CREOP - Centre for Research on Business, Organisations and Assets)