Volume 15, Issue 3

“Scar Literature,” a literary movement in twentieth-century Chinese literature, encompasses a series of works written after the Cultural Revolution. The scar metaphor was taken from the title of a short story, “The Scar,” and characterized a series of works with common features. The outlines of “Scar Literature” are blurred, mixed and intertwined with other literary trends and movements. But while Chinese and foreign literary criticism claim that it was short-lived, its influences are visible in several works by contemporary authors. Based on the idea that literary works are prone to being analyzed as a form of persuasive discourse, this paper identifies typical rhetorical procedures of this literary trend and its influences in certain emblematic works: the recurrence of topoi (figures such as “rehabilitation,” peculiar to the Cultural Revolution); inductive reasoning (the construction of a historiographic reasoning via the exemplum); recourse to pathos; and the metaphorical figure of the scar bearing the value of the plotline. This analysis applies concepts of New Rhetoric and discourse linguistics, in particular, concepts developed by Olbrecht-Tyteca and Perelman, Amossy’s approach about pathos and the role of emotions and “figurality” in argumentation, and Plantin’s linguistic theory of the emotions.

Chomsky is an evolutionary figure in linguistics. His greatest contribution lies in transformational generative grammar, which put an end to the leading position structuralism had held in language for more than 30 years. His naturalistic methodology has greatly influenced the research of both linguistics and psychology, and he is also considered to be the first to study language from the cognitive perspective. He insists on a naturalistic methodology; therefore, he was even considered by some to be a physicalist. However, this is not the case. On the contrary, TGG, as a critique of the behaviorist view of language, is intertwined with a critique of physicalism. On the one hand, he thinks the mind, like chemical elements and electrons, can be approached from a third-person perspective; on the other hand, he again admits there exists consciousness, which can be merely approached in terms of a first-person authority, which, therefore, is a fatal challenge to his core theory. Now there remains a new solution to this dilemma, that is, to admit that the mind is a special natural phenomenon with two means of existence: one is involved in physical aspects with the brain, and the other is concerned with something mental, with the former approached by a third-person perspective and the latter better researched via a first-person authority.

The aim of this study is to analyze the semantic organization of the text “Shooting an Elephant.” The research is carried out with a multidisciplinary perspective using semantic and semiotic data. The theory of semantics is used to examine the words which predominately form the meaning universe of the text. The analysis is fulfilled within the scope of meaning relations as denotation/connotation and synonymy/antonymy in the lexical field. Then the transsentential signs which have a critical role in the construction of the semantic universe of the text are interpreted in the sense of semiotics. The production process of the descriptive, narrative, and thematic meaning layers is revealed throughout the study. Besides bringing the semantic universe of the narrative with its constructive components to light over the course of the study, the impressive dominance of particular signs and their contribution to the narrative are discussed to reveal the loss of identity of the West.

Rich literature on the representation of women in advertising has repeatedly concluded a message in keeping with a GDP-promoting agenda: with economic development and modernization, women’s status has been elevated and they appear in professional and other settings beyond domesticity. Amid this optimism, the present study cautions that women’s elevated status and transformed roles should not give way to the exuberance on display in many sectors. Motivated by the unusual persistence of women’s decorative role against the background of pro-egalitarian industrialization and modernity, this study, drawing on advertising discourse in Cosmopolitan , the world’s leading women’s magazine, aims to investigate the gender ideology that dehumanizes women by exploring the various dehumanizing metaphors and the visual and linguistic codes deployed to construct the metaphors. In identifying and analyzing two major dehumanizing metaphors – WOMEN ARE OBJECTS and WOMEN ARE ANIMALS – this study outlines a critical metaphorical landscape that goes beyond the warfare metaphor which is popular in various fields (e.g. women, health care, and economy), and highlights HUMAN BEINGS ARE THINGS metaphors as a major instrument in constructing dehumanizing discourse and ideology.

City branding brings immense benefits for megacities to gain international prestige in an increasingly competitive global arena. City publicity films, as an effective method for selling the city through online dissemination, could reach and influence a wider audience. However, the deployment of different semiotic resources in the branding discourse in city publicity films remains under-explored, and in particular, the role of cultural attributes in the construction of meaning in the discourse of city branding through linguistic and nonverbal modalities remains unknown. This paper, drawing on theories of systemic functional grammar and visual grammar, examines the multimodal discourse of publicity films of Beijing and London in terms of representational and interactive meanings achieved through various semiotic resources. It is found that, in verbal and visual discourse, both films share similarities regarding enhancing persuasiveness via emotional branding but exhibit differences regarding how to achieve persuasiveness through different semiotic resources that co-construct meaning. The Beijing publicity film blends functional and emotional values while the London publicity film is prone to being more functional. In addition, possible reasons for the differences observed are discussed.

The article seeks to establish a dialog, from a semiotic point of view, with the grand cartography of methods in literary criticism proposed by Prof. Zhang Jiang in his famous essay “Imposed interpretation.” While acknowledging that Prof. Zhang Jiang identifies the most crucial weak points of the semiotic methodology, the article nevertheless takes these criticisms as occasions to improve the approach of semiotics, as regards especially the following oppositions: diagrammatic over-schematization versus quest for a more judicious application of the method; overenthusiastic adoption of mathematical formulas versus cautious cross-fertilization between humanities and scientific thought; frantic pursuance of theoretical uniformity versus humble acceptance of literary idiosyncrasies; fundamentalist proclamation of the self-reliance of the text versus thoughtful consideration of the evident links between the text and its contexts. This new theoretical approach, wherein traditional semiotics improves itself in dialog with Prof. Zhang Jiang’s criticisms, is exemplified with reference to the concept of interpretive fidelity, which is categorized into different levels and dimensions of adhesion between the textual structure and the discourse of the meta-language interpreting it: hi-fi, low-fi, no-fi, and wi-fi interpretation.

Meaning generation reaches beyond the convenient code-based distinction between the encoding versus the decoding of information. What we need is a more comprehensive perspective that can encompass code-based communication and agency-oriented interpretation, both of which are treated as two subordinate mechanisms of meaning generation or signification. Based on a close reading of Saussure, there are only forms in signification; signs and signification are one. Given the complexity of its usage over the years, the term sign should be reevaluated. In its stead, the present article proposes using Sebeok and Danesi’s term model , although with some modifications, in order to shed a new light on meaning generation. The present article also demonstrates that cultural memory, or culture understood in the sense proposed by Lotman and Uspensky, coupled with emotions and human agency, act as three determinants of the process of meaning generation and make it a semi-autonomous process.

People communicate with each other in and by the signs around them. The sender might intentionally or unintentionally tell lies to the addressee through signs in order to achieve special effects or purposes which are contrary to fact or reality. These signs can thus be termed as sign lies . This interview with Prof. Hongwei Jia addresses the nature, property, classification, boundaries, and application of sign lies so as to improve the concept of sign lies proposed by Umberto Eco. Along with some new achievements in the understanding of sign lies, some problems or difficulties that scholars will confront in the coming years are also put forward.