Volume 13, Issue 3

Meaning and form are two important concepts in philosophy, literature, and other humanities, and discussions on the dialectical relationship between meaning and form have lasted for 2,000 years. Though the importance of meaning was considered, attention, interest, and studies were overwhelmingly focused on form much more than meaning, especially in the popular period of aestheticism, formalism, and structuralism. Henceforth, form retained ultimate supremacy over meaning. Roland Barthes was one of the giants of structuralism and was traditionally regarded as a formalist during his structuralist period (1950s–1967). In fact, Barthes’ semiotic thought was composed of two branches, cultural semiotics and literary semiotics. He valued meaning and the way of meaning-making in his cultural semiotics, and was devoted to exploration of hidden meaning, as well as the relationship between meaning and form. He found three layers of meaning hiding in mass media, i.e. denotation, connotation, and myth, which shape and reshape readers’ ideology, and persuade them to accept the ideology of the middle class. While forms are plentiful, even overflowing, meaning is relatively simple, but meaning is of supreme importance, as it manipulates forms in an implicit way. Consequently, Roland Barthes was really meaning-oriented or meaning-centrist in his cultural semiotic thought.

This article investigates the practical application of Peirce’s pragmaticism in the social sciences through the analysis of commercial signboards as signs. We find that Peirce’s semiotic theory is of great instructive significance to a specific case, but has its limitations, especially in the study of human semiotics or human philology. Peirce’s theory can be conceived in two ways: using commercial signboards as cases to explain Peirce’s semiotic classification system; and using Peirce’s semiotic theory as a tool to analyze and study the features of an object in special status. We focus on the practical application of this theory.

Children and adults absorb and interpret folk tales, fairy tales, and other stories through books, movies, and the vast resources available today on the Internet, including a multitude of storied games. The very best stories are personal, transparent, and effective vehicles for teaching and learning. They teach us how we (mis)fit in families, cultures, hopes, and dreams. From the classic tales of Indigenous people to contemporary interactive web-stories, we learn how strength and weakness, courage and fear, tenacity and laziness define girls and women, boys and men. It is through stories that we learn what it is to transgress and the punishments meted out for making bad choices. Through stories, we learn to be who we are. And through a social semiotic study of these stories as practices of meaning-making, we begin to understand how they shape individuals and society.

This paper takes as a starting point the age-long debate over the formidable divide between Chinese and Indo-European languages, a widely endorsed standpoint from which a vigorous line of research has sprung up, with findings reinforcing the “unbridgeable” divide and “specificities” of the Chinese language. Through the lens of semiotics, I revisit some of the pervasive arguments sustaining this view, and identify the unsolved problems concerning the absence of tertium comparationis in comparative and contrastive analyses. Drawing on semiotic insights on the philosophy of language relevant to the debated “specificities” of Chinese, I venture to propose a semiotic solution to mitigate the upheld divide between Chinese and alphabetical languages in Chinese linguistics studies, and argue for a negotiated view against the binary approaches and the skewed methodology in a comparative/contrastive framework.

In a constructional approach, the caused-motion construction is productive enough to attract verbs of different types into the construction; however, the distinct senses derived from actual instances indicate it is necessary to posit the caused-motion construction at lower levels because more novel uses present meanings closer to those lower constructions. The present analysis of the corpus data of English motion verbs shows that the senses of manner of caused-motion, manner of causing motion, and accompanied motion arise from their occurrences in the caused-motion construction. From a usage-based perspective, the entrenched use would yield verb class-specific constructions that are productive as well. The lower level of construction, together with the most schematic one, is stored in our memory as part of conceptual representation. The research indicates that creative use of motion verbs in the caused-motion construction is better interpreted with verb class-specific constructions.

There are some problems concerning the properties of Mandarin reflexives as claimed by former studies. The present study redefines Mandarin simplex reflexives and compound reflexives as having different syntactic properties. Mandarin simplex reflexives with ziji possess features of both anaphor and pronoun and follow the normal pattern of derivation. This explains why the simplex reflexives exhibit the long-distance binding phenomenon and blocking effect. Mandarin compound reflexives are quite similar to English reflexives and they follow the special derivational pattern. At the beginning of the derivation, they form pairs with antecedents and their antecedents help to value the reflexive feature and then designate ziji as a suffix to the pronouns. This helps to explain why the Mandarin compound reflexives strictly follow the BCA. The simplex reflexive in Mandarin double reflexive structures is different from the bare conditional shui in having de dicto interpretation, that is, it has an implicit specified antecedent in the context.