Volume 9, Issue 1

Both phenomenology and semiotics have to do with the basic question as to how our experience functions. But considering the fact that phenomenology tries to go back to the intuitively given things themselves, whereas semiotics stress the mediating role of signs, there remains a certain tension between both approaches. This tension leads to unbridgeable conflicts only if one side tries to dominate or to replace the other. In this case the extreme attempt to proceed ultimately without using signs clashes with the opposite presumption that basically everything is made of signs or words. However, in my view we should and can seek the so-called things themselves through the medium of signs, of words, and of pictures and so on. There is an intermediary sphere closely connected with our own body and with the relations between one’s own and the Other’s body. This basic assumption shall be tested by referring to a series of key issues like saying and showing, materiality of signs, sign and trace, sign and affect, use and creation of signs. We will cite authors such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Wittgenstein and, on the other side, authors such as Bakhtin, Bühler, Jacobson and Peirce. As to the bridging over civilisations, our considerations by no means leads to a global form of being everywhere, but rather to the chance to be at once here and elsewhere, leaving room for singularity and otherness.

The term “semiotics” is better used as a more desirable approach for promoting the modernization of global humanities. In place of a mere study of signs a new semiotics should be related to the institutionalized and institutionalizing mechanism of semantic production and communicative constitution with respect to the entire social and human sciences. For the sake of attaining this correct scientific goal semiotics should be linked with an ethics of subjectivity. Both Husserl and Wang Yangming, with different styles, provide us with the model of ethical practice that can make the semiotic scholar become spiritually capable of insisting on scientific truth against the prevailing scholarly utilitarianism caused by present-day commercialized globalization.

Semiotics of the body consists essentially, in a current use, in gestural and mimo-gestural semiotics. At best, in an integrated semiotic approach, communicative gesture involved the construction of a syncretic expression plane, combined with verbal discourse. The body as conceived by psychoanalysts is, on the contrary, the source and the seat of energy itself (impulses), from which psychic instances feed their representations. The psychoanalytical body is thus both the source and the significant substance from which the semiotic actant may take form. In the phenomological conception developed by Merleau-Ponty, the proper body is that entity, the “vehicle of our being in the world”, which belongs both to “I” and to “the world for me”, which takes shape in perception, where the first (I) experienced the second (world for me). The phenomenological body seems at first sight an adjuvant, which turns out to be, for a second sight, the very principle of actantiality and intentionality. In a quick overview of the different “implicit semiotics” of the body in human sciences (psychoanalysis, theory of “I-skin”, contemporary cognitive science, psychology, etc.) it acquires a status of an actantial basis, because, as an actant, it is directly involved in the process of incorporation of agentivity and intentionality, and with two different and recurrent representations: one according to movement, and the other according to envelope. Forces and form, in short. We decide to name them (arbitrarily for now, but we’ll return to this point) the first “Me” and the second “Myself”. • “Me” is the referent instance, consisting both of sensitive matter and energy, the substrate and the dynamic bodymark for all figures and all enunciations. In short, it will be the “Me-flesh.” • “Myself ” is the body-in-construction, the living vehicle of intentionality and the interactions support, and therefore, particularly the support of confrontation with otherness; and, through these interactions, it provides the actant a patterned form through which it may be identified. In short, this is “Myself-envelope”. Then the paper may display a new typology of semiotic body figures. At each of these figures of the body, is a figure of movement. At each of them, is a figure of enunciative instances, that is to say for each of them a modality of the imprint and of its interpretation.

As a revolt against the traditional extrinsic approaches to literature, structuralist literary criticism flourished as an important literary movement in the 1950s and 1960s. However, its difficulties cannot be ignored. The failure of structuralist literary criticism can be found deeply rooted in structural linguistics. In the European tradition of semiology, structuralism is equated with semiotics, as is evidenced in Terence Hawkes’ Structuralism and Semiotics. Guided by the spirit of semiotic interdisciplinarity, the present paper makes an interdisciplinary investigation into the linguistic roots of structuralist literary criticism. First of all, the concept of “a closed system,” initially established by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics, occupies a predominant position in structuralist criticism. Secondly, structuralist literary criticism borrows the principle of digging various levels of structures from structural linguistics. Thirdly, the typical notion of relations in structural linguistics is also widely used in structuralist literary analysis. Probing into the linguistic roots of structuralist criticism helps to make clear the cause of the failure of structuralist criticism.

