Introduction to the special section “Communication and meaning-making”

Since Frege distinguished between “sense” and “reference” (Frege 1948), meaning has been attracting a great deal of attention in scholarship. Ironically, no consensus on meaning, or the true meaning of meaning, has been found yet at all. The life of meaning arises from subjective meaningful recognition and from the continuous labor of society in meaningful creation. Frege’s ingenious contribution is in finding out that semiotic labor, such as different linguistic expressions relevant to the same object, adds a new component to the object referred to for the purpose of positioning meaning. The problem of where meaning is has been transformed into how to create meaning, and in what way. Frege’s theory of meaning implies the meaning of practice for meaning. Meaningful practice in linguistic sign, in Frege’s terms, is to have different senses through distinct expressions while anchoring in the same referent.

Since the same referent is shared in cognition among diverse people and a linguistic sign is generally accepted by any member of a linguistic community, meaning enrichment has been put under the constraint of communicative rules. Meaningful creative labor largely depends on the application of linguistic signs. In linguistic signs, people express meaningful thinking and share it with others. Linguistic communication is the channel, platform, instrument, and not least the significant location of meaning. Through communicative practice, people make meaning, preserve it in close circles, and convey it far away. It is precisely in the process of linguistic communication that people use language to make meaning and negotiate among themselves in ideational, interpersonal, and textual dimensions (Halliday 1978).

It is noteworthy that the globalized mobility of information and human resources and the communicative mode in the digital context have transformed either temporally or spatially the way we communicate. Face-to-face communication is being replaced by digital technology on a daily basis. The spatial limitations of everyday language have been overcome, whereas the liveliness sensed in face-to-face linguistic encounters is rapidly fading. This is a challenge facing linguistic communication, and also a crisis for meaning creation. Meeting this challenge asks us to search for laws of linguistic communication in this digital era, and the strategies people use to cope with their communication situations.

Lu has investigated some undisclosed laws of linguistic communication from the standpoint of crossing. He argues that crossing is significant not only in fulfilling a semiotic function, but also in transferring meaning in a superdiversity context. Against the backdrop of globalization, a postmodern medium-centered communicative order is being shaped in the superdiversity context. This new order of linguistic communication is featured with dramatic code-switching, rhetorical mirror effect, code twisting, and the like. In contrast, crossing in monolingual linguistic communities renders hierarchical social communication less hampered through transversality beyond in-group social divergence (Lu 2022).

As to the meaning derived from the complex function of signs, Peirce contributed a meanwhile well-known concept, namely that of “interpretant.” But this concept should not be conceived as a categorical supplement to the concepts of sign and object. Interpretant is produced in semiosis, that is, in a process of sign interpretation, or mental labor. It reveals that the meaning of a sign merely arises from the practice of thinking and interpretation. Peirce’s trichotomy of sign, object, and interpretant might be taken as an explanation of the mechanism for meaning production. Peirce’s theoretical purpose in proposing “pragmaticism” was to put forward “a method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of abstract concepts” (Peirce 1998: EP2: 400, 1907). The positioning of meaning in the philosophy of pragmatism has answered the question of how meaning is majorly constitutive of Peirce’s philosophical edifice. As Jappy accurately points out: “The only component of the sign-system […] that could help to explain how meaning is made and communicated from mind to mind was the definition of the sign” (Jappy 2022). The significance of Peirce’s meaning theory is precisely in revealing the dynamic nature of the sign, answering the question of how the sign means, but not what sign means.

Linguistic communication means that a speech event happens in a certain context. Carrying on the speech event requires a linguistic sign to do the job of a sign, namely what a linguistic sign means is often found out precisely in the linguistic sign itself. The social or cultural context is potential, but linguistic signs in utilization by communicators are real. In linguistic communication, meaning production is basically a process from morpheme to word and then to sentence in a particular context. Li and Meng’s research on the meaning-making process of Chinese words has revealed the rules hidden behind some typical words quite popular in today’s Chinese social life. Contextual hierarchy has been indicated by Li and Meng as a ramification of Halliday’s contextual theory (Li and Meng 2022). It is noteworthy that the rule of contextual hierarchy, namely the cultural context above the speech event, and the speech event above the morphological and sentence organization, has disclosed a processed path of meaning-making in linguistic communication.

As mentioned in the early part of this paper, there seems to be a general trend toward digital technology replacing face-to-face encounter as a linguistic communication mode. This development raises the question of what linguistic communication would be in nature. To decode this important question, we need a comparative study on both the commonness of and the difference between digital communication and face-to-face encounter. Zhu and Ren’s research focuses on the structure and function of emojis on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, and has analyzed the complimentary role emojis usually play on this platform. It is interesting that Zhu and Ren point out speech act function of emojis, analogous in illocutionary force to linguistic signs in everyday communication, but different in perlocutionary effect (Zhu and Ren 2022). This finding is significant to our continuing research on the nature of linguistic communication in the digital era.

This special section intends to provide a new perspective on the nature and development of communication and meaning-making in today’s life context. Investigations into the construction of meaning transference in a coherent framework, semiotic tracking of meaning, contextual mapping of lexical meanings, and digital pragmatic communication represent some new steps in communication and meaning research. However, what we have found and presented in this section is instructive that any research on communication and meaning-making is at best one small part of an unending mission.