Volume 9, Issue 2

Peirce’s final statements on the sign were consigned in various ways over a hundred years ago as a form of logic, a branch of the science of enquiry based upon observation. This means inevitably that some parts of the theory will have been contested or considered superseded by more recent pronouncements on cognitive activity in general, both within and without the field of semiotics. Two such areas that have been host to innovative developments concern central preoccupations of the entire Peircean edifice: the basic unit of semiotics and its function, and ways of looking. First, following Thomas Sebeok’s pioneering integration of semiotics and the biological theories of Jakob von Uexküll, biosemiotics, it is claimed, has espoused a Peircean approach to the definitions of sign and semiosis. Second, observation involves the relation between the observer and the object observed, and, as a theoretical consequence, the relation between an organism and its environment, von Uexküll’s Umwelt . In view of the importance accorded Peircean semiotic theory in this more recent science, the paper compares and contrasts aspects of the later theory with the earlier, and concludes that there are significant theoretical differences between the two conceptions of the sign and its theoretical implications.

Starting with a critique of so-called intercultural communication, the present paper contests and challenges the prevalent and dominant essentialist views of “culture”. It is exposed that these views have a detrimental underlying logic that is both destructive and self-destructive. Instead, the paper proposes a radically new idea of culture, a minimalist approach supported by insights gleaned from contemporary semiotic inquiry. In this approach, culture is defined as a biological instinct to acquire information through modeling, that is, learning by models. This instinct is at work, or is realized, in specific acts of such modeling, resulting in cultural practices and cultural artifacts. In the case of humanity, a cultural practice is anything a human does that can be modeled by another human and a cultural artifact is any object that humans make and can model. The paper argues it is imperative to keep in mind that when we deal with the “intercultural”, we are only dealing with concrete yet different cultural practices or cultural artifacts. This is an effective way to completely refute essentialism. In a sense, the paper is meant to be a wake-up call, instead of a fighting talk. Its main objective is not to negate or obliterate the field of “intercultural communication”, among others, but rather to save them from themselves—a true and worthy field of “intercultural communication” is a field against essentialism, instead of an accessory to essentialism, whether the commission is “before the fact” or “after the fact”.

The paper describes and analyzes the full presence of blue in the Old Testament – in Hebrew and translations. The interdisciplinary approach includes the treatment of color as a cultural unit according to of Eco’s idea, lexical and contextual semantics, distinguishing visual and verbal color languages. The interface between verbal and visual color language is the prototype. Prototypes are universal natural visual objects – sky, sea, fire, blood, the sun at noon, all plants, light, milk, snow, darkness, and coal and have evolved into cultural units (Eco 1996 [1985]) in all cultures and languages. Basic Color Terms (BCT – blue ), Prototype Terms (PT – sky and sea ), Rivals Terms of prototypes (RT – sapphire, blue skins ), Terms for Basic Features of the Prototypes (TBFP – breadth, infinite, boundless ) are examined. Translation is a criterion for semiotic value, cultural and linguistic context. Norm of Test of Free Word-Associations is a source of non-color (secondary) meanings of verbal colors. Test results allow us to flesh out the hidden links ‘prototype color ─ most typical feature of the prototype ─ secondary meanings of color’ in text and visual culture. The secondary cultural meanings of BCTs and RTs are specified in color compounds. The color blue tehèlet is used in most cases in synergy (not in opposition) with the other three colors in a tetrad: purple argamàn─ scarlet tolàat shanì─ linen shesh . Analysis on the synergic relations is performed. The same applies to duads blue-linen, blue-purple, blue skins-scarlet, blue skins-red skins. Color compounds are elements of the Priestly Code, therefore a hypothesis on compounds at semiotic axes is developed. The PT sky is involved in religious heritage. Themes as Hebrew substitute shamàim for the Tetragrammaton, the Hierarchy of heavens complete the areas of cultural unit blue in the Old Testament.

Semantic predictability is one of the important factors that influence word processing and recognition. Based on the SPaM paradigm (Self-paced reading + Masked priming), the present study explores the influence of semantic predictability on TL effects in Chinese and English. The findings show that in both languages, internal and final transpositions produce priming effect in low-predictability preceding and following contexts as well as in high-predictability following contexts. From the perspective of priming magnitude, internal transposition produces greater priming effect than final transposition in English, while in Chinese, final transposition produces greater priming effect than internal transposition. In high-predictability preceding contexts, internal and final transpositions reveal significant priming effect and initial transposition produces close-to-significant-level priming effect in English, while in Chinese, no significant priming effect is observed in initial, internal or final transpositions.

Until recently, the study of language and meaning of cartoons, the media discourses they generate, and their analysis as a creative means of exploring meaning-making processes as semiotic resources have not received much scholarly attention in Nigeria. Although cartoons that involve the use of satire and humour as visual representations of reality have gained prominence across many media platforms in Nigeria, only a few scholars have examined this from a social semiotics perspective. This has created a gap in the literature, thus creating room for a paradigm shift in the field of social semiotics. This study explores the semiotics of cartoons in selected Nigerian newspapers to examine the meaning-making resources employed in the visual representation of ASUU strikes in Nigeria. The study, therefore, examines how cartoonists manipulate symbols, signs, and other semiotic resources to convey specific meanings through visual and textual representations. The study adopts a qualitative research design; data comprising cartoons sourced from selected Vanguard Newspapers and websites are analyzed using Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual semiotics and interpreted from the standpoints of Halliday’s Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach and O’Halloran’s position on metaphorical constructions of meaning. Here, metaphorical manipulation and representation of visual elements in the selected cartoons are interrogated. Findings from the study show the use of semiotic resources in the portrayer of reality in the context of the seemingly intractable ASUU strikes and their consequences on academic activities in Nigeria. This scholarly intervention deserves attention as it significantly contributes to the field of social semiotics through its visual representation in portraying challenges faced by the educational systems in Nigeria vis-à-vis poor government funding.

This study examines the persuasive strategies in selected animated advertisement videos by Piggyvest, the first and one of the fastest-growing online savings platforms in Nigeria, whose modus operandi is quite different from those of the conventional banking system. Drawing insights from Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design , 2nd edn. New York: Routledge) Multimodal Discourse Analytic framework, 12 samples of Piggyvest’s animated videos (for advertisements) were randomly sampled out of the 30 videos initially purposively sampled. Findings reveal metaphorisation of financial management and discipline, playing around gender-related ideas on finances, foregrounding of aspirations and financial decisions, depiction of cognitive strength and weakness on money matters, and striking a connection between money and relationships are persuasive strategies deployed in the animated advertisement videos by Piggyvest to appeal to their target audience.

This paper explores the deployment of multimodal elements as appraisal resources in #Endsars civil unrest-related memes in Nigerian social media space (WhatsApp and Twitter) to express affective meanings and intersubjective positioning. The study investigates how both verbal and non-verbal elements are deployed as appraisal resources to evaluate the trajectory of the protest. The data, which comprise thirty purposively selected Internet memes, collected between October and December, 2020, were analysed qualitatively. The study shows that the meme producers, through the use of multimodal concepts such as symbolic, analytical, action, reactional processes, offer and salience, among others, project various expressions of affect, judgement and appreciation of things to create important narratives in the memes. Thus, the verbal elements are graded/upscaled through the non-verbal elements in the memes to evoke specific reactions, positive/negative, which signal intersubjective positioning about the protest and relevant social actors. The study concludes that meme producers effectively utilize multimodal elements to interrogate various expressions of attitude and intersubjective opinions that Nigerians made about the protest and its management by the Nigerian government.