Band 10, Heft 2

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a French writer of the twentieth century, was an important author during the two world wars in France. His works, set against the backdrop of these wars, depict the various aspects of human nature during wartime. “Survival” and “Death” are important themes discussed in Céline’s novels. Under the background of wars, “survival” becomes the instinct of characters in Céline’s works, but the threat of death is always present. Through the perspective of a doctor, Céline materializes “survival” and “death,” using metaphors such as “devouring,” “decomposition,” and “corrosion” to illustrate the viewpoint of “death on the installment plan,” vividly depicting the “imagination” and “fear” between “survival” and “death,” presenting the disasters and sufferings caused by wars, and expressing strong antiwar sentiments within a pessimistic view of life and death. By using semiotic isotope as a tool, we study the thematic generation process of “survival and death,” analyzing the “surface-level image paths” of the text through the “discourse images,” and then delving into the deeper layers of the text to discover the inherent and shared nuclear seme features of these images and their repetition of information, namely semiotic isotope.

In the context of Semiosic Translation , two elements are essential for a translation to emerge: the body–brain–context interface (extended mind) and the sign systems making up a translation output. In this paper, I explain how a renewed view of the body as a Bayesian-heuristic Semiotic Prior helps to understand in a more holistic manner the motivations and agentive character of translation, defined herein as a phenomenological grasp of the world. Central to the present proposal is the idea that bodily self-stabilization (homeostasis) and brain-driven correction (allostasis) provide translator-agents with maps of action upon the world that are semiotic in nature. All this occurs thanks to information weighing (Bayesian) and cue-driven (heuristic) types of inference whereby exteroceptive (exogenous) and interoceptive (inner-body) signals converge to create a sense of bodily awareness responsible for the construction of the symbolic persona (the translator-agent).

This pilot study on humor in cultural trauma uses innovative digital methodologies in speech recognition and social media analysis via Postman and Python in the Twitter API v2 to propose different forms to gather and analyze empirical data on semiotics and humor to be used in a broader context. The given example of humorous instances on the cultural trauma of 9/11 in the fictional sitcom Rick and Morty is limited but corroborated by a second example that is structurally different from the first: humor about 9/11 in stand-up comedy by Louis C.K. Based on the data, humor in trauma seems to undergo a 5-phase-typology related to the Kübler-Ross model of grief, which is mended by the (digital) participation of society. Society, we argue, both shapes the discourse on humor in trauma and overcomes the traumatic effects through humorous discourse.

Live streaming e-commerce is not only an important part of China’s digital economy but also the preferred way of purchase for many Chinese, especially the young. Since 2022, a new model initiated by East Buy has emerged, quickly becoming known as knowledge-based live streaming. The most famous streamer from this novel type of live streaming is Dong Yuhui , a former English teacher of the New Oriental School. As a top Internet influencer with millions of followers, Dong Yuhui has become a conspicuous social sign of the rising China that is undergoing fast technological, economic, and cultural changes. This study thus takes Dong Yuhui as an example to examine the typical discourses of the knowledge-based live streaming. Through a triangulation of case study, discourse analysis, and sentiment analysis, it finds that Dong Yuhui mainly employs the strategies of disseminating encyclopedic knowledge, telling intriguing stories, and using poetic language in his live streaming discourse. This unique discourse has the main function of fulfilling customers’ intellectual, emotional, and psychological needs. As such, it is warmly received by customers, whose comments are centered on the talents of the streamer rather than the attributes of the commodity.

The use of directives in communicating the nature of the pandemic and reference to social experiences were promoted using images on social media platforms. The images or memes are used to create awareness and reinforce the criteria for safety during the pandemic. Previous studies on internet memes have concentrated on humor generation, speaker-hearer shared knowledge, neologism, and multimodality among others, with insufficient attention paid to the use of directives and references in such coronavirus-motivated memes. This paper, therefore, examines how directives and references are employed in conveying expected social responsibilities through coronavirus-motivated internet memes in Nigeria and other socio-cultural contexts. For data, one hundred coronavirus-motivated memes were purposively selected from Facebook, and eight representative memes were subjected to pragmatic analysis using aspects of Jacob Mey’s (2001. Pragmatics: An introduction , 2nd edn. USA: Blackwell Publishing) pragmatic acts theory to unearth insights from them. The paper observes that the various spheres of life that are relatable to an online audience help to express what the pandemic is about and enhance the meaning of the pandemic with the context of the use of the memes, giving clearer perspectives on the pandemic. Directives and references are useful tools for conveying social responsibilities to online audience.

The global outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has been experienced differently by people depending on their socio-cultural contexts. These varied experiences are expressed in various forms of communication, including cartoons. This paper examines the pragmatic resources inherent in COVID-19-related cartoons depicting the impact of the virus on Nigerian society. Forty COVID-19-related cartoons, circulated on social media, were collected on Twitter and WhatsApp platforms between March and April 2020 as data. Multimodality and presupposition served as theoretical framework and descriptive research design was adopted. Findings reveal five socio-contextual domains, religion, health, economy, politics and governance nd family, characterizing the social experiences of Nigerians during the pandemic. Through the evocation of situational reality, pragmatic sarcasm, punning, and orientation to government insensitivity, the cartoonists evoke pragmatic functions of informing and warning about social behaviours in the religion, family and health domains; recreating situational realities on socioeconomic impacts in the domain of economy; and satirizing government policies and mocking politicians’ insincerity in the domain of politics and governance on sociopolitical experiences of Nigerians before and during the pandemic. The study concludes cartoons are a strong means of portraying societal realities and people’s experiences comically and graphically.

This paper explores the communicative acts deployed in covid-19 vaccination-related pictorials circulated on digital media platforms. Seven internet images were purposively sampled with a view to exploring their communicative functions as well as their generic structure. The data, which were culled from the websites of the World Health Organisation, Centre for Disease Control, Pan American Health Organisation and Facebook, were subjected to qualitative analysis. The study deployed van Leeuwen’s Multimodal Discourse Analysis and Yuen’s Generic Structure Potential as theoretical anchor. The multimodal communicative acts are deployed for instructive, illustrative, informative, persuasive, inviting and advisory purposes. Categories such as Lead, Emblem, Announcement and Enhancer are compulsory in the data while Display, Tag and Call-and-Visit Information are non-compulsory elements. This can be catalogued as: ‘Lead^(Display)^Emblem^(Announcement)^(Enhancer)^(Tag)^(Call-and-Visit Information)’. The study contends that the various semiotic resources deployed in the internet-circulated covid-19 images are used not only for informative and other communicative purposes but also to evoke attitudinal change towards and encourage widespread acceptance of the covid-19 vaccines.