Volume 17, Issue 2

This article makes a comparative analysis of the use of metaphors in the Hong Kong riot reports by British and American mainstream media. The analysis reveals the conceptualization process of events and finds that the use of metaphors is mainly concentrated in the war domain, the flare domain, and the natural forces domain.

The musical culture of modern Europe has produced numerous extra-linguistic elements which constitute a kind of code making transmission of content possible between sender and receiver. These elements also permit a kind of narrative strategy which organizes this communication. One of the codes most important for this field of European culture is musical rhetoric, made up of dozens of signs such as rhetorical figures or the symbolism of musical keys. I demonstrate the functioning of these elements on the example of funeral music, whose topoi , signs, and codes have developed in European culture for several centuries, along with characteristic musical and literary genres, and their mutual interactions. My methodological approach is mainly based on the tools of cultural and musical semiotics, and of narratology combined with analyses of musical rhetoric, supported by elements of literary analysis. I discuss this subject using the example of Karol Kurpiński’s Elegy on the Death of Tadeusz Kościuszko (1818), which perfectly illustrates the signs typical of European culture in the first half of the 19th-century and of nascent Romanticism, with its complex nationalisms and its quest for signs typical of a given nation or region, as well as for individual solutions. All of my analyses point to the power and versatility of cultural semiotics, which allows us to study human creativity in a highly comprehensive manner, exploring areas which are inaccessible to other research methodologies.

In this article, I bring together the famous American semiotician Terrence Deacon and the most famous proponent of Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200). I focus on two of Deacon’s central concepts, constraints and work. All systems are constrained in some way, i.e. they behave in certain ways, but not in all ways. And “work” means that in their existence they make some difference: a gas in thermal equilibrium does not produce work. I bring these notions together with Zhu Xi’s concepts of li 理 and qi 氣. Li can be understood as internal articulation of a system or an event, its “veins.” And qi is the power of existence of a system or an event, its “energy.” In this light, I discuss the topics of the priority of li , the coagulation of qi , the normativity implied in the li , and self-cultivation. A connection to Deacon can give us new tools to make sense of those ancient topics of Chinese philosophy, and a connection to Zhu Xi can give semiotics in general and Deacon’s theory in particular an extension to certain fields that have been underdeveloped in Western thought, for instance self-cultivation.

Waking from a vivid dream, the sage finds himself lost between worlds of possibility and ultimately transformed. Zhuangzi’s famous butterfly story may seem familiar, but the text-linguistic structures of its broader interpretive context are little discussed and poorly understood. In this paper I argue that the Qíwùlùn 齊物論 chapter, like so many other ancient writings, is composed in a concentric, chiastic pattern, with sections in each half mirroring each other throughout, while the central sections provide a pivotal peak and interpretive key that radiate meaning back out to the margins. To quote Mary Douglas, “the meaning is in the middle.” The middle is also the place of Peircean Thirdness. In this paper I map the chapter’s text-level chiastic structures and trace its intimations of Peircean semiotic pragmatism. The core rings of the text endorse contrite fallibilism while also prefiguring triadic structure, the pragmatic maxim, and the continuity thesis. Referencing cultural and historical contexts plus recent scholarship on Zhuangzi and Peirce, I ultimately argue that this ancient text, like the pragmatist semiotic it foreshadows, can be better appreciated and applied by embracing the interplay of centers and margins, discarding debilitating ideologies, and waking up to new degrees of freedom.

This paper looks at the phenomenon of “irony attrition,” when speakers start out using an expression or engaging in a genre of semiotic activity ironically, but become more earnest in their usage over time. It argues that irony attrition arises as a consequence of three things: (a) the complex viewpoint arrangement that underlies the ironic interpretive stance, (b) routinization or entrenchment, and (c) limitations on our ability to keep track of source information in memory (“source memory”). Irony attrition is not a hazard of irony as irony, but part of a more general tendency for intermediate-level embedded discourse frames to be forgotten, compressed, or mislaid in memory and in quotation. The ironies and erstwhile ironies in this analysis come from the domains of sarcasm, trolling, camp, shtick, and situational ironies in literature, and parody. They are brought into conversation with the evolution of other kinds of perspective-embedding expressions in language acquisition and language change.

This study proposes an integrated model called the Eco-Pragma-Translatology Model (EPTM) with four Kernel Guidelines for accounting for translation of public (environmental protection) signs. An EPTM analysis of pragmatic failures in public environmental protection signs (from the database) demonstrates that the ubiquitous errors and mistakes of rendering come under the rubric of pragmalinguistic failures of translation, sociopragmatic failures, or pragmatic failures straddling boundaries and leads to the conclusion that translators should correspondingly enhance their pragmalinguistic and/or sociopragmatic competence. EPTM is a new, interdisciplinary theoretical approach that largely applies to issues of poor translation of public signs.