In the early years of the new millennium, Chinese scholars in translation studies were still debating, belatedly, the “cultural turn”, particularly with regard to two issues: (1) the distinction between the ontology of translation and the ontology of translation studies, and (2) the so-called “paradigm shift” triggered by the cultural turn. Stemming from a critique of the two ontologies and questioning the paradigm shift, this paper serves the following critical purposes. It appeals for a return to textuality by reinstating the role of language in translation studies; i.e., it seeks to clarify how language functions on the boundary between translation and non-translation on both the object-language and meta-language levels, and calls for a new meta-theoretical orientation of translation studies. Scholars participating in the Chinese debate over the cultural turn have regrettably overlooked the fact that semiotics has long since renovated translation studies, especially in terms of the discipline’s system-specificity and intersystemic relationships. Semiotic input on translation studies may enable the Chinese researcher to better formulate, pose and answer the crucial question: What is translation? Four versions of a semiotic approach to translation studies can be identified or envisaged: (1) the influence of Peircean “semeiotics”; (2) a structural linguistics-informed methodology, such as that of the Russian formalists and their Slavonic followers; (3) the impact of biosemiotics; and, finally, (4) the influence of cultural semiotics represented by the Tartu School. This essay provides a critical survey of the Chinese debate on the cultural turn and suggests a prognosis based on the aforementioned semiotic approaches.

The authors of this paper put forward a global semantic communication project to realize the mutual comprehension of different languages. This paper briefly introduces the basic concept and thinking of this innovative project

Semiotics has tremendous potential as a subject to be studied globally since it deals with the signs and sign-processes that exist in every society. In addition, it interprets culture, and related phenomena, by means of the scientific method. Further, the domain of semiotics includes social, temporal and spatial phenomena, from aerospace to the human mind, and from prehistory to the remote future. Viewed in this light, semiotics could be regarded as an essential discipline of the academic world. This paper explains the necessity of studying semiotics worldwide, its nature and characteristics, and its scope as a global discipline.

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief sketch of the cultural phenomenon of tea from the point of view of Cultural Semiotics as developed by Juri M. Lotman and the Tartu- Moscow School of Semiotics. Tea, either as a beverage, tradition, ceremony, fashion product, or a 21st century cultural practice, is a product developed by human communication. Thus, it involves a complex meaningweb and meaning-production. To account for it as such, we must posit that it constitutes several semiotic models that explain and construct the context of tea in our social reality. Thus, we may say that tea is a meaning-generating mechanism, which presupposes it is inside a cultural space called semiosphere

In this article I argue that certain commonalities of ideology, belief and cultural practice existed between the ancient Babylonian empire and ancient Chinese Bronze age empires regarding theocracy, kingship, and governance derived from and represented by the Chinese imperial scepter. Evidence adduced is drawn from the description and use of imperial scepters recorded in ancient Chinese texts, hieroglyphic representations of scepters, material scepters and oracle-bones and their inscriptions, other artifacts unearthed at archaeological sites in China’s Sichuan Basin, astrological instruments, Babylonian stele and inscriptions and the Babylonian zodiac.

Unlike alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, as orthographic symbols, can represent the meaning of a word. According to Peirce’s triadic division of signs, we believe that a Chinese character is an iconic sign for the referent that its meaning denotes; that is to say, there is something perceptually in common between the character and its denotatum; however, we could be misled by the simple definition of this “similarity” because perceptual experience is not naive but something conventional. Based on the degree of conventionality among iconic signs, we distinguish their iconic nature (i.e., iconicity) into primary and secondary kinds - the former having an obvious similarity between the sign and its referent and the latter showing a sophisticated reflection of an analogical relationship. The construction of the Chinese character system has resulted from the superposition of different iconic relationships, while their differentiation has led to the classification of Chinese characters playing an important role in the recognition of their meanings.

This paper attempts to explore animal names1 in Chinese and/or French idiomatic expressions in the light of representation (la représentation), a notion interpreted by French sociolinguist Henri Boyer.2 As linguistic phenomena are believed to be rooted in society and explained by the latter, animal names in different languages could be culturally loaded via their figurative/symbolic significations, due to the representations associated with animal referents in a given society. On the premise that animal referents generally exist in the physical world, the representations of animals would be formed on the basis of animals’ appearances, their habits and their relations with other animals, especially in accordance with the observation and the exploitation of animals by human beings in social life, and might be eventually enhanced, modified or even created in the common imagination. Besides animal referents as objects of human cognition, the other reason accounting for animal representations could be that human beings tend to attribute their moral values and spiritual expectances to the animals around them.

