Band 2025, Heft 264

The article intends to understand the metaphor used in religious communication against the background of Peirce’s semiotics not as a single sign, but as a process consisting of different types of signs to connect two different domains. To this end, the concept of domain is first clarified in contrast to related concepts of schematicity, and then the distinction between metaphor and types of contiguous sense relations within a single domain is discussed, followed by a discussion of the relationship between mapping and blending and a brief summary of the basic assumptions of Peirce’s semiotic approach. Subsequently, the metaphorical process is reconstructed on the basis of empirical material as a mapping of two discrete semantic domains. Finally, the functioning of metaphors in religious use is analyzed. As a result, the metaphorical sign process generally consists in the interplay between index and icon mediated by a symbol and in the oscillation between types of sense relations within a single domain and metaphor. In religious communication, a metaphor is a semantic concretization of the religious code, which consists in the distinction between transcendence and immanence. Religious meaning is created by the intertwining of a known (immanent) source domain with religion as an unknown (transcendent) target domain.

While there is an established body of scholarship discussing Victoria Welby’s contribution to semiotics, her philosophical ideas engage with many of the intellectual currents that would later define the modernist movement. Exploring Welby’s extensive articles, letters, speeches, and monographs – through a genealogical framework and modernist lens – conveys Welby’s semiotic portrait of language and gender as both building upon and extending the classical semiotic approaches of Peirce as well as demonstrating nascent modernist elements. This casts a new light on the importance of Welby’s semiotic concepts of Significs and mother-sense. Yet, although Welby’s works correspond with proto-modernist concepts, including language’s reflexive capabilities and the fluidity of gender, her semiotic philosophy marks a disjuncture with modernism’s formal experimentation. Thus, while Welby’s ideas about gender and language, in addition to her unschooled prose and eclectic approaches, were incompatible with the traditional institutions of late nineteenth century philosophy, neither did her works align entirely with modernism’s dramatic breaks, experimentation with form and intellectual revolution of the later twentieth century.

This paper examines the representations of disability on an overlooked cultural medium such as postage stamps out of a collected corpus of 250 stamps that were analyzed and taxonomized in thematic categories. Thematic analysis was the first method employed and the first-level coding led to the formation of seven thematic categories that were found to represent societal stereotypes around disability: (1) disabled people are wheelchair bound; (2) disabled people are brave, courageous, heroic and inspirational for living with their disability; (3) disabled people are in need of support, help, care, love; (4) hope for rehabilitation, better life, normalization for disabled people; (5) disabled people differ from the norm; (6) disabled people deserve funds raising; and (7) disabled people deserve pity. Further study involved visual semiotic analysis for an in-depth categorical scrutinization with emphasis on the representation of disabled people on the illustrations of a number of selected stamps. The current study makes a significant contribution to an unexplored field of disability studies and semiotic research and confirms the experience of disability as being framed by social oppression that derives from stereotypes about disability and disabled people around the world. Such research is useful for education, disability studies and its interdisciplinary directions that seek to challenge dominant societal norms and stereotypes about disability on documents and cultural mediums that have the power to influence the public opinion.

This study explores the act of giving, a topic underexplored in semiotic research. To develop a semiotic perspective on gift-giving, it investigates the “donation of the century,” an unprecedented contribution of 23,000 items by the late Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee to South Korea’s national and public museums, which demonstrates how donation transcends material exchange and carries symbolic, social, and cultural significance. Based on actor-network theory, the study analyses the complex networks of donation. It challenges the traditional human-centric perspective framing donation solely as the actions of donors or heirs, rather revealing it as the outcome of intricate and dynamic interactions between human and non-human actors, including laws, artefacts, and recipient institutions. This study recognizes musealization as a process that creates new meanings and knowledge through material-semiotic interactions and that a collection’s defining characteristic lies in its transmissibility. Accordingly, the study highlights how the musealization of the donated collection – grounded in the materiality of artefacts – fosters new relationships and redefines the collection as “dynamic national treasures.” This study presents an exemplary case of art donation, exploring its semiotic, epistemological, and ontological dimensions and offering insights into the dynamics and significance of gift-giving in contemporary society.

Contemporary communication contexts involving dramatic increases in multilingual and multimodal interaction call for careful attention to translation between domains and modalities. This study provides a bibliometric analysis of studies on multimodal translation (MT) to map its trend and development. The indicators analyzed include the number of publications by year, mostly researched fields, most productive countries/regions, major source journals, most frequently explored topics, most cited articles, and most cited references. The results show that the annual research output of MT is on the rise, revealing its significant potential. It is evident that, although MT is mostly distributed in the field of linguistics, its collaborative research with other fields is increasing, like psychology, history, music, and religion. Audiovisual translation is spearheaded by scholars with continuing interests. Other emerging topics include the translation of video games, comics, musical lyrics, and machine translation. As a whole, many potentially unexplored areas may gradually appear with the development of technology, presenting both broad prospects and challenges for MT.

Nominal group adjectivization has been extensively investigated in relation to its distribution across registers relying on the normalized frequency of its occurrence. This frequency-based approach does not consider the repetitive use of a specific instance, thus assuming that a text with more nominal group adjectivizations is of more complexity than the one with less such cases. Although the entropy-based approach takes the repetitive use of lexical items into consideration, the entropy value counters our expectation that a more frequent instance of nominal group adjectivization conveys a smaller entropy value, because the linguistic items around such an instance will definitely mitigate the complexity that this instance conveys. Against this backdrop, this research proposed the employment of the self-information value as an index to measure the complexity that nominal group adjectivization conveys. It is uncovered that the self-information value efficiently measures the complexity of nominal group adjectivization not only in different sentences but also in various types of texts. The significance of this research lies in that it is possible to quantitatively analyze the complexity of nominal group adjectivization, which will further facilitate the quantitative investigation of grammatical metaphor, a superordinate term of nominal group adjectivization, in systemic functional linguistics.

Biosemiotics is the study of biological signs and communication. There is no consensus about how its sub-fields should be organized: a great chain of semiosis or a nested hierarchy or mutually exclusive branches? However, sense organs, transmitters, receptors, hormones, enzymes, and genes – all the biological features that biosemiosis is based on – have emerged through evolution. Their evolution can be traced using a predominantly diverging hierarchy of gene and species phylogenetic trees. The differences between (i) megabats and microbats and between (ii) baleen whales and toothed whales, are given as examples of how the branches of the phylogenetic tree of life can be used as the basis for the sub-fields of biosemiotics.