Volume 21, Issue 2

The paper presents modeling as more than interpretation of signs. Although this term is often associated with AI, a method of operating AI, or operating with AI in the human task environment, it may also be understood as the ability of any form of life to realize its living in general. Both these understandings of modeling can be too narrow and too broad to cope with one of the main problems it poses for semiotics and beyond – the elusive explanatory nature of models and/or their misuse in an effort to explain life and its relational ecology. Drawing on Humberto Maturana’s biological epistemology, I propose a systemic approach to modeling, as well as elaborating on supersession, a functional and operative substitution of the modeled by the model. In its biological account, modeling is a repetitive and/or recursive way in which the organism arises and operates as a system capable of finding (and distinguishing) itself as a primary source of all happenings in, around, and with it. The system, the composite unity, conserves the composition its components compose and deals with the consequences of this conservation by continuing (projecting) what has been conserved onto the space that affords further conservation.

English and Chinese are two quite different languages, the distinctive features of which take on various forms, but cannot reflect the fundamental differences between them in the most general sense. By analyzing key features such as hypotaxis vs. parataxis and rigidity vs. flexibility, I argue that the essential difference between the two languages lies in their contrasting use of concreteness and void. English, with its rich morphological and syntactic markers, tends to emphasize concrete, definite structures, facilitating clear, logical, and linear thinking. In contrast, Chinese, with its sparse cohesive devices and implicit relationships, allows a more flexible, open-ended interpretation, reflecting a cognitive tendency toward abstract, holistic thinking. This flexibility in Chinese facilitates a higher tolerance for ambiguity, often leaving space for multiple interpretations. I suggest that these linguistic distinctions are deeply tied to the respective ways of thinking in the two cultures, with English reflecting an analytic, individualistic mindset and Chinese expressing a more holistic, collective orientation.

The aim of this paper is to continue the development of a biosemiotic literary criticism. Critics have made significant contributions to this emerging field. However, their work either largely focuses on introducing biosemiotics to a non-scientific audience or directly or indirectly limits the application of biosemiotic readings almost exclusively to nature texts. It is important to now direct our attention to a wider literature. Following a Deleuzean/autopoietic approach to biosemiotics and presenting theory alongside examples from literature, I will explore how life, as an emergent, semiotic process is narrativized and represented in literary texts. A key insight of biosemiotics is the assertion that human beings share a basic mode of biological and cognitive organization with other organisms. A notion of life grounded on semiosis is inherently creative. Literature, I argue, allows us to explore the aesthetic dimension of individual emergence and sense-making without undercutting or turning away from biosemiotics as a science. To make my case, I will present readings of the work of Virginia Woolf. Along the way, I will connect my readings to insights from biosemiotic and autopoietic theory in support of an understanding of life as a fundamentally aesthetic phenomenon.

This paper critically engages with contemporary semiotic and sociolinguistic theories, focusing on Pennycook’s concept of the “total semiotic fact” and its ontological implications. Drawing on Roy Harris’s integrational semiology, this study challenges the materialist paradigms aligning with a sociolinguistics of complexity. It critiques the externalization and abstraction of signs in ethnographic approaches that endorse a distributed view of agency and prioritize semiotic assemblages of human and nonhuman actors, as exemplified in the works of Pennycook and Otsuji on language in multicultural urban spaces. Through a Harrisian lens, the paper asserts the primacy of individual sign-making activities, emphasizing the radically indeterminate, i.e. contextualized, nature of the sign. The paper argues against the notion of “semiotic totality,” as it obscures the irreducibility of individual agency in sign-making. Instead, it highlights how signs integrate various communicational activities within unique temporal and spatial contexts. The paper thus advocates for an integrational perspective that only recognizes the participant-dependent nature of linguistic “facts” and rejects the need for pre-existing codes (repertoires, resources, idiolects) or externalized meanings. The Harrisian approach offers an understanding of complexity which derives not from “language practice” but from personal linguistic experience.

This study investigates how gender affects the perception of coffee shop signs in Jordan using gender and communication theory and visual semiotics. The research explores how different males and females perceive shop signs based on design elements and visual appeals. A mixed-methods approach was used which involved 20 participants (10 males and 10 females) aged between 20 and 35 and all from middle-class backgrounds. Participants were asked to rank the 10 coffee shop signs chosen and then explain their choices in the second part of the survey. The results showed that most males prefer signs that indicate that the shop is affordable and straightforward, and offers quick service. On the other hand, most females prefer signs that indicate that the shop is sophisticated and prestigious. The study shows how men and women have different tastes in shop signs, helping businesses understand how to design signs that appeal to a wide range of customers.

Chinese frequently use lao (old) + surname when addressing others. Based on a dataset collected from the Chinese literature corpus, i.e. novels and plays, this study analyzes its referents and functions. Lao  + surname is unmarkedly used to refer to elderly people as a sign for respect, intimacy, or informality. The findings reveal that lao  + surname markedly refers to a teenager, a tool, or even a member of the younger generation addressing an elder, a Chinese person, or a non-Chinese person. Its marked use aims to establish or maintain social bonds, strengthen solidarity, or achieve an aha effect. The use of lao  + surname indicates the speaker’s observation of the Address Maxim of Gu’s Politeness Principle by taking beifen (辈分) and weifen (位分) (roughly age status and position status respectively) into consideration. The aim of this study is to advance existing research into forms of address.

This paper aims to investigate the ethical implications in narrative to bridge the gap between theory and practice, drawing attention to religious ethics as a poetics of possibility. Based on Peirce’s account of conservative sentimentalism, a semiotic-pragmatic method of logical sentiments of charity, faith, and hope is employed for moral creativity. These sentiments are tied to self-control, leading to altruism, which is associated with Christian ethics for discovering the true and real Self. In connection with Paul Ricoeur’s idea of poetics of will, in which ethics and poetics interact, I illustrate Peirce’s developmental account of the Self as an autonomous self-controlling agent: the “I” imagining the Thou idea as a person in semiosis through narrative imagination. Thus, this paper implies the transference from narrative reality, which is associated with a vague and indeterminate sense of narrative meaning, to narrative truth, which is determined by way of narrative argument, generating narrative meaning-truth. In this regard, verification of this argument is confirmed in narrative meaning-truth in life, which actually emerges as the narrative therapeutic effect through practice.

The concept of “the synchronic” factors prominently in Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist semiotic theory, while that of “the immediate” is of central importance in the post-1903 pragmaticist semiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Although the two sign theories are often characterized as fundamentally different, a point of articulation between the two is apparent when synchrony and immediacy are examined closely in their respective theoretical and semiotic contexts. In this regard, both the Peircean and the Saussurean traditions may be observed to deal comparably with a condition designated here as sign pregnancy . This point of articulation depends on the recognition of a potential aspect inherent in the definition given to the synchronic dimension of Saussure’s approach.