This article aims to build a semiotic frame necessary for the analysis of television, in particular current formats of “reality” TV. First, it questions the concept of contract, which is the basis of many models of TV communication. As soon as one abandons the paradigm of textual immanence and adopts a more pragmatic perspective, this model loses power, develops cracks and fissures. Some examples show that it does not function for current TV programs in so far as TV formats such as Big Brother intentionally play on an ambiguity among three “worlds”, which are the interpretants of any TV genre: the real world, the world of fiction and the ludic world. Networks make promises as to the generic nature of a program and viewers are free to believe them or not. The author analyzes two programs the ambiguous anchorage of which in some world creates an opposition between those viewers who believe and those who do not, between the gullible and the incredulous. These programs displace content belonging to the domain of belief (or inversely to the domain of the “suspension of disbelief”) into the domain of knowledge. Such examples provide evidence that the notion of contract is epistemologically inadequate for the analysis of present-day media.

The aim of this study is to analyze verbal and pictorial signs in advertisements of cars, collected from Finnish newspapers in the 1950s and 2010s. The semiotic study of the material is based on the sign theory of Charles S. Peirce. The collection also opens a possibility to a micro-historical analysis, where the methodological emphasis lies more on quality than quantity. Finally, the car in urban society is considered as a kind of a Bakhtinian chronotope. The language variants, photos, pictures and other illustrations reveal interesting features in the advertisements, and they also show some social and cultural contrasts. There are only few human beings pictured in the advertisements, and the advertisements have, moreover, a clear masculine label. The car was a great dream for young people in post-war Finland in the 1950s, and that is why the pictures of cars had a great symbolic value in the society with a low number of car owners. From being a more or less luxurious vehicle of the higher social class, the car has become a vehicle for almost everyone. Internationally, the car has played a central role in the industrialized society, a role with an increasing effect even today.

There is a principle of language that impels users to prefer linguistic choices that are more effective for them in any communication context. These choices vividly render some aspects of the world described or express more clearly their own hierarchy of relevance. Based on this semiotic principle, this paper examines the nature of text messaging among Nigerian youths and investigates how non-arbitrariness reveals itself in the structuring and patterning of the text messages used by Nigerian youths. It observes the creative ways in which language is manipulated to serve the purpose of brevity, which is the hallmark of text messages, and yet communicates effectively. It observes that these linguistic patterns identify the youths stylistically creating new prescriptive rules for written language. The communicative behavior presented through these linguistic choices is basically iconic.

Peirce’s ten-sign classification system has the mathematical structure of a bounded, complete tri-lattice; that is, it is a network organized by a specific kind of triadicordering relation over the set of his ten special sign classes having additional properties and privileged members. This triadic relation is what “in-forms” the contents of Peirce’s mysterious diagram. Triadic-ordering relations were discovered and first used by the author to account for the mathematico-logical properties of Peirce’s semeiotic relation and later for other structures in Peirce’s philosophy.

One aspect of theoretical thought is the position, sentiment or temperament chosen by the thinker, one that guides the thinker’s thought onward to new avenues. A “flat ontology” is proposed as one such possibility for semioticians, one that would take a nonhierarchical field of diversity as its basic ontological stance. In light of this flat ontology - which can be seen as a view on semiosphere -, two issues are briefly explored: reductionism vs. holism, and three models of relationship: self-actional, interactional, and transactional

The aim of this article is to give an overview of the interpretations of Giambattista Vico’s ideas in the context of general and Tartu semiotics and to bring attention to the possible fruitful lines of research in Vichian semiotics yet to be explored. One of the essential notions of Vico’s opus magnum The New Science is that of the imaginative universal. It signifies a primordial class concept that is based on bodily experience. Imaginative universals are part of mythological, or in Vico’s terms poetic, thought. In Vico’s conception, imagination is an extension of bodily experience - being thus a kind of mediator between sensory perception and more abstract levels of human cognition. The article provides a brief account of Vico’s connection to semiotics, followed by an outline of the concept of the imaginative universal in Vico’s texts, focusing on the aspect of body-mind interrelations. Finally, it offers some preliminary observations about the similarities between Vico’s concept of the imaginative universal and the concept of primary metaphors in the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

This article presents a consideration regarding semiosis and the theoretical problems faced in semiotics in cases where the approach to the phenomenon is taken under limiting conditions such as a singular focus on subjects or objects in semiosis. These problems, exemplified as disjointed components of the Tartu-Moscow school can be faced and overcome given a complex approach as the paradigm established by the combination of parts given in Tartu-Moscow semiotics through its heritage of complex subject-system relations in the semiosphere. The implications of this thought are considered as a potential solution to the issues of limiting semiosis to either a singular or dual reference of signification, creating a coherent tool for the analysis of semiosis beyond the vague definition of the action of signs.

This is an interview in which six questions formulated by J. Peng on the contemporary developments in semiotics at the University Tartu are addressed by K. Kull. The questions concern the role of Juri Lotman’s semiotics today, its relationship to the works of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, the importance of the concepts semiosphere and umwelt, and more.