Volume 14, Issue 2

Contemporary semiotics proceeds and progresses along two major paths of human intellectual inquiry in general: One is to constantly extend and deepen social studies; the other is to use theoretical and logical reasoning to examine and even predict the laws of nature and the universe. To highlight these two paths and reflect the latest trends in current semiotic inquiry, we have launched the book series of “Select Works of Eminent Contemporary Semioticians,” published by the Nanjing Normal University Press. The first five English monographs included in this book series are Basics of semiotics (eighth expanded edition) and Logic as a liberal art by John Deely, Marshall McLuhan : The unwitting semiotician by Marcel Danesi, Signs in society and culture by Arthur Asa Berger, and The way of logic by Christopher S. Morrissey. These five books afford not only revelations in the ways of knowing and the dimensions of thought, but also new perspectives for interpreting contemporary sociocultural phenomena and their developments.

Semiotics as a science of signs originated from Europe and America where France, the USA and Russia are acknowledged as the three epicenters for semiotics studies. Comparatively, in China, the conscious study of semiotics as an independent discipline started much later; yet, the traditional Chinese culture is imbued with bountiful semiotic resources. In response to the prospects of semiotics studies around the globe, how should China, with its deep-rooted traditional culture and unique semiotic resources, integrate itself with the world as a powerhouse in semiotics studies? How can it gain its access to the academic discourse of semiotics? What should it do to establish a school of semiotics studies featuring Chinese characteristics and to contribute to the world’s semiotics studies? These questions, which still remain to be answered, concern not only the process and progress of semiotics studies in China but the historic mission of Chinese semiotics as well. The paper highlights 12 semiotic spheres unique to China and six aspects of the academic philosophy of Chinese semiotics, hereby calling for long-term and sustained efforts to advance the progress of semiotics studies in China. And it is the authors’ belief that China’s bountiful semiotic resources and relevant research achievements will be a contribution to the world’s semiotics studies.

This article explores the relevance of semiotic perspectives on and approaches to Interpreting Studies. Interpreting can be perceived as textual (re)production, as communicative interaction, and as a sociocultural activity, and can be studied in the linguistic and structural approach at the micro-dimension, the pragmatic and communicative approach at the meso-dimension, and in the sociocultural approach at the macro-dimension respectively. Different degrees of applicability can be identified in structural semiotics, interpretive semiotics, and social semiotics. Multimodal analysis integrating linguistic semiotics, paralinguistic semiotics, and non-linguistic semiotics is identified as having great potential in examining the communicative process of interpreting in its entirety.

While the concept of hua has always been integrated with China and Chinese, huaren and huaqiao and the like have different identities, involving profound historical, social, and cultural significance as well as the core values and attributes of Chineseness. Based on a semiotic approach, this paper explores the special relations between hua as a semiotic symbol and the connotations implied in relation to translation studies through typical case analyses and personal experience shared. Certain meaningful implications may be revealed from three aspects, namely the connotations of hua in the light of a semiotic approach, Chinese identities and Chineseness, and the “signifier,” the “signified,” and their agreement.

At the present time in Venezuela a practice commonly occurs at funerals celebrated at funeral chapels or in family houses that certainly can be said to have already become part of the funeral ritual: Those attending the funeral tell jokes. Although it seems a contradiction because a funeral is a serious event where people have lost a loved one, the jokes have come to acquire a symbolic range within that ritual. This paper aims to explain precisely, from an anthroposemiotic perspective, the presence of jokes at funerals as a mask for the human being before the phenomenon of death. The theoretical and methodological contributions of Van Gennep (2008), Peirce (1987), Auge (2000), Turner (1988), and Freud (2005) are used, as well as the technique of participant observation from the ethnographic method (Mauss 1947; Guber 2006; Kottak 2007), based on an introspective-experiential epistemological approach (Padrón Guillen 2001, 2003). In conclusion, it can be said that jokes told in these non places can be translated as a mask, which has become another symbol of the funeral ritual, the unconscious intentionality of which reveals the fear of humankind before a natural and inevitable phenomenon that is a reminder of the finiteness of human beings and expresses the desire to break the direct death / pain / depression relation.

With the help of Chinese reform and the opening-up policy, as well as the global cultural fusion, TCSL (Teaching Chinese as a Second Language) is gradually growing into a hot research field where more and more research has been conducted to solve difficulties in practical teaching. However, little of this is concerned with the semiotic value of the TCSL classroom. To fill this research gap, this paper innovatively regards the TCSL classroom as a special semiotic text and applies Roland Barthes’ textual analysis theory into the TCSL classroom. Through a series of theoretical analyses and case studies, it aims at exploring the mutual connection between Barthes’ free text and the TCSL classroom and elaborating five codes existing in the TCSL classroom. At the same time, a new plural teaching model is expected to be constructed which can realize the democratic communication between the teacher and students, bring students’ subjective initiative into full play and eventually achieve the goal of mutual learning.

This inquiry examines how an index tracks the internalization of habits, from action templates to intersubjective and intrasubjective regulators (West 2013, 2014). Habit draws upon spatial primitives (Mandler 2010) and is expressed as sensory coordinations (tracking movement, force, orientation). Indexical action templates advance mechanical and self-regulative purposes: Source, path, and goal transition to social and internal regulators. Inferences drawn from event sequences culminate in plausible directives – recommending courses of action (Peirce MS 637: c1909), useful in dialogue alterations. Such alterations require habit-change, fitting novel participants into different event slots – driven by good instinctual guesses or “twigging ideas” (Peirce MS 930: c1913).

This article reviews and discusses some the main aspects of the growing edusemiotic research movement. The authors briefly explore the historical antecedents to educational semiotics in antiquity, before going on to discuss edusemiotic’s fundamental “triadic” (non-dualistic) orientation. They focus on the use of Peirce’s categorical semiotic philosophy to conceptualize educational dynamics; the alignment of edusemiotics with biosemiotics; the relevance of Thomas Sebeok’s modeling theories to education; and the primacy of iconicity in learning. Throughout the article, it is emphasized how edusemiotics does not mean semiotics applied to education, as a pedagogical aid or teaching/research tool, but is rather, “thinking” semiotics as the foundation for educational theory and practice at large (cf. Stables and Semetsky, 2015).