Volume 20, Issue 1

The sociolinguistics of mobility is one of Jan Blommaert’s significant theoretical legacies vis-à-vis language interactions in the age of globalization. This paper investigates the mobilization of English as a semiotic resource in the public space of Chinese cities to reveal how the process of linguistic landscaping rescales English in China’s layered language regime. In the three investigated cities in eastern China, the English language has been conceptualized as a symbol of internationalization, and the affective potentials of English signs turn the cities into spaces of friendliness. I argue that the visual bilingualism for internationalization purposes is loaded with state ideologies, and English semiotization in the urban space demonstrates the state’s keenness for international recognition and integration into the global world. Inherent in this linguistic landscaping process are Englishization as internationalization ideology, standard language ideology, and linguistic purism ideology. While the translocal status of English in the world language system serves to upscale the cities to a higher scale level, the valorization of English in the official domain also reinforces the hegemonic power of English in the indexicality order, marginalizing social groups with limited English literacy. Thus, a critical, dialectical lens is needed to analyze the role of English in top-down linguistic landscaping.

Jan Blommaert had a profound impact on studies of language in society, pushing many concepts, theories, and research approaches to the center of sociolinguistics. Materialist semiotics is one of the theories and research approaches that he argued for forcefully. Blommaert’s approach to semiotics aligns with Kress’s social semiotics and Scollon and Scollon’s geosemiotics, with an emphasis on the social and materialist nature of signs. By theorizing materialist semiotics, Blommaert argued against the traditional abstract view, which saw meaning systems as timeless and context-less. This paper discusses three core elements of materialist semiotics – spatial scope, orders of indexicalities, and chronotopicity – and presents an ethnographic landscaping case study of a Chinese university’s on-campus bilingual signage, in order to illustrate materialist semiotics and to attract more scholarly attention to Blommaert’s oeuvre, which offers a wealth of theoretical and empirical potential, and continues to inspire us to do more, to go further.

Space is constructed as a particular place by various agents and in a variety of ways, and languages play an important role in the semiotic construction of a space. This study adopts a linguistic landscape approach to explore how languages are commodified for consumption in sites of luxury, i.e., four cafés in Quanzhou, a southeastern city of China. The findings show some similarities and differences in terms of language choice for the four cafés. Despite the similarities and differences, the four shops’ landscapes feature atmospheric multilingualism, where multiple languages and scripts move into a luxury register of late-modern consumption and create the affective regime of luxury and exclusivity. Atmospheric multilingualism is driven by commercial interests and characterized by the commodification of multilingualism and a division of labor among languages in four cafés. In this division, English, other foreign languages, and traditional Chinese characters are employed for their symbolic functions, indexing cosmopolitanism, distinction, luxury, and modernity. Simplified Chinese characters are linked to the interaction order and used in daily business as the main instrument of communication.

This paper adopts a digital ethnographic approach to analyze concrete communicative practices with Elder Biaoqing, a type of graphic semiotic resources comparable to emojis and memes, typically designed for and used by older people on Chinese social media. Following Silverstein’s theorizing, it reveals the emergence of multiple indexicalities of Elder Biaoqing that are a result of several social factors: the growth of an older population online, people’s reflections on their communicative needs engendered by specific social facts, and people’s ethno-metapragmatics. The study of Elder Biaoqing reveals users’ agency in creating semiotic resources, the inequality between digital natives and digital migrants, and age anxiety in Chinese society. The findings invite a re-imagination of social facts – the existence of an online–offline nexus and a re-thinking of theories for sociocultural research in a digital era – ontological perspectives on multimodal resources and digital infrastructures, developments of the theoretical perspective of indexicality, and a total-semiotic-fact approach to digitally mediated social interaction.

Adapted by Li Bihua and Lu Wei and directed by Chen Kaige, Farewell My Concubine was first released in mainland China and Hong Kong in 1993. It gained strong momentum and went on to break the box office for mainland Chinese literary films in the USA. Against the background of traditional Peking Opera culture, the film spans nearly half a century and follows the love–hate relationship between Cheng Dieyi, played by Leslie Cheung, and Duan Xiaolou, played by Zhang Fengyi. It shows the changes in human nature and the rise and fall of classical art in the city of Beiping in different eras. Taking “symbols” as the entry point, this paper analyses and explores the characteristics of the cultural symbols and metaphors that accompany the main narrative line of the film so as to further trace and understand the multiple interpretations that “anti-identity construction” brings to the film, as well as the ethical implications reflected in the symbols.

