Volume 9, Issue 1

The article indicates the essential tasks of a semiotics of artificial intelligence: studying the way it simulates the expression of intelligence; the way it produces content that is creatively endowed; the ideological assumptions of artificial intelligence within the culture that produces it. Artificial intelligence is, from a semiotic point of view, the predominant technology of fakery in the current era. On the strength of its studies on the false, semiotics can therefore also be applied to the analysis of the fake that, in increasingly sophisticated forms, is produced through artificial intelligence and through the deep learning of neural networks. The article focuses on the adversarial ones, trying to highlight their ideological assumptions and cultural developments, which seem to indicate the entry of human societies and cultures into the ‘realm of the absolute fake’.

The importance of argumentation in academic writing, while historically recognised, has arguably lost prominence alongside the rapid expansion of higher education since the early 1990s in the UK. This has been exacerbated by an increasingly prevalent technological intervention in teaching and learning processes. With this as a background, this article presents a semiotic analysis of student dissertation extracts to illustrate the role of intertextuality in governing interpretative , evaluative , and concluding propositions in argumentation. Each proposition is perceived as indexed to syntactical compositionality by which a previous proposition elicits a present one that awaits a future one, thus forming a line of argument. The analysis teases out what is at stake concerning the interdependence of signifying codes in textual relations and functions. This brings into view a network of sign actions that lends itself to instances of signification in mediating and coordinating propositions in argumentation. The article concludes with reflection on the medium of English as a lingua franca for studies in higher education, highlighting a semiotic understanding of the intertextuality of argumentation in academic writing.

The concept of equivalence seems to be one of the most contentious issues of the academic discourse on linguistic translation, as it has long been associated with the much criticised approaches that would follow the naive idea of sameness or close correspondence between languages. For these reasons there have been voices claiming that the concept is not needed and, as such, should be rejected. However, equivalence is central to linguistic translation, being one of the main goals of this activity, even though it is often hidden behind other concepts, including adequacy, relevance or interpretive resemblance. Accordingly, a more global approach offered by semiotics may help to revisit the traditional, yet unpopular, understanding of equivalence. This article attempts to discuss the concept of equivalence from the point of view of the universal categories put forward by Charles Sanders Peirce. To this end it provides an overview of approaches to equivalence within the discipline of translation studies, lists the most pertinent features of the concept and refers them to Peirce’s universal categories. It is argued that equivalence is founded on the triad similarity-difference-mediation that is determined by and within the context of translation.

Pragmatics has grown into a flourishing independent academic discipline. Undefined and unsolved are, nevertheless, such confusing and controversial concerns in its evolution as research boundaries and uncertain definition. Some academics view Austin᾽s Speech Act Theory to be the birth of pragmatics, which certainly confines pragmatics to the field of linguistics and hence limits its study scope. This assertion is incongruous with Morris’ primary objective of proposing the word pragmatics from the standpoint of semiotics, inspired by Peirce. This research intends to investigate pragmatics from the perspective of linguistic philosophy and semiotics and argues that pragmatics derives and develops from Peirce’s pragmatist semiotics and Morris’ behavioral semiotics. Pragmatics is the exertion of the “interpretant” in Pierce’s Semiotics. Clearly, it is one of the three branches of Morris’s semiotics that investigates the relationship between signs and sign users. The meaning of signs is derived from the interpretation of sign users. Pierce’s pragmatism or pragmaticism is the intellectual foundation of pragmatics. As its research objective, it focuses on the relationship between meaning and context, i.e., the illocutionary meaning not covered by the study of semantics. Its primary methodology is based on logical reasoning.

The present paper explores how the issue of the current energy crisis in the wake of the Covid-19 and Ukraine war was constructed by political cartoons. Adopting Critical Multimodal Metaphor Scenario Analysis, this paper focuses on the disease metaphor scenario, one of the most recurring scenarios in political cartoons on this topic, and specifically emphasizes how the method of treatment , one of the structural elements in the scenario, is represented. The analysis reveals that two predominant scenarios constitute the representations of the method of treatment: narcotic scenario and medicine scenario. They differ in entailments: one frames fossil energy as detrimental narcotic while the other frames it as therapeutic medicine. By means of the two scenarios, these cartoons convey strong criticism of the major involvers in the energy crisis, namely, the E.U., Russia, and the U.S. The cartoons make full use of the dynamic interplay of visual and/or verbal metonymy, metaphor, and narrative to elicit associations, assumptions and evaluations in the viewers, helping facilitate understanding and constructing a view of the crisis reality. The present analysis sheds light on the way cartoonists reshape the public point of view in the framing of specific event(s).

The paper describes and analyzes the full presence of red in the Old Testament – in Hebrew and translations. The approach is interdisciplinary, which includes: the treatment of color as a cultural unit, according to the idea of Umberto Eco; lexical and contextual semantics; examining Basic Color Terms (BCT – adjective, noun, verb), Prototype Terms (PT blood and fire ), Rival Terms of Prototypes (RT), e.g. ruby ; Ters for Basic Features of the Prototypes (TBFP burn ); translation as a criterion and semiotic value; semiotic osmosis (semio-osmosis) as a process that aims equivalence between Hebrew PT and TBFP; semio-osmosis and accommodation; cultural and linguistic context; the interplay of old information (topic/theme) – new information (focus/rheme); rhizome of Hebrew root Aleph-Dalet-Mem deriving untranslatable set of words; well-structured and always translatable terms for PTs. Some links between the Old and New Testaments based on red color are explicit.