Volume 6, Issue 1

Genre was once seen as something categorically fixed and immutable and such a view of genre can still be found in some contemporary studies of genres though it has been challenged by more and more theorists in both the literary and the linguistic circles, who hold a fairly dynamic view of genres. The analysis in this paper will demonstrate that, though we can identify a definite generic structure in the editorials of People's Daily, there are noticeable generic variations arising from the different occasions and/or purposes of those editorials. The results of the analysis will also show that different cultural conventions and different ways of thinking of different peoples often play an important role in the shaping of genres resulting in major or minor structural variations in the same genre in different languages.

The article offers a general introduction to the semiotic sign-systems that constitute the logic by which communication and culture function together to create the human world of expression and perception. There are two styles of logic that characterize a western egocentric (individual) perspective and an eastern sociocentric (group) perspective on cultural communicology. The cultural attitudes and practices of America (U. S. A . ) and China (PRC) are used to compare and contrast these two phenomenological styles of human logic: the causal disjunctive ( either/or) logic of the West and the causal conjunctive (both/and) logic of the East.

The narrator is the organizing other. In a conscious interaction with the narrator the interpreter articulates and develops his identity. When an interpreter disregards the narrator, he perceives a situation as objectively there, he perceives a situation as "trivial" or as entirely a product of his subjectivity. When however an interpreter consciously interacts with the narrator, he acknowledges his sociocultural determination and can therefore further develop his socioculturally embedded subjective " theory". When an interpreter consciously attempts to escape this subjective theory, he enters the realm of the "aesthetic". In this paper an argument is developed that these complex relations between trivial interpretation, theoretical interpretation and aesthetic interpretation fit into a semiotic model. The model is introduced and summarized. The model is then used to explain how semiotic polyphony raises theoretical awareness, how theoretical awareness may open the realm of the aesthetic and how overlooking the narrator results in the trivial. These semiotics of the trivial are illustrated twofold. To underpin the relation to Western modernity we will briefly analyze the invisibility of the judge as a narrator in Western judicial argumentation. To underpin the relation to cultural literacy we will analyze the invisibility of the dynamics of the camera as a narrator in the Western world of moving pictures. Both " hide and do not seek" plays seduce the interpreter to disregard the indexical and symbolic in his interpretation. He disregards his ongoing dialogue with the organizing other. The narrator hides and the interpreter does not seek. To restore the awareness of the narrator requires forms of literacy.

Why has semiotics focused more on iconicity and resemblance than on aniconicity and dissemblance? Can a semiotic theory of how signs, and in particular icons, tum into non-signs, be formulated? Taking as theoretical point of departure Peirce's triadic conception of signs as consisting in the relation between a representamen and an object through an interpretant, the article explores the evanescence of iconicity and resemblance through several examples of aniconicity and dissemblance: a son who cannot recognize his own father's picture because it is too old; a writer who cannot recognize his own city because it was turned into rubble by aerial bombing; a cubist painter who distorts the pictorial icon of an object so that viewers cannot recognize it; etc. Through these and more examples, the paper points out that semiotics should develop not only a cultural theory of how signs are created, but also a cultural theory of how they are dissolved.

For decades, multimodality, an intrinsic attribute of discourse, has long been neglected in discourse analysis. Adopting the theoretical framework of visual communication grammar by Kress and van Leeuwen, which grew out of Halliday's systemic functional grammar, this paper makes a detailed social semiotic analysis of the three-fold metafunctions of the visual and verbal modes of one of the No Smoking Day print advertisements. The analysis shows that these two semiotic modes complement and supplement each other to add to the denotation and connotation of the discourse.

Working in multicultural contexts involves moving in an area of semiotics in contact. When this contact occurs between very dissimilar cultures, it often generates perplexity. And perplexity, as we will later see, can be extremely useful to reflect. In this article, I will refer to perplexities and reflections arisen from the contact areas of Chinese and Western semiotics, focusing on some of the intellectual aspects in philosophical, linguistic and psychoanalytical fields. In fact, Chinese language and culture has left profound traces in Western thought, which can be traced in the ideas of Foucault, Leibniz, Derrida, in the works of Lacan, among others.

