Volume 12, Issue 2 - Festschrift: Semiotics as an interdisciplinary methodology: Studies in Honor of Jie Zhang

“Semiosis” comes to us from Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) as a coinage derived from Locke’s 1690 coinage of “semiotics”. In early to late-middle twentieth century, however, with the notable exception of Juri Lotman (1922–1993), who knew Locke’s work, this “new science” for studying signs was known rather as “semiology”, the name proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who was ignorant of Locke’s earlier proposal. Drawing upon Locke’s original terminology, Thomas A. Sebeok distinguished between anthroposemiotics as the exclusive realm of “semiology” and zoösemiotics as studying the action of signs throughout the animal kingdom. Sebeok identified Saussure’s “semiology”, accordingly, as a pars pro toto fallacy : the fallacy of mistaking a part for the whole, and later concluded that “sign-science and life-science are co-extensive”, a thesis establishing the framework for studying the action of signs throughout the realm of living things, or biosemiotics . The present essay addresses the question of whether the unnecessarily reductive interpretation of this thesis as restricting sign-action to the living world is not itself a further illustration of Sebeok’s pars pro toto fallacy , inasmuch as communication involves sign-activity whether it occurs in the living world or the non-living world of inanimate beings.

This contribution discusses a fundamental semiotic problem, i.e., how much of a linguistic message is explicitly coded and how much content is implied by the speaker and has to be inferred by the addressee. This coding problem is demonstrated with two types of speech act constructions, viz. (i) explicit performative utterances in which the illocutionary act performed by the speaker is overtly named , and (ii) hedged performatives in which the illocutionary verb is hedged by a modal or attitudinal expression. One focus of the contribution is on performative utterances that are hedged by can and must , in particular, cases where the illocutionary act denoted by the performative verb is not affected by the modal (illocutionary-force preserving hedged performatives). Notwithstanding, the modals contribute substantially to the overall meaning of the utterance. The modal can pragmatically implies a positive evaluative and emotive stance on the illocutionary act and its propositional content, whereas must often implies a negative evaluation and feelings of discontentment and displeasure. The results of this study confirm the thesis that pragmatic, in particular, metonymic, inferencing plays a central role in the elaboration of linguistic meaning.

Major concepts thematized by Mikhail Bakhtin are “dialogism” and “otherness” – where the latter is understood as the capacity to evade the sphere of being, the same –, and with them the concepts of “singularity” and “responsibility”. Bakhtin’s writings are topical today more than ever before, representing a major contribution towards a critique of ontology and reformulation of humanism in terms of the logic of otherness, dialogue, and unindifferent difference.

The right to non-functionality, that is, the right to be taken into consideration, to be loved for nothing is not included in the sphere of human rights. The right to life has no consistency whatsoever if it is not accompanied by the right to non-functionality. In today’s world there are widespread situations where we could say that this life is not life. All communities thus far are based on a recognition of the other insofar as one is useful, functional, and productive. We now look forward to extra-communitarian communities where each single individual is welcomed independently from one's usefulness.

Metaphor is one of the key concepts of semiotics. This essay has been written with the aim in mind of defining a new application of the field of semiotics, namely what I call ‘future studies’. The paper deals with three issues: (i) the theory of metaphors as such, much discussed in the semiotic literature; (ii) what semiotics says about the future; and (iii) what kind of semiotics we are considering here. I propose to explore the problem of metaphors and the future of semiotics in the light of my own new theory, which I call ‘existential semiotics’. Existential semiotics is a combination of the continental philosophy and the semiotic tradition. It investigates sign phenomena in our living world i.e. Dasein in the light of transcendence and its appearance. This new semiotic theory stems from the Paris school and maintains many of its central notions.

There are various artist-characters in many of O’Neill’s plays, which – if interpreted in a new way – can be regarded as dramatic embodiment of multi-level significance. With their expressed awareness of being artists, they occasionally go beyond the narrow confines of O’Neill’s personal life experiences to reveal an implicit re-examination of the author’s own theatrical methods. In O’Neill plays poets are usually of symbolic significance in contrast to commercially motivated society. The novelist characters convey O’Neill’s tendency to combine novel and drama; they also represent the difficulties O’Neill experiences in such an endeavor. The characters involved with drama production reveal O’Neill’s ideas on the relationship between drama writing and production. The analysis attempts to explore the pluralistic space of interpretation of O’Neill’s artist-characters so that a more perceptive comprehension of his plays can be achieved.

Anti-identity construction is a uniquely semiotic behavior that can be witnessed in both fictional and non-fictional narratives. It is not a solitary concept but subordinate to a hypernym that can be defined as anti-modeling , which is a representational or cognitive process whereby a person creates models that challenge or defy certain stereotypes, specific groups of people or individuals, objects, and events. Just like anti-identity construction, anti-modeling is fundamentally different from defamiliarization. A major difference between anti-modeling and defamiliarization is that the former recognizes both prose and poetry, among all the other types of human modeling systems, verbal and nonverbal alike. Nevertheless, defamiliarization does share a critical trait with anti-modeling, that is, habituation or automatism for the economy of mental effort, although in the case of defamiliarization, the habituation/automatism is one of perception, whereas in the case of anti-modeling, it is the habituation/automatism of interpretation. Given that stereotyping is in fact an instantiation of the categorization process and anti-modeling imbricates, if not coincides, with the categorization process, anti-modeling is not only “anti-stereotype modeling”, it can also be thought of as “cross-category modeling”. The import and position of the categorization process in modeling, or more broadly, in semiosis, need to be further explored in future studies.