Volume 2025, Issue 263

AI-generated images of “cats” offer novel opportunities to consider the semic role of expectations in sign formation where they act as constraints on semiosis through the potential identification of the AImage as “correct,” or as a “glitch.” Because the identification of “errors” depends on a range of technical and cultural expertise, they offer valuable insights into the interpretive process. The automated generation of media by AI separates the artist’s decision-making process from image production, continuing a trajectory that began with the invention of photography in the nineteenth century that brings the sign formation process into consciousness by distinguishing “intentional” and “unintentional” encoding. The identification AI-produced images as-glitched provides a vehicle to consider how the sign formation process informs identifications of creative action as an intentional action: aesthetic appraisals are central to this process where cultural beliefs about creativity become ideological constraints on interpretation. The potential to understand AI “glitches” as expressive features of the image-object, rather than errors, proceeds via the aesthetics and affects of earlier art, such as the “painterly motion” shown in old master paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, or via the heritage of Surrealism. These affective constraints on sign formation reveal the central role of “glitches” in the distinction of creative and uncreative action.

A teacher’s use of classroom space via embodied movement enacts a specific spatial pedagogy and has a significant impact on the nature of teaching and learning that can take place. The ubiquity and large expenditure in renovating university learning environments have not been accompanied by well-informed research due to a tendency to background embodied movement in pedagogic investigations. This paper explores the semiotic potentials and pedagogic functions of one teacher’s embodied movement in an Active Learning Classroom in a tertiary setting. It maps out the interrelationship of embodied movement and space as an entanglement of materiality and practice, which complements existing research that relates movement to space only in terms of layout and composition. By conducting a nuanced multimodal analysis of one teacher’s co-patterns of movement and speech in a tertiary lesson, this paper finds that co-patterns of embodied movement and speech in the classroom can segment phases of pedagogic discourse into five secondary phases and that these phases congruently enact different types of space to modulate the teacher-student relationship and enact different pedagogic roles. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of embodied movement on classroom design and pedagogic practice.

This article proposes a semiotic reading of the most widely recognized internet image macro memes (termed “canonical image macro memes” or CIMMs) and analyzes these memes as individual texts. It demonstrates that memes possess their own language, or system of signs, and form their own literature. By delineating the extent to which the visual and verbal components are customizeable image macro memes, this article strives to understand the language of CIMMs, and the processes and limitations by which meaning is generated. Understanding each meme as a text, this analysis demonstrates that the first-order semiological system of memes is informed and underpinned by a discrete, highly specific second-order semiological system, which guides the way in which a meme user will read memetic texts both individually and in relation to one another, and which must be analyzed as a phenomenon unto itself. The increasingly complex interreferentiality found within the growing corpus of memetic texts engenders sets of memes which only acquire signification when read together; a consideration of such memes demonstrates the codification of a metalanguage, or mythology, of memes, which allows us to understand better how memes have begun to consolidate their own canon.

This paper analyses “A Message to America,” the 2014 ISIS video that presents the beheading of American photojournalist James Foley. This short film served as a model for the more than 200 graphically violent videos posted online by the terrorist group before the fall of the caliphate in 2019. The main objective of this research is to question the truth-value of violent ISIS videos and to advocate a critical approach to them. To this end, four key issues need to be explored: the quality of the videos; their status as art, documentary, or propaganda; their target audiences; and the purpose of the message being conveyed to each of those audiences. To deconstruct the mechanisms employed by the constructed fallacy of this video and critically expose its literal and metaphorical meaning, we use textual analysis, the methodological tool developed in Greimasian semiotics. The results reveal a carefully planned text with a clearly recognizable narrative structure (crime and punishment). This video is a propaganda documentary that makes use of the tools of fiction to stage a real event: Foley dies, but his death is not shown on camera; it is only staged. Targeting two different audiences, an implicit Muslim viewer, and an explicit Western viewer, the text can be interpreted as a crossing of gazes between East and West.

Compared with history, which is a compendium of statements of what happened in human past, rumors are a fleeting phenomenon that escapes scholarship from historiography. However, rumors, as the manifestation of local beliefs and the power relationships at the time, can expand the horizons of history by providing decentralized perspectives towards various events. The semiotic relationship between rumor and collective memory delves into respective cultures of social groups on both synchronic and diachronic planes. On the one hand, collective memory provides an integrated framework of rumor studies, which can be stratified by different layers, reaching different depths of the collective concern. On the other hand, it can contextualize rumors in the rich archive of cultural texts preceding rumor texts. In this regard, collective memory functions both as the corpus for rumor discourses to generate and as the context for such discourses to mesmerize the public by pre-selecting the audience as model readers, especially under a particular social concern. Moreover, these discourses can be sedimented for future recurrence of rumors of the same schema under certain social circumstances, which demonstrates the dynamics of culture as new rumor texts are generated out of the cultural context. Rumors, therefore, are framed in cultural history, which leads to further discussions on explosion as a cultural phenomenon.

