Volume 10, Issue 2

The study of cognitive semiotics first took the form of “cognitive linguistics + Peircean semiotics” in China in 2005. Two years later, the term “cognitive semiotics” (CS) began to be introduced to Chinese scholars, who came to learn the names of pioneers such as Daddesio, Brandt, Thom, Stjernfelt, Bundgaard, and others, situated mainly in Europe. Since then, Chinese CS scholars have devoted themselves to the theoretical exploration of CS focusing on such topics as metaphor and symbolization, cognitive steps in semiosis, humor comprehension, interpretation of polite utterances, the deictic center, etc. Moreover, some scholars have focused on the application of the theory in fields such as literary analysis, the interpreter’s mind style, education, disaster symbols, architecture, etc.

This paper claims that, as a “cryptosemiotician” and a philosopher, Marx practiced semiotics. Thus the paper examines Marx’s semiotics and its historical and theoretical developments in Europe. The relation between semiotics and Marxism is understood in the sense that the study of signs is not secondary with respect to historical-dialectical materialism. Marxism is an “open system” in that the elements that constitute it are related in such a way that modification of one element provokes modification of the others. It is an open system because it is a scientific system; it is subject to the laws of science and thus continuously susceptible to verification and exposed to confutation. I propose a critical reading of so-called Marxist interpretations of Marxian semiotics.

Language users are known to have the ability to construe a given situation in several alternate ways. It is also known that being faced with one and the same situation, a speaker of one language may prefer to construe it in one way, while a speaker of another language may chose to construe it in another way. The present paper addresses this variability specifically with regard to speaker preference for either the ‘subject-object contrast’ type of construal or the ‘subject-object merger’ type of construal. It further suggests that there can be a parallelism (or ‘homology’) between a speaker’s stance in linguistic encoding and a painter’s stance in pictorial encoding, as can be observed in Japanese cultural artifacts.

This article discusses the application of systemic-functional semiotics in the analysis of visual materials, and, specifically, presents and demonstrates the efficacy of an original systemic-functional model that facilitates both the analysis and synthesis of drawings in a cross-cultural context. The model is explained as developing from Michael O’Toole’s systemic-functional semiotic model for painting (O’Toole 2011) itself an adaptation of Michael Halliday’s systemic-functional semiotic model for language (Halliday 1973, 1978, 1985). The article is illustrated with examples of work from China, Europe, and the authors’ drawing practice.

Recently, in most foreign language course books, rubrics of units, activities, and exercises are codified resulting in a peculiar coexistence of semiotic systems to produce or to accentuate meaning, creating thus polysemiotic signs. In this paper, I study the polysemiotic signs of English and French in foreign language course books published in Greece which are composed of verbal and visual signs within the context of Groupe M. Such a relation of semiotic systems also includes intersemiotic and interlingual translation. My main result is that course books are characterized by an increasing visuality that permits reference to a common cultural framework or semiosphere that enables the polysemiotic signs used in course books to be understood by students learning a foreign language.

In China, subtitling is replacing dubbing as the preferred mode of audiovisual translation. Fans of particular shows form groups to circulate their video resources and translations online. Although remaining controversial, ‘fansubs’ shed light on and raise questions in both theoretical and practical aspects of subtitling. Herein I define what the product of subtitling should be and investigate strategies of translation in use. The analysis focuses specifically on translators’ strategies in complying with the constraints of a multimodal medium in order to explain, transform, or neutralize the subtitle for transcultural purposes. This goal is achieved by comparing different versions of Chinese subtitles for the same episodes selected from two American TV sitcoms - The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men.

Taiwanese director Wang Tong’s film Strawman (1987) aims at comparing the maimed national identity and sense of helplessness of colonized Taiwanese people to the situation of a “strawman” in the late period of the Pacific War. I explore the relationship between the filmic representation of trivial events involving Taiwanese farmers and the irrepressible power of life and humanity that emerges despite Japanese empirical exploitation and domination. The events become a series of detours of sign processes that represent not just the tangos of life and death but also the tangles of the colonizer and the colonized in the real world, while the film’s Kristevean ideologemes operating through sign functions correlate the cinematographic world and the possible contextualized real world

In this contribution I recount the history of the development of modern logic in the late 19th century and early 20th century in order to explicate the role played in it of Charles S. Peirce and his semeiotic

I focus on the history of energy, symmetry, and symmetry breaking as unifying conceptions connecting previously isolated fields of inquiry. This narrative proceeds through three stages. The first concerns the establishment of the principle of conservation of energy in the second half of the 19th century. The second depicts the emergence of the concept of symmetry and its central role in relativity and quantum physics. The third stage follows the rise of the notion of symmetry breaking from a seminal paper by Pierre Curie to its present pervasive role in explanation and concept unification, and in bridging previously separated disciplines, such as quantum chromodynamics, condensed matter physics, and cosmology. Applications of these ideas to biology and semiotics are noted.

In this paper I discuss the metaphysics of symmetry and then illustrate several of the most obvious symmetries in the theory of sign structure. By breaking one of these symmetries, a new and more powerful theory is displayed: the theory of the structure of the dialogic sign. However, there are many symmetries remaining to investigate in this theory.

In setting a text to music, a composer actively engages the text by manipulating it to serve an expressive end that coalesces into a multi-layered art form. Peirce’s conception of semeiotic with its emphasis on presentation, representation, and interpretation allows access to the thorny issues surrounding the relation of music and text in the art song. The analytic focus is on the use of the pastoral topic in Shubert’s setting of “Nur wer die Sehnsucht Kennt” (D. 877, No. 1).