Band 9, Heft 3

What kind of actions or reactions can sudden good news elicit in the experiencer? How can these actions/reactions be cognitively interpreted by others? Is there a nexus between social realities and the gospel? Using these questions as a spark, this article critically examines the cultural conceptualisations in Ijo Odi , a Yoruba gospel ballad by Elijah Akintunde. Drawing insights from Cultural Linguistics, this study argues that cultural symbols and structures (schemas, categories, and metaphors) are deployed in gospel music to capture the message of liberation from socio-economic challenges. Specifically, DANCE and DEAFNESS are mapped to express the kind of PERPLEXITY and ABSURDITY that characterise reaction to SUDDEN PLEASANT NEWS. The song also invokes cognitive schemas and cultural memories of dance, cultural class categories and metaphorization of dance and its internalized network of cognitive associations in the Yoruba world view to project the message of prosperity as a miracle. The study concludes that language is firmly grounded in cultural cognition and the complex socio-economic lives of Nigerians can be captured in the negotiation of spirituality in gospel songs. Future research may explore how the artistic performance of other music genres equally evoke cultural imageries in communicating other diverse issues.

This paper extends Nartey’s model of Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA), examining the visual metaphors (VM) in the representations of Islamic identity. The paper highlights how hand-drawings operate as a positive discourse resisting negative accusations in hegemonic discourses about Islam. This PDA study is an intellectual proximity between semiotics, VMs and cultural studies. Through the constructed framework, I argue that PDA can utilize VMs to construct/construe homogeneity and inclusiveness. Through the findings of this study, we can construe the imageries as a reflection of the physical and cultural environments whose cognition is attained by examining how semiotic signs reflect and are reflected by conscious awareness and perception. A major criticism of PDA is its lack of contextual framing, that’s why this paper provides a contextual framing mixing semiotic visuality and the sociocultural construal of discursive representation of Muslim identity. The interpretation of the findings is contextualized after the adaptation of the philosophical view of Molyneux’s question, the issue of blindness from birth, and the capability of seeing things properly if someone, hypothetically, gains his sight again.

Catchwords, as important social and cultural symbols, are the barometer of a country’s society and culture. In China, various catchwords are coined and used every year by Chinese people, especially the young. Of these catchwords, one particular type that expresses despondency or Sang ness is increasingly gaining scholarly attention. This study takes a socio-linguistic approach to investigating the most frequently used Sang ness-related Chinese catchwords in the past ten years. By examining the annual top ten catchwords selected by Biting Words and Chewing Words between 2013 and 2022, it finds that the most frequently used Sang ness-related Chinese catchwords in the past decade have been (1) Ge You Slouch , (2) feeling awful and wanting to cry, (3) Buddha-like, (4) 996 work schedule, (5) life is too hard for me, (6) laborer, (7) involution, (8) lying flat, and (9) mental internal friction. These catchwords mainly serve the functions of deconstructing mainstream values, expressing self-mockery, and seeking value recognition. The development of these Sang ness-related catchwords is characterized by an increasing diversity and a stronger applicability.

The Eye in the Door is one of the masterpieces of Pat Barker, a famous contemporary British female writer. In this novel the image of the Panopticon stands out because of its high frequency and detailed descriptions, and it also becomes the key to the interpretation of the novel because of its relation to the fates of many characters and its metaphorical meanings. From the perspective of semiotics, this paper makes a progressive interpretation of this imagery symbol from three aspects: the features of the Panopticon in the surface sense, the surveillance function and power mechanism of the Panopticon in the deeper sense, and the Panopticon as the metaphor of the British society during the First World War in the social and cultural sense, then points out that the imagery symbol of the Panopticon is the encoding and embodiment of the writer’s ideas. Through this imagery symbol, the writer criticizes the disciplinary characteristics and totalitarian tendency of the British society during the First World War and expresses her reflection on the First World War and its causes.

This paper addresses the interrelation between AI and language studies in the (digital) humanities in the context of knowledge exchange economies. We propose a three-dimensional semiotic model (pyramid) that includes AI as an active agent in meaning-creation into the sign system of communication and test its validity on autocompletion and predictive texting. We, therefore, analyzed 360 million tweets on COVID-19 over a period of 2 years and focused on the time-dependent shift of language use in the positive and negative extremes correlating to significant external events. The data suggest that digital language use has significantly changed over the course of the pandemic. Feedback loops are created between AI, utterance, and external reality that fossilize preconceived notions into textual isoglosses by suggesting and completing text entries. We thus argue that AI subtly changes the perception of reality by influencing the choice of wording. To mitigate the impact of AI in meaning-creation, we highlight the structural precautions undertaken by providers; we argue, however, that the (digital) humanities may re-emphasize their intrinsic value within the economy of knowledge exchange according to the subject-specific insights they may provide for language use and AI.

Victoria Welby introduces the concept of “Significs” as a methodology that could bridge the various sciences, theoretical trends, and practices in human experience. “Sense”, “meaning”, and “significance” are the three terms in her most important meaning triad. The first level of meaning, ‘sense’ refers to the generation of meaning processes in terms of organic life and perception. Welby hypothesizes that the organic dimension of sense and its human dimension are closely intertwined. She theorized the need for “plastic language” in a biological sense, which she equated with pragmatic, ethic and aesthetic sense: the relation between word and context could be similar to the one between the organism and its environment. The plastic dimension of verbal language and signs in general is necessary for adaptation, development, and expressivity. A century later Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee introduce the concept of “plant blindness” which is a human tendency to ignore, in all “senses”, plant species. Plants are different in all aspects from animals: they are not even considered “individuals”. In the etymological sense “individual” means “not divisible”. Plants are “morphologically” divisible. In this presentation I intend to compare these two concepts and analyse their consequences.

This paper examines the signifying mechanism of gift-giving in ancient China from the perspective of semiotic rhetoric, aiming to answer the question of what can be regarded as li (roughly meaning ceremony, rite, courtesy, or gift) or, in other words, how the social meaning of gifts is constructed in giving semiosis. It describes four dominant rhetorical devices that existed in ritual and non-ritual gift exchanges in ancient China. The ritual gift tended to adopt simile and conceit as its meaning-construction device, becoming a symbolic good beyond ‘thingness’ and thus fulfilling the sociocultural function of ritual. Non-ritual giving activity made use of semiotic metonymy and synecdoche as a strategy of ‘indirectness’ to maintain the relationship between the giver and receiver in daily communications.

Innovative uses of punctuation in online communication have become increasingly visible in research and public awareness since the 2000s, whereas studies on the innovative use of tildes (“∼”) in digital use remain scarce. Drawing on a data set of 543 Chinese WeChat messages with sentence-final tildes, this article investigates the uses and functions of innovative tildes in online communication using quantitative data and follow-up interviews. The findings suggest that: (1) The innovative tildes are deployed in messages implying sounds and performing speech acts in online communication, and they are more frequently used in speech acts (e.g., expressives and directives in particular). (2) The innovative tildes convey sound extension, i.e., to compensate for the loss of audio information in online communication and reproduce elongated sounds; pragmatic function, i.e., to enhance or mitigate the illocutionary forces of speech acts; and entertaining function, i.e., to make messages informal, vivid, joyful, and interesting. (3) The innovative tildes are pragmalicalized as a result of their semiotic features and politeness motivation of messengers for maintaining rapport and achieving successful online communication.