Signification is the act of signifying or being a sign or meaning. The term signification is also used to mean importance or consequence. Consequence can be: Consequences is a game. ...

Signifyin(g) (Gates) or signifyin' (slang) is an African-American rhetorical device featuring indirect communication or persuasion and the creating of new meanings for old words and signs. Signifying, in this sense, includes repetition and difference, implication and association, combining words and meanings to create or associate new ones. In everyday practice it consists of telling people you know what you think about them or their actions, or making some other point, in an indirect way. Literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1988, xxi, 44, 52) uses the Signifying Monkey tales of African-American folklore and the pan-African Yoruba Esu-Elegbara to function "as a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition" which he further describes as "the rhetorical principle in Afro-American vernacular discoure". Among other examples, he cites "marking, loud-talking, testifying, calling out (of one's name), sounding, rapping, playing the dozens," and Ralph Ellison's play on Richard Wright's Native Son and Black Boy in his Invisible Man. Other examples include many hip hop techniques and forms such as sampling and answer records. Roger Abrahams (n.d.) cites the subversive elements of the improvised and repetative lyrics of old work-songs such as collected by John and Alan Lomax. African Americans, also known as Afro-Americans or Black Americans, are an ethnic group in the United States of America whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to West and sub-Saharan Africa. ... Rhetoric (from Greek ρητωρ, rhêtôr, orator) is one of the three original liberal arts or trivium (the other members are dialectic and grammar). ... Communication is the process of exchanging information usually via a common system of symbols. ... See also: Persuasion the last novel written by Jane Austen. ... Word can mean one of several things: A linguistic word—a unit of language that symbolizes or communicates a meaning, consisting of one or more morphemes. ... Sign can denote any of the following: Within a writing system, a sign is a basic unit. ... Repetition is the occurrence of an event which has occurred before. ... Difference in arithmetic: see Subtraction Difference in computing: see Delta encoding Difference on a coat of arms: see Heraldry Difference as a state of being unlike others: see The set theoretic difference or complement See Gilles Deleuze and other See also: Comparison, Similarity (mathematics), Similarity (psychology) This is a disambiguation... In logic, material implication is a binary operator. ... Association is the following: A voluntary association (also sometimes called an association) is a group of individuals who voluntarily enter into an agreement, explicit or implicit, to form or act as a body (or organization) to accomplish a purpose. ... Meaning is studied in philosophy and linguistics. ... Henry Louis Gates Jr. ... For the Nelly Furtado album, see Folklore (album). ... In the work of Roland Barthes, intertextuality is the concept that the meaning of an artistic work does not reside in that work, but in the viewers. ... Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1914 - April 16, 1994) was an American scholar and writer. ... Richard Wright, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1939 Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 - November 28, 1960) was an African-American author of novels and short stories. ... Native Son (ISBN 0060809779) is a novel published 1940 and written by Richard Wright. ... Black Boy is an autobiography by Richard Wright originally published in 1945. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... Hip hop is a cultural movement that began amongst urban African American youth in New York and has since spread around the world. ... In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording. ... The answer record is, as the name suggests, a record or track released in answer to a previous recording. ...

Caponi (1999)) "describes calls, cries, hollers, riffs, licks, overlapping antiphony" as examples of signifying in hip hop music and other African-American music. He explains that signifying differs from simple repetition and from simple variation in that it uses material "rhetorically or figuratively--through troping, in other words--by trifling with, teasing, or censuring it in some way (Wentworth and Flexman 1960; Major 1970). Signifyin(g) is also a way of demonstrating respect for, goading, or poking fun at a musical style, process, or practice through parody, pastische, implication, indirection, humor, tone- or word-play, the illusions of speech, or narration, and other troping mechanisms...Signifyin(g) shows, among other things, either reverence or irreverence toward previously stated musical statements and values." (141) Schloss (2004, 138) relates this to the ambiguity common to African musics including looping (as of a sample) for "it allows individuals to demonstrate intellectual power while simultaneously obscuring the nature and extent of their agency...It allows producers to use other people's music to convey their own compositional ideas." Hip hop music is a style of popular music. ... African American music (also called black music, formerly known as race music) is an umbrella term given to a range of musical genres emerging from or influenced by the culture of United States. ...

See also

• significator
• call and response

In the field of astrology a significator is the faster of two planets as they move towards forming an aspect. ... The term Call and response may refer to Call and response -- a type of musical phrasing Call-and-response -- a type of communication Call and Response is a Californian pop band. ...

Sources

• Caponi, Gena Dagel (1999). Signifyin(G), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 155849183X.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195034635.
• Schloss, Joseph G. (2004). Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0819566969.