Volume 18, Issue 1 - Special Section – Communication and Meaning-Making; Guest Editor: Deping Lu

In the post-modern era, the knotty issue of “meaning” is more often examined from the perspective of practice, differing from the previous conceptual analysis. Meaning potential and meaning-making are preferred to meaning itself as terms in philosophy and linguistics. This special section aims to investigate the meaning of the change in “meaning” through an understanding and interpretation of “meaning-making” from the perspective of Peirce’s semiotic philosophy, linguistic communication, Chinese lexical structuring, and technological exchange. The four articles in this special section examine a number of meaning topics, such as constructs of meaning transference in a coherent framework, semiotic tracking of meaning, contextual mapping of lexical meanings, and digital pragmatic communication, to gain a more comprehensive view of the nature of meaning-making.

Although “crossing” as a new concept comes from Rampton’s seminal work, this article argues that crossing defines linguistic communication in a perspective of process, act, and especially change. As a controlling principle for linguistic communication, it might be in a different way complementary to Husserl’s shared sense, Habermas’s reaching understanding, and Searle’s shared intentionality. Crossing denotes changes in phase, sphere, and universe, characterizing the process of communication and having a meaningful value for continuing interpersonal relationship and reinforcing communicative competence. Crossing is also constitutive of communicative order both in monolingual contexts and in superdiversity multilingual settings. Against the backdrop of globalization, a new communicative order is being shaped in the reality of mobility and diversity. This new order of linguistic communication is characterized by dramatic code-switching, rhetorical mirror effect, and focus on linguistic medium. The mobility of human resources requires crossing to take creative strategies to achieve what monolingual crossing could not.

One domain in which one would expect to find enlightenment concerning the nature of meaning is the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and, in particular, the various versions of the pragmatic maxim that he refined over the years. For the maxim was, he claimed in a late text, really nothing more than a sort of protocol for determining the meaning of “hard words.” However, at the same time, Peirce saw the communication of meaning as a process that necessarily involved signs, thereby placing the onus of meaning-making within the scope of semiotics. The paper begins by examining the possible contributions to our understanding of the nature of meaning provided by Peirce’s pragmatism and the well-known ten-class classificatory system of 1903 derived from his theory of universal phenomenological categories. However, finding that both present structural limitations for such a study, the paper proceeds to develop the hexadic, 28-class sign-system of 1908 – based, in this case, on three modal universes of existence – and the process of semiosis in order to show how a neo-Peircean conception of semiosis enables the researcher not only to demonstrate the way meaning is communicated but also to hypothesize the way meaning is made through mediatization.

From the contextual perspective of functional linguistics, this paper emphasizes the role of two types of extra-word context – situational context and structural context – in the meaning-making process of Chinese words. We found that if a word is embedded with situational context, such as the X+lǐng (领) category, the meaning-making process of the word needs to force the word-forming components to be semantically transferred in the situational context. If a word is embedded with event context (i.e. special situational context), such as the X+mén (门) category, the meaning-making of the word needs to fill the semantics of the word-forming components in the context of the event. Words rely on structural context to construct meaning. If a word contains an explicit and marked structural context, such as yǒu (有) +N , then the meaning-making of the word is also explicit, and there is no need to assign structural meaning to any one of its components. If a word contains an explicit structural context, with entry-qualified schema, such as X+N causee , then the meaning-making of the word is also explicit. However, because of the relative vagueness of the grammatical and semantic nature of the components, the structural meaning tends to be transferred to a certain component, and the construction provides sufficient structural context for its new meaning-making. Based on the above analysis, this article constructs the meaning-making procedure of Chinese words and explores the semiotic values of context dependence, hierarchy, variability, and sociality that Chinese words show in the process of meaning-making.

