Volume 3, Issue 1

Whether the aesthetic is something we actively make or whether it just appears to us, can be formulated as the distinction between notions of act and event-as defined by the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik v. Wright. Moreover, the concepts of geno- and phenosign refer to this crucial foundation of any aesthetic treatise, i. e. genosigns carrying along all the phases of its production aiming for such a goal, i. e. Kantian Zweck, and phenosigns as a kind of phenomenal, immediate qualities. However, insofar as the aesthetic manifests a value, we can consider it a sign of such an abstract entity. Such transcendental values gradually get dense and concretized, become 'beings' when they arrive at Dasein via modalities. So, values become modalities, certain modal constellations, and at the end signs. Analogously, aesthetic values become aesthetic experiences when they are 'modalized', and then manifest as artworks, as aesthetic signs.

There are two identities of semiotics: reality and ideal. We semioticians should keep the double identity in our mind to get rid of the limitation of the existing professional semiotic operation. Theoretical semiotics should at first more deeply learn from philosophy and secondly further tum to the interdisciplinary theoretical creation. Only a more effective semiotic theoretical baste could make semiotics stronger to guide the epistemological modernization of the global human sciences in the New Century. The postmodernist trends, however, tend to make semiotics be the mere intellectual games leading to losing its original scientific power. Originated by Sausäure, Pierce, Husseri, semiotics should defend its traditional rationalism against the scientific-dogmatist and the artistic-commercialized fashions alike. Globalization of semiotics will strongly promote its healthy development along the line of a global multiple-rationalization.

The nature of arbitrariness and iconicity has been a heated topic for debate among the Chinese linguists and semioticians in the past 20 years. Due to the fact that modern Chinese linguistic scholarship has been strongly influenced by Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (2001 ) , the dominant view in China was once marked by arbitrariness. Yet, with the development of cognitive linguistics, today the scale has tilted toward iconicity. Since most of the papers in favour of arbitrariness have focused on Saussure's view of seeing sign as a dualistic relation between "signifier" and "signified", that is, "sound-image" and "concept" ,and have not objected much to the role of iconicity at the syntactic level and the textual level, this paper, to save space and time, will not deal with sequence iconicity, distance iconicity, quantity iconicity, space iconicity, temporal iconicity, markedness iconicity, etc., and will confine itself to the image iconicity, that is, sound iconicity and graph iconicity. In doing so, I will start with a brief review of concepts and views held by the Chinese philosophers and etymologists, past and present.

Ernst Cassirer and Ferdinand de Saussure are two of the most important semioticians of the 20th century. Both of them view language not as an instrument through which the objective world can be represented, but as a formative event which actively organizes otherwise indistinct streams of human experience. Despite their agreement on the constitutive nature of language, however, Saussure and Cassirer differ significantly on the issue of how the formation of concepts is achieved. According to the former, it is not enough to individually consider a particular combination of a sequence of sound and a concept, because to do so is to assume that one can start from the terms and construct the system by adding them together when, on the contrary, it is from the interdependent whole that one must start and through analysis obtain its elements. Thus, instead of specific words that de facto connect us with the world through their meanings, Saussure starts his explanation of concept formation with the two preexisting continua of sound and thought which, when they combine, supposedly articulate phonic units on the one side and conceptual units on the other. In this way, language somehow takes on the attributes of an autoeffective spirit which decomposes itself into various components. For Cassirer, the formation of concepts is fulfilled by a universal consciousness with the help of language and other symbolic forms. Although there are no ready-made concepts or ideas before the appearance of language, the thinking subject still encounters chaotic extralinguistic life experience which Cassirer calls " indeterminate outward material". Only, in its pursuit of the universal, consciousness does not require the entirety of information from the particular itself. Instead, it resorts to sequences of sounds in its creation of necessary complexes of meaning. The result is the birth of verbal concepts or ideas which do not belong to any specific situation but can be used to evoke those meanings that belong to a whole class of similar situations.

Intercultural communication has been a popular topic both in and outside academic studies, yet most researches in this field have been conducted with the methodology of comparative anthropology while the studies on the dynamic process of intercultural communication have been limited, which serves as the primary motivation to write this paper. The thorniest obstacle to conduct the study is to find a feasible and applicable methodology for the analysis of the process of intercultural communication, which deflated and even impaired the author's confidence to do the study from time to time. Fortunately, months of meditation finally saw the enlightenments from semiotics, a profound science that can provide insights into various humanity and social sciences. A thorough introduction to semiotics is impossible in an MA paper; therefore, only the related theories helpful to study intercultural communication are presented, including the dichotomy theory by Saussure, trichotomy theory by Peirce, theory of cultural semiotics by Lotman, and the semiotic concept of code by scholars such as Eco and Barthes. With this semiotic theoretical framework, the present paper elaborates the definitions of culture and communication and explains their semiotic features from different perspectives. Culture is semiotic in that it refers to not only the metaphysical existence but also the psychological traces, both of which are related with sign. The semiotic feature of communication is explained by identifying the sign as the carrier of information and semiosis as the realization of meaning. In this sense, intercultural communication as a subject based on culture and communication should be understood via semiotics as well. Limited by the size of the present paper, this study focuses exclusively on the process of intercultural communication. The ingredients involved in the process are figured and their roles are identified to the semiotics theories, based on which a semiotic model of intercultural communication is established. This model as the core of the present paper is described in detail and the mechanism of intercultural communication revealed by the model is explained accordingly. The relationship between the semiospheres, the nature of representamen, and the psychological processes as interpretant, are three most significant factors affecting intercultural communication. The findings of this paper explain the humanity subject of intercultural communication in a scientific view, which provides new understandings as well as indicates new research methods.

