It’s about time: On the semiotics of temporality

Multiple planes of temporality in language, including real-time indexicality, tropical or poetic entextualizations, the diachrony of codes, and the cultural constructs of time, are explored from a semiotic perspective. Empirical data from papers in this journal issue by Davidson, Perrino, Wirtz, and Lempert are reinterpreted in terms of complex intersections of the representational axis and the interactional axis of texts, in which either poetic constructions or reflexive calibrations function indexically to charge the present with the sedimented value of the distanced past.