In this article we suggest a possible relation between C. S. Peirce's (1839-1914) concept of metaphor and abduction. To our knowledge Peirce never did analyze nor even mention , the two concepts in the same context. But we understand the hypoiconic metaphor as rooted in the abductive mode of inference; the hypoiconic metaphor is part of an intricate relation between experience, body, inference, and guessing instinct as a semeiotic mechanism which can convey novel ideas.

This paper explores the various ways in which selfreferential loops are tacitly embedded in the interplay of some of the most basic and foundational notions of biosemiotics-notions ordinarily conveyed through the informal use of such terms as " signification", "information", and "purpose". The examination proceeds by proposing a new way of understanding Peirce's account of the triadic nature of semiosis. The manifold correlations that link representamens to their objects and interpretants are clarified through the disclosure and articulation of the implicit function of self-referential relations in semiotic action. These ideas are initially discussed at the level of human language and are subsequently generalized to the level of biosemiotics. This generalization is reached by considering how the disclosed correlations can be partially extended to the sphere of those basic semiotic transactions that obtain within and between organisms and among organic systems in general. In a separate section there follows a brief account of the explicit role of self-referential processes in Robert Rosen's modeling of organisms in terms of non-formalizable circularity, as clarified and expanded in a recent revival of his ideas through the work of several authors. The triadic structures within semiotic transactions and those arising in Rosen's (M, R)-systems are compared. Finally some realizations springing from the preceding discussions are pointed out. One is the need to integrate the conceptual restructuration sought by biosemiotics into a wider conception of natural philosophy-into a view that is receptive to new epistemic insights disclosed by current physics and mathematics. Another advances a heuristic strategy for reaching that goal.

The purpose of this paper is to warn that, as a new science, semiotics will introduce new problems, new ways of thinking, and new ways of solving all problems. These new characteristics must be discovered by the hard work of trial and error. The first two sections of the paper introduce a new way of looking at the world semiotically. Section 3 details how semiotic structure makes this new woridview possible. Section 4 suggests that this new woridview can lead to a unification of science and phenomenology, while section 5 suggests that this unification of science and phenomenology can provide an analytical continuity between the two, similar to the analytical continuity between algebra and geometry provided by analytical geometry. Section 6 provides several examples of new ways of thinking including my favorite whipping boy-a new golden age of mathematics is coming; it will be a triadic mathematics and it must be developed by us, the semioticists of the 21st century, in order to solve the problems encountered by the new semiotic science. Other examples are also discussed or suggested.

Peirce's formal rhetoric is the least developed of his three branches of semeiotic. I argue that Peirce intended formal rhetoric to be a general theory of inquiry. Peirce recognized that semeiotic requires a cooperative effort by inquirers guided by certain methodological and normative principles and was thus one of the three normative sciences. Thus formal rhetoric is subject to normative considerations. The purpose of this paper is to give some body to the skeleton outline originally provided by Peirce. I start with an outline of his formal rhetoric and conclude that Peirce appeared to treat three dimensions of inquiry ·. 1) a proper community of inquirers; 2) a proper method of inquiry; and 3 ) the proper goals of inquiry. Each of these three dimensions has a normative aspect which makes the connection between semeiotic and ethics much clearer. The most important factors in scientific inquiry have been the moral ones such as love of truth and recognition of science's social and public nature. These normative factors have an impact on inquiry in at least three respects: 1 ) the ethos of the community of inquiry; 2 ) the cultivation of feelings and sentiments, forms of communication, and the virtues of inquirers; and 3) the goals of inquiry necessary for success in the long run. The normative aspect of inquiry leads to speculative rhetoric which privileges certain forms of communication and certain goals of inquiry. Spelling these out in detail leads to Peirce's novel point that pure reason or pure logic alone is not enough to discover knowledge, but that it requires the effort of a historical community of inquirers, cooperating in the right sort of community