According to renowned linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson, translation can be divided into three general categories: intralingual translation, interlingual translation, and intersemiotic translation/transmutation. Unlike the first two categories, intersemiotic transmutation lacks the usual isomorphism that exist between a source and its target, but that should not deter us from discovering an underlying universal process of two-step interpretation that is involved in transmuting painting as a nonverbal sign into art criticism which is mostly verbal. Put simply, painting as a special form of human communication relies heavily on iconicity between “representamen” and its “object,” but this is only the first step on our way toward the hidden meaning of a visual text. To achieve the latter goal, we also need – often, but not always, through indexical reasoning – to make connections between a painting and its sociohistorical context in the manner of logical abduction as proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce rather than structural differentiation as advocated by Ferdinand de Saussure. Compared with iconic correspondences, indexical relations are far more arbitrary and therefore extremely difficult to reconstruct.

The enchantment of things has been found in the long tradition of Chinese literary narrative. This article explores the three salient ways Chinese people have developed of thinking about and writing about their (imagined) relationship with the things around them, i.e.,  Bo Wu 博物 , Gan Wu 感物 , and Guan Wu 观物 . In the Bo Wu tradition, people described strange things that may or may not have existed in the actual world, and in doing so, they displayed either their extensive knowledge of these things, or the fertility of their imagination; in the Gan Wu tradition, people tried to express some kind of emotional attachment to things, and conceived of them as being able to feel like humans; and in the Guan Wu tradition, people tried to lose themselves in the contemplation of the world of things. The three Chinese traditions are reconsidered in this article in relation to the relevant Western lines of thought and particularly to emerging thing theory in Western philosophy.

This article investigates the syntax of sluicing in Mandarin Chinese, including the syntactic constraints on predicates that might appear in sluicing, the reclassification of wh -phrases, the syntactic status of shi ‘be’ and you ‘have,’ and the syntactic derivation of typical sluicing and pseudo-sluicing. This article argues that there are both pseudo-sluicing and typical sluicing in Chinese, with each involving different structures and derivations and requiring different analysis.

Although scientific research usually emphasizes objectivity unaffected by any form of subjectivity, semiotic inquiries have to consider the role of subjectivity. In fact, social development, art, and literature always follow certain rules of objectivity, but these rules seem to be inescapably linked to the subjectivity of human beings. How can we avoid the subjectivity of research, or research biases caused by subjectivity, to ensure the objectivity of scientific research to the greatest possible extent? This paper answers the question through the cultural semiotics of jingshen , which is grounded in Chinese cultural traditions, especially the philosophies of Lao Tseu and Chuang Tzu. This line of inquiry seeks to identify objectivity in the constant transformation between the subject’s states of self and selflessness, while striving to avoid inductive and deductive biases caused by the “conceit” of rationality and to eliminate the constraints of specific concepts and images formed by existing knowledge as well as possible consequential “Verborgenheit.” The purpose is to achieve a state of “rational intuition,” returning to the natural mode of human existence and forging for semiotics a rationality-based path to the intuitive understanding of meaning.

This study examines the relationship between disaster and religion by exploring three main questions: how religion shapes the interpretation of disasters and the subsequent recovery processes; how disasters transform religious practices; and how religious interpretations may coexist with scientific explanations of the same disaster. By focusing on the Aceh society’s experience after the 2004 tsunami, this paper argues that Islam, which serves as the central modeling system of Aceh culture, played two interconnected roles in the post-tsunami period: one of providing explanations for the inexplicable disaster and the other of guiding the ensuing actions. Furthermore, the tsunami had a significant impact on the practice of Islam in Aceh, as demonstrated by the shift toward the Sharia system to create a more Islamic Aceh society in the future. This phenomenon thus serves as an example of an explosive change in a semiosphere, as explained by Juri Lotman. This paper also identifies the coexistence of religious and scientific interpretations of the tsunami among the Acehnese, highlighting their distinct social functions.