The origin of "deixis" is deiktikos (deictic) in Greek, meaning "pointing or showing". Since the Greek period, the phenomenon of deixis has been of considerable interest to philosophers and in the past hundred years or so it has also become an important subject of linguistic study, especially in pragmatics. In the study of deixis the choice between proximal and distal deixis has been a major focus, and philosophers and linguists have been trying hard to identify the various factors that determine the choice between the two demonstratives this and that. However, none of these attempts has done justice to the complexity and variety of the deictic expression that occurs in natural languages. The present paper tries to ascertain the various factors that affect the choice between the proximal and distal deixis this and that in spoken English. This study reveals that, in addition to relative distance, other factors such as the referential functions of the deixis (especially the speaker's assumption of the information status of the referents), the syntactic functions of the deixis (especially as head or modifier) and the speaker's attitudinal orientation also play an important role in the choice between this and that.

Since I began studying the problems of semiotics in 1990, I have published eight books on the subject (seven in Russian and one in English), as well as many publications in print and in electronic sources. (See a short bibliography of English publications at the end of this paper.) All of these writings were devoted to the problems of general semiotics. In them, I considered a variety of different issues, and dealt with many of them in an original and innovative way that had not been applied before. In this paper, I will elaborate on some of the themes I presented in my other papers. I will focus on those topics that seem to me to be the most important, and will try to discuss them clearly and concisely.

Peircean Semiotics is inaccessible to most people for its triadic logic system of categories and model of signs. Author of this paper tries to understand it through a historical view of logic systems of categories and interpret Peircean semiotics and its applications in linguistic studies.

This paper highlights the Mekuk tribe's Dzi'i-Ba'a as a sign of theatralization of marriage, as the obvious proof of the semiotic junction, that is to say, the vectorial relation uniting the subject with the valuable object; man with woman. Dzi'i-Ba'a is a genuine Bantou tradition in which social ceremony and theatrical spectacle are identical. It stresses the traditional process of a man's search for the woman, strengthening a certain supremacy of the man. According to the nature of marriage, the artifices of selection underline the importance of the communicative axis Transmitter-Object- Receiver, as in Greimas' actantial diagram. These relations evidence the polemic still in force about the woman's status, and underline also the will to perpetuate the values of the social group and the entirety of social strategies, the purpose of which is to consolidate the domination of man over woman, or of a clan, or a tribe, over others.

With this issue, CSS introduces a new section emphasizing the semiotics of Charles Peirce and his philosophy of inquiry. This will be a regular feature, appearing in every issue. The section covers both topics because Peirce regarded both semiotics and philosophy of inquiry as the same subject. In a future issue, we hope to present in this section a forum dealing with the reasons that he regarded them as identical.

One of Peirce's most important and influential contributions to pragmatism is his reconceptualization of traditional metaphysical ideas like reality in terms of human inquiry. Whether we consider his definition of reality as the external permanence which gives science its selfcorrective, or his definition of reality as the object of the final opinion in the long run, Peirce clearly intends to connect his idea of reality to the practice of inquiry. In this paper, we will consider some of the difficulties of applying the same pragmatic argument when it comes to the reality of mathematics. First, there is the difficulty of discerning what Peirce's position is regarding the reality of mathematics, since there are several disparities in his writings. Second, there is the difficulty of which view regarding the reality of mathematics serves inquiry best. In other words, must a mathematician suppose he studies real entities in order to practice mathematics? In considering this problem, we will examine the Quine-Putnam Indispensability thesis, as well as Angus Kerr-Lawson's bicategorial view. We will conclude that Peirce's philosophy of mathematics only apparently commits him to a bicategorial ontological dualism, and that is more monistic view-which is more agreeable to the Indispensability Thesis-is ultimately preferable.

As an extension of Peircean semiotic theory, the author examines the importance of contexts, complexity, and continuity, as demonstrated by the Classical musical style and the interpretation of expressive meaning in a movement of the Mozart Requiem. The author argues that a richer context for interpretation must include the shared competency of a musical style, which both grounds interpretation by means of an "intersubjective interpretant" and also guides listeners' understanding of the unique features or strategies of a given musical work. Complexity is implicated in the integration of such interpretive contexts, which require a more synthetic model than is inferable from Peirce's linear chain of interpretants. Finally, continuity presupposes the body conceived as an organism which is attuned to a particular environment (that which is available to its senses, and with which it engages in actions), with consequences for our understanding of musical gesture. The author enriches Peirce's notion of the continuity of signification across biological and cognitive domains, by analogy with a musical style as the environment within which a musical work is interpretable.