Noted for the ability to generate meanings across linguistic boundaries, nonverbal communication in computer-mediated communication has attracted increasing research attention. This study examines the prevalent but under-investigated phenomenon of memes and emojis employed in Chinese compliments on the social platform Weibo. Data were collected in a follower-based community on Weibo, the Topic. The results revealed that memes that did not feature the image of the complimented target outnumbered those memes with the figure of the complimented target. Memes without the image of the complimented target were employed to express compliments, either through explicit or implicit expressions, although explicit expressions of compliments were used more frequently. All of the memes served to compliment the appearance, performance, and personality of the complimented targets. Regarding emojis, there were three patterns of emojis employed in online compliments, namely, emojis initiating compliments, emojis inserted in compliments, and emojis closing compliments. Overall, emojis functioned as transitions and intensifiers which increased the force of compliments.

Looking beyond the internalism–externalism debate, we offer a distributed view of how experience can garner linguistic and mental content. To make the case, first, we challenge the idea that cognition is organism-centered and synchronistic. Instead, we use Berthoz’s principle of “simplexity” to open up the multiscalarity of cognitive ecosystems. In exemplifying wide cognition, we track how the eyeball’s neurophysiology is transformed by simplex tricks. As learning was integrated with seeing, looking evolved. Later, we argue, lineages gained social use of gaze. In primates, gaze was integrated with cultural techniques like nut-cracking and termite dipping. Individual perceptual experience thus came to build on enculturated behavior. We then turn to the case of modern humans who make use of things with “meaning attached.” Their cognition, we argue, is not only enculturated but also enlanguaged. In this connection, we show how simplex mechanisms disclose aspects-in-things, thus allowing individuals to attribute practical significance to selected parts of their surroundings. In harnessing articulatory skills, human judgements draw on cultural and practical expectations: as a child perceives, she also learns to observe and say things. In this connection, we argue, people come to act ostensively and give rise to descriptions. In terms proposed here, humans learn to simplexify.

The concept of experience of consciousness ( Erfahrung des Bewußtseins ) is a central concept to Hegel’s The phenomenology of spirit . At the same time, it is one of the most difficult to understand for the contemporary reader. Despite the numerous specialized works dedicated to this topic, there is no study dedicated to the semiotic experience of consciousness, to which Hegel devotes memorable pages in The phenomenology of spirit . This contribution aims to highlight the experience of consciousness when its object is represented by the sign or the individual as a system of signs.

Presented is an analysis an analysis of language structure in the round incorporating the elements of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticism and his apothegm “My language is the sum total of myself” together with a program for reorienting linguistics in the twenty-first century. Postulated as a fundamental principle is the idea that the locus of linguistic reality is the act , the creative moment of speech  – a moment made possible by the existing structure of language with its general rules but which transforms that structure, so that linguistic structure is itself always in flux, always being modified by acts of speech. Adduced in illustrative support are data and analyses drawn from the author’s blog (www.languagelore.net) and from his recent book, The speaking self: Language lore and English usage (2nd edn., 2017). Included in Appendices form are fundamental concepts of Peirce’s semeiotic as summarized from Max Fisch’s classical description.

In the latter half of the 20th century, with the development of philosophy studies, Western jurisprudence also witnessed a linguistic turn in its field. A series of academic schools appeared consecutively, such as the school of semantic analysis, the school of new rhetoric, the school of legal interpretation, and the school of structural semiotics. Their analytical paradigms, which were skeptical of the views of legal languages in traditional theories of jurisprudence, are interdisciplinary and multidimensional in nature and characteristics. Normally, there are three methods used in the linguistic turn of Western jurisprudence, that is, the method of symbolic restoration, the method of structural and functional analysis, and the method of legal hermeneutics. Promoted by the linguistic turn, two traditions of legal semiotics also developed. One is the legal theory based on Greimasian semiotics, and the other is based on Peircean semiotics. The linguistic turn in jurisprudence still represents a breakthrough and innovation in the paradigm of legal theoretical studies, as it leads to a re-examination of language, which is no longer treated as a tool but as a philosophical afterthought in relation to the human being.