Volume 8, Issue 4

qing (青) is a very special and controversial color term in Chinese language and culture for the fact that it can refer to green, blue, or black depending on how it is used in collocation or context; it can be used as both a basic color term and mixed color term; in context it can be understood to refer to a certain color, but sometimes nobody can tell for sure what specific color it refers to; it can refer to color, but in more situations the understanding of it just goes beyond the perception of color, bringing about a vague but delightful feeling about the world in general. Basic as well as associative meanings of this term existed at the early stage of its creation, and these meanings can still be perceived in various situations in modern Chinese, used in much more extensive way. To a large extent, it has become a rather peculiar sign of Chinese culture, held so firmly, dearly and lastingly by the Chinese people. The case of qing serves as a typical example that reflects how the Chinese perceive the world.

The broad theoretical underpinning of this paper is that food is a vital part of the second-order signifying modes in literary texts. Its definite thesis, in relation to the age-long debates on power dichotomy between male and female gender, is that while men merely enjoy and noisily exercise social power sustained by patriarchy, which is a contrivance, women possess a great deal of authentic powers usually not overtly acknowledged. These theoretical and ideological (thesis) statements respectively are demonstrated through a semiotic reading and analysis of four foodspheres in J.P. Clark’s The Wives’ Revolt , using the critical lenses of gastro-criticism, social semiotics and textual cooperation theory. Through these analytical lenses, the paper recognises that each of the foodspheres in this play is a hypertext which transcodes or interogates the diverse gendered power relation hypotexts embodied in religious, socio-cultural and institutional semiospheres. It concludes that the power that women exercise in food preparation and administration, as signified in some of the foodspheres analysed, is a semiotic prototype of the many other unnoticed powers, through which the female homo rule the world.

Story time and narrative time are two interrelated issues in the research of drama. In Waiting for Godot , mere explorations in the perplexing systems of story time cannot pin down the signifieds of time, while incontiguity and quiescency of narrative time highlight the theme “Existence of time is meaningless”. The contradictory and paradoxical co-existence of story time and narrative time contributes to the construing “the void of ambiguous signifieds” and “the void of ambiguous signifiers” of time as blank signs.

The story continuation writing task (SCWT) is a newly emerging proficiency test of National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in three provinces in China. Nevertheless, little is known with respect to how test-takers enhance their alignment of situation models in SCWT. This paper reports on a case study of the development of situational alignment of one L2 (second language) learner in a senior high school in Jiangsu Province, China, drawing on qualitative data collected via individual face-to-face interviews, and supplemented by face-to-face conversations and email exchanges, over a period of one year. This study investigates how the test-taker enhances her alignment of situation models, and what factors contribute to her development of situational alignment under the framework of a new semiotic research finding, a pan-indexicality model. This paper concludes that test-takers possess the capacity of developing their alignment of situation models, and that a pan-indexicality model, affording opportunities for test-takers to accurately decode the meaning of a linguistic sign at the overall sense level, plays a decisive role in identifying and integrating key dimensions of situation models and eventually enhancing test-takers’ situational alignment. This study suggests that a pan-indexicality model can be employed by test-takers to understand the meaning of a linguistic sign at the overall sense level, and test-takers’ encyclopedic knowledge, contextual information, and personal emotions regarding a linguistic sign should be highlighted in classroom instruction to help test-takers construct aligned situation models in SCWT.

Slogans play an important role in Chinese society. Numerous slogans have been created and used in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. As an eye-catching linguistic phenomenon, anti-pandemic slogans have sparked heated debates not only among the general public, but also in the academic sector. This study is focused on the pragmatic presuppositions in Chinese anti-pandemic slogans. By adopting a mixed approach (quantitative and qualitative), it finds that six types of pragmatic presuppositions are used in Chinese anti-pandemic slogans. Among them, the behavioral presuppositions rank first in frequency of use, factive presuppositions second, stative presuppositions third, belief presuppositions fourth, cultural presuppositions fifth and emotional presuppositions sixth. The pragmatic presuppositions of these slogans can serve four major functions, which are persuading people to act properly, spreading scientific knowledge, warning people against wrongdoings and bolstering people’s confidence. However, there are sporadic occurrences of misusing pragmatic presuppositions in the so-called “hardcore” slogans. This study concludes that knowledge of pragmatic presuppositions is essential to a correct understanding and a proper creation of Chinese anti-pandemic slogans.

The study examines how language, peculiar to members of the guilds in Ẹdo, is used to express their cultural ideology. This is expected to provide the necessary insight and comprehension of the nature of the guilds’ socio-cultural activities resulting in the distinct ideology expressed by them. Data were purposively collected through the indepth interview of key informants (individuals with knowledge of the activities of the guilds examined) and direct observation of the interaction between the members of the different guilds. The collected data were subjected to discursive analysis. The language used by the guilds in interaction among members is a marker of the guilds ideological orientation as this serves to bring members together while at the same time separates those that are not members of the respective guilds. The choice of language use by these groups therefore is determined by the ideological orientation of the guilds which seeks to maintain the relevance and supremacy of the group in the larger Ẹdo (Bini) society.

Language is a symbolic system consisting of the signifier and the signified. There is an asymmetrical binary correspondence between them, which is also widespread in Russian linguistics. There are two main types of interrogative sentence formed by the interrogative pronoun какой . Traditional lexicography and grammar have limitations in their understanding of какой and of the interrogative sentences it forms. The analysis of such syntactic phenomena should be included in the Q–A unity, which can be described in terms of argument structures, generic relations, deixis, relevant characteristics, properties, or attributes of objects, etc.