Résumé Dans cet article, nous interrogeons la traduction interlinguistique de la chanson du point de vue de la sémiotique de la traduction. Notre approche se nourrit des travaux de l’École sémiotique de Paris ainsi que des travaux faits sur la traduction de la musique en traductologie. Nous présentons, dans cette étude, une analyse sur le corpus constitué de La chanson des vieux amants de Jacques Brel et de sa version turque intitulée Şarap Mevsimi [Saison du vin] (2012) interprétée par la chanteuse Funda Arar. Notre étude contient deux volets: Le premier volet concerne l’évaluation musicale de la chanson originale et sa comparaison avec la version traduite du point de vue des instruments utilisés, du tempo, des dynamiques musicales, de la mesure et de l’orientation musicale. Quant au second volet, il consiste d’abord en l’étude sémantique et thématique des paroles de la chanson de Brel, puis en celle de la version turque afin de les comparer sur trois éléments d’analyse: titre, refrain et isotopie fondatrice de l’univers sémiotique du chant. Nous concluons en interprétant les changements survenus tant dans la composante musicale que dans la composante sémantique de l’adaptation turque selon les nouvelles significations et valeurs qu’ils actualisent dans le contexte d’arrivée.

Current inter-disciplinarity has rendered it feasible to utilize implements and methodologies to navigate around the communication of fashion at textual as well as material levels, reified by inter-semiotic and cultural translation. Fashion communication, from the perspective of post-translation studies, is a process of cultural translation with visual symbols as its text, visual rhetoric as its core meaning system, and visual stylists as its translator. This study takes one of the most formidable and awe-inspiring icons – the Chinese totem Loong 龙 as the main research object, through the analysis of multifarious styles of visual text structures across the entire process of fashion communication, to deconstruct the semiotic transformation of Loong 龙 by means of visual rhetoric. In forging this rhetorical dynamic within the realm of visual art, the cultural translative procedure is orchestrated primarily through the registers of field, tenor, and mode . Furthermore, it is molded by the intricate interplay of transitivity , mood , and modality , culminating in this newly proposed concept – “cultural functionality” through the lens of systemic functional grammar. This study, by means of this rhetorical, semiotic approach, forays into the profundity of what is named as “Made in China” and showcases Chinese spirit in fashion communication.

Résumé Depuis le milieu des années 1990, les spécialistes en brand management recourent à une variété de stratégies de marques fortement institutionnalisées et peu contestées. Or, un examen sémiotique de ces stratégies peut amener à questionner la façon dont ces architectures sont construites. L’objectif de cet article est de mettre en lumière les contradictions sémiotiques d’une partie de ces stratégies pour, d’une part, proposer un modèle d’architecture de marques sémiotiquement fondé, et, d’autre part, offrir une définition renouvelée du concept de marque, comme « service ayant une vision propre ». En outre, cet article invite à toujours considérer deux types de services lorsqu’on s’attelle à une réflexion stratégique sur les marques : les « services souverains » et les « services adjoints ». Cette « relation d’appartenance » entre services permet de saisir toutes les relations de marque possibles entre entreprises, filiales, produits, lignes, gammes, offres, etc. Plus généralement, cet article entend valoriser le recours à la sémiotique (post)structurale greimassienne pour enrichir la réflexion et améliorer les pratiques dans le domaine du brand management.

According to conceptual metaphor, this study finds and categorizes three metaphors in perfume commercials: FRAGRANCE IS ATTRACTION, FRAGRANCE IS EMOTION, and FRAGRANCE IS OBJECT. Drawing on the analytical tool of multimodal metaphor analysis, the study further analyzes how perfume commercials complete the metaphorical operation mechanism of mapping from visual and auditory modes to olfactory. It is found that, different from the traditional definition of a concrete source domain and an abstract target domain in conceptual metaphors, the joint participation of multiple modes in commercials may cause a reversal of the degree of abstraction between the source and the target. Due to the limitation of transmitting olfactory information in fragrance commercials where the audience can only receive audible and visual information, “scent” becomes a more abstract concept, while the abstract concepts of “attraction” and “emotion” become a more concrete source. Additionally, the three metaphors’ advertising effects in fragrance commercials are evaluated. Theoretical implications for future studies in multimodal metaphor analysis are also discussed.

This research investigates how multimodality is applied in logos to build a heritage brand identity for Chinese destinations. As a historical country, China is known for its huge reserves of cultural and natural heritage, which ideally offers abundant resources for developing its tourism industry. These can be taken advantage of in branding its destinations. Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar was adopted in this study to conduct a qualitative analysis of the images and words of destination logos collected from 34 provincial-level administrative regions in China. The findings indicate that pictorial and written elements are skillfully used in the logos through the manifestation of heritage, capturing features that convey significant connotations to promote a positive brand identity of the Chinese destinations. This research adds to the existing literature on destination branding through heritage commodification by embodying evocative multimodal features in destination logos, as well as promoting the semiotic approach as an effective tool in constructing the heritage brand identity of Chinese destinations.