Volume 8, Issue 3

This study presents a pictorial analysis of Portuguese advertisements from a visual semiotic perspective, particularly the symbolic attributive and suggestive processes. Aiming to elucidate the relationship between genre and gender, the study explored advertising genre, masculinity in advertisements, and the antithesis of man as primary theoretical concerns. The data consisted of five pictures from Portuguese advertisements. The analysis suggests that advertisements are a textual arena where not only genre but also gender is constructed and modified in collaboration. The image of the antithesis of man coexisting with the one of normative masculinity in the five Portuguese advertisements indicates that genre and gender are mutually and simultaneously fluid, with their boundary often blurred. That advertisements are often prone to changes in their function to attract customers implies new and evolving presentation forms of genre and gender. The combination of new and conventional images of masculinity, as shown in the analysis, impacts social and linguistic practices, particularly the fact that traditional norms of defining genre and gender, despite their resemblant quality, might be occasionally challenged or reconstructed in late-modern culture.

The Digital Age has significantly changed how people communicate. Thanks to technology, people have a large variety of communication tools to choose from, such as emails or instant messaging applications, that allows communication to be easier, quicker and, to a certain extent, more efficient. In this technological scenario, emojis play a fundamental role as a kind of universal form of communication. Furthermore, thanks to translation, which acts as a bridge for people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, communication can cross national barriers and spread worldwide. Communication and translation share a common goal that is ‘mutual understanding’. What happens, therefore, when translation meets both technology and emojis in the Digital Age? A new form of communication through translation has emerged, that is emoji translation. The aim of this paper is to show, through a series of examples, how emojis have been recently employed in communication and translation in an attempt to establish whether their use, besides creativity, can be universally accepted and understood worldwide.

GIFs, short audio-free loops of moving sequences, are active members of social semiotic resources in the era of Internet 2.0 that could generate humor, mediate power and signal identity. This paper proposes the perspective of visual nominalization and visual telicity as GIF properties that, in the environment of social media technologies, become capable of expressing polyphonic evaluation, transcontexualized polysemy, and dual deixis. Visual nominalization expresses the freeing of movement from integration into a time-dependent narrative and the abstraction resulting in deemphasized participants and emphasized processes. These traits are activated and realized by visual telicity, which is looping movement that can be conceptualized as an atelic visual container which packages and expresses both telic and atelic processes. This paper argues that visual nominalization and visual telicity are what establishes GIFs’ semiotic differences from still images and film videos, and facilitates their integration with written language in online and computer-mediated discourse.

This study employs a revised theoretical framework of multimodal positive discourse analysis to analyze the process of national image construction in a Chinese video. In contrast to original studies focusing mainly on language or text and image, this study considers three interrelated multimodal resources: sound, image, and language. Different modalities play different roles in national image construction, and they also collaborate with each other for a uniform purpose. Specific multimodal working mechanisms contribute to the construction of a positive national image. Multimodal resources are also signs in the sense of semiotics, which are perceived by different sense organs and take effect in producing vivid and impressive senses.

Metadiscourse is a significant method in revealing audience awareness, but related studies have been confined to linguistic markers and current writing analyses. This essay aims to enrich metadiscourse engagement in particular with certain rhetorical figures and to investigate audience awareness in a highly acclaimed Roman-era Greek classic: Longinus’ On the Sublime . Drawing from a refined framework of engagement, we find explicit evidence of audience awareness as manifested in the author’s use of engagement markers. We have sorted these markers into four types, including reader mentions (apostrophe and pronouns), directives (modal verbs and imperatives), questions (erotema and rogatio), and appeals to shared knowledge (emphasizers and comment clauses). We suggest that the frequent use of these engagement markers, in particular reader mentions, could be taken as evidence of the author’s strong audience awareness and the cueing effect in facilitating perception. This integration of rhetorical figures into the metadiscourse engagement markers contributes to the audience awareness analysis in a more explicit and comprehensive way.

Whereas science fiction has no identity, no necessary conditions, no essence, and no timeless and universal attributes, we should not be able to recognize it. We do. Something must allow it. This article will show how recognition and learning outweigh contingent feature-based academic projects on science fiction as ends, thereby revealing the socio-cognitive frames that buttress such recognition and proposes that we consider semio-cognitive models to refine our understanding of the genre. To that end, this article shows how science fiction is a creative mode recognizable by its prototypes and the theories built thereon. Ultimately, this article promotes a means-based socio-cognitive understanding of science fiction where it is free, in a new way, from retrospective academic projects to define it by ends.

Ecological semiotics belongs to the field of culture, and biological semiotics refers to biology. There are both similarities and differences between ecological semiotics (ecosemiotics) and biological semiotics (biosemiotics). “Co-existence and co-prosperity” are the highest true meaning of human beings and nature. Faced with the increasingly serious ecological crisis, human beings, as the only semiotic animal that can reflect on sign activities, are ultimately responsible for other species and the entire ecological community.