In this paper we examine the pragmatic meaning of mathematical necessity. While Peirce writes extensively on the pragmatic meaning of a "would be", he does not provide a developed account of the pragmatic meaning of a mathematical "must be". After examining several possibilities such as information relative accounts, conceivability, the ideal world, and possible worlds accounts, we consider mathematical necessity in terms of his overall pragmatism whereby metaphysical notions are understood in terms of their pragmatic effects, and, in particular, their role in inquiry. We argue that mathematical necessity should be considered a regulative hypothesis. Peirce often addresses questions of modality, such as whether to posit real possibility or physical necessity, by appealing to what is good for inquiry. Just as the hypothesis of the real world constrains and directs inquiry in science, positing the reality of mathematical possibility (or what Peirce sometimes calls " substantive possibility") can also be seen to constrain and direct mathematical inquiry as well as natural science. The necessity of mathematics may, in the end, be stipulated in the form of a hypothesis, just as the reality of the natural world functions as a hypothesis in Peirce's system. The effect of positing this ideal world of substantive possibility lies both in its effects within mathematical inquiry, and ultimately within the natural sciences as mathematical conclusions constrain the hypotheses we see fit to entertain.

This article begins with Peirce's ten sign classes, derived from his three trichotomies of sign relations, and adapts this taxonomy to graphic design. The paper presents a table that graphically illustrates the sign classes and their inter-relationships, and it argues for a shift in the traditional terminology to allow a tighter fit with contemporary graphic design usage and practice. This article may be seen as a companion piece, and extension, to the article in Chinese Semiotic Studies by the same author in 2010 which questioned whether a designer ever completes an argument.

Tracking the use of index from early ages to later childhood reveals that indexical signs evolve from those in physical contiguity with their objects (spatially and temporally) to indexes which are used apart from the presence of their objects. An analysis of how recognition of the continued substance of objects, despite their absence, and direct reference to absent objects by means of indexical signs, constitutes a bridge from adherence to an existential relationship between index and object, to a loosening of that connection. Such analyses draw upon pre-linguistic cognitive studies, such as Baldwin and Saylo’s current work, as well as Bühlens deictic continuum. Finally, it is argued that Peirce's concept of index is not unlike Jakobson's-although Peirce and Jakobson require contiguity between index and object, such contiguity need not be both spatial and temporal

With this issue, Chinese Semiotic Studies continues the column on the Tartu Semiotics School. These introductory notes specify some aspects of the current scope and tasks of semiotic research. A brief account of the Tartu Semiotics Summer School 2011 on the topic of semiotic modelling is added.

The article gives a brief overview of Summer Schools in semiotics of the 1960s and 1970s that took place near Tartu, at Kääriku sports centre of the University of Tartu, and later in Tartu. These Summer Schools on secondary modelling systems were certainly the most important scientific events in the field of semiotics in Soviet Union. These meetings drew together the members of Tartu-Moscow Semiotics School. An unconstrained atmosphere of these conferences allowed a freedom of discussion that the participants had not experienced earlier and that they recall decades after.

The essay provides a brief analysis of correspondence between two scholars whose heritage forms the basis of contemporary Tartu semiotics-Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) and Juri Lotman (1922-1993). A comparison between Uexküll's and Lotman's work demonstrates a series of features in which their approaches are in concord. We find some aspects of local culture as supportive of their way of thinking. We also claim that the theoretical integration of Jakob Uexküll's and Juri Lotman's approaches is at the heart of the contemporary semiotics, which has a task to develop a theoretical and methodological apparatus that would delimit and specify the scope of general semiotics and that could be used as a basis for all branches of semiotics.

The founder of semiotics of cinema, Christian Metz set as the aim of his project to go to the bottom of the metaphor of language that had been used widely for describing cinema in film theory, yet without taking into account the knowledge about language that had accumulated in linguistics. Thus the goal of early semiotics of cinema was to go beyond figural analogy and bring together the two domains of knowledge; knowledge about cinema and knowledge about language. The development of metaphor of language of cinema into semiotic model of language of cinema sheds light to semiotic modelling as methodological tool. Firstly the metaphor of language of cinema itself- either pre-theoretical or theoretical-can be seen as an attempt to make sense of novel phenomena through analogy with something already familiar. This stage resulted in ontological theories of language of cinema. Refining this rough analogy into the object of study meant acknowledging the difference between cinema as experienced and cinema as object of knowledge, arriving thereby at methodological theories of cinema that use semiotic modelling as a means for constructing the object of study.