Semiosis, temporality, self-fashioning: An introduction

• This issue explores the relationship between semiosis, timescale, and subjectivity.
• Studying timescales reveals the processes that implicate semiosis and subjectivity.
• Linkages between semiosis, subjectivity and timescales are regularly patterned.
• Timescales and these linkages are sometimes the emergent product of institutions.
• This study can be seen as a reformulation of the concern with linguistic relativity.

In this short essay, we introduce a collection of papers that examines the relationship between semiosis, subjectivity and timescale. We argue that a temporal approach to the relationship between semiosis and subjectivity—i.e., one that considers, at least, the interactional, ontogenetic, and historical timescales—can reveal the variety of ways in which semiosis comes to be implicated in subjectivity. This approach can be understood as a reformulation of the traditional linguistic anthropological concern with linguistic relativity.