Volume 19, Issue 4 - Cultural Signs and Sign Theories

The concurrent lamination of distinct categorial principles in speech allows language users to interpret and create a vast range of social-interpersonal realities. Any conceivable dimension of social life – from the mental states of persons to the forms of belonging they exhibit within sociohistorical orders of caste, class, age-set, gender, commerce, or profession – can indexically be linked to features of speech, and thus enacted in interpersonal encounters. This paper discusses a range of cases in which such dimensions of social life are made manifest through social indexical effects performed and negotiated through speech. In the course of analyzing a delimited set of case studies, the paper presents an outline of the analytic tools and methods that permit the systematic study of such processes in any language community or locale.

This paper explores the quest for an account of the total linguistic or semiotic fact. Speech act theory, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and social semiotics have all attempted, in various ways and at various times, to find a way to describe as much as possible what is going on around any speech event. While this search for the total linguistic fact will always be a chimerical goal, this paper draws on the inspirational work of Jan Blommaert to suggest a framework for moving in this direction. The acronym SEMIOSIS points to the complexity of what is at play, comprising social relations, emotional and affective domains, multilingual practices, iterative activity, objects and assemblages, spatial repertoires, interactivity, and sensory relations. Looking at data from a small Bangladeshi-run store in Tokyo, the paper shows how bringing in this wider set of concerns allows a more comprehensive account of semiotic moments.

With acute historical awareness, African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks uses abundant signs in the form of words, movements, sights, and sounds in her plays to create an imagined world, helping readers and audiences to revisit forgotten and neglected history and contemplate on how to read Africana history. In Venus , she wields rapid transformation of space, inserts a play-within-the-play, and presents historical extracts to reconstruct history. This article uses theatrical space as a critical tool to investigate how Parks uses the configuration of theatrical space within and theatrical space without to express historical allusions, reconstruct historical events, and bridge the gaps hidden between remembered and forgotten history in Venus .

Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American female writer, includes many photos about family and land in her autobiography Storyteller . The relations of images and words in her book are analyzed from the perspective of semiotics, particularly from Roland Barthes’s image rhetoric. The linguistic message and the coded and non-coded iconic message of the photos help in understanding the Laguna Pueblo concept of time and place. Photos about family show the cyclical time expanse of the family history and the change of traditions in Laguna. Photos about land and the stories behind pass on their ancestral culture to the next and the next generation. Photos, as a sign to be against linear time and against humans’ violence to nature, help the indigenous reshape their history and re-envision their subjectivity.

Six Records of a Floating Life is a collection of autobiographical essays written by Shen Fu, a scholar in the Qing Dynasty. Its writing is ancient and elegant, and it is rich and profound in connotation. The German translation of Six Records of a Floating Life by German sinologist Rainer Schwarz presents the spirit of the original in detail and is of high cultural value and research significance. Based on Lotman’s theory of cultural semiotics, this paper examines the interpretive value of Lotman’s view of “text” for translation research in three dimensions: information transmission, information generation, and information memory, with a view to elucidating the cultural value of the German translation of Six Records of a Floating Life , innovating the theoretical integration of cultural semiotics and translation research, and expanding the application of semiotic theory in the field of cultural translation.

Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art contributes significantly to diverse perspectives that seek to understand the nature and significance of artistic creations, offering unique insights into the interpretation and meaning of artworks. This paper aims to examine Danto’s philosophy of art by employing the semiotic framework developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and applying it to the analysis of three famous artworks. By integrating Peirce’s semiotics with Danto’s ideas, we seek to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of art, its interpretation, and the significance it holds within the “artworld.” This exploration highlights the complementary aspects of Peirce’s semiotics and Danto’s philosophy of art, shedding light on the multifaceted realm of artistic expression.

The Prague School of Linguistics is one of the most important groups in the history of twentieth-century structuralism. Ever since Qixiang Cen wrote on it at the end of the 1950s in his book on the history of linguistics, it has continued to attract the interest of Chinese linguists. This essay explores the half-century in which the Prague School was introduced and studied in China and aims to identify the features of the three stages of these linguists’ efforts.

Against the background of deliberations about the conception of worldhood as developed in existential semiotics on the basis of linguistic modality acts, this paper proposes merging mundane and transcendentalist phenomenology with epistemology as a theory of knowledge, in general, that alludes to pragmatic sources of human knowledge about the world, in particular. From the epistemological perspective, the reality of the human “life-world” is considered not only as a static position of the individual subject’s being-in-the-world, but also as his/her/its experience of living-the-world or things-of-the-world. Against the background of epistemology, defined in terms of ontological and gnoseological assessments pertaining to the knowledge of how things exist and how they are cognitively accessible, and epistemology as an activity of acquiring knowledge about an object of cognition, the author puts forward a hypothetical deductive scaffold of the linguistically and phenomenologically rooted documentary epistemology of practice, which refers to the practicing researchers’ knowledge as a set of texts created for the purposes of communicating in the first person about the awareness of lived word-ness and lived sign-ness of the transmedial and multimodal means and ways of how the world is perceived.