Introduction to the special section “Communication and meaning-making”

Abstract

Abstract In the post-modern era, the knotty issue of “meaning” is more often examined from the perspective of practice, differing from the previous conceptual analysis. Meaning potential and meaning-making are preferred to meaning itself as terms in philosophy and linguistics. This special section aims to investigate the meaning of the change in “meaning” through an understanding and interpretation of “meaning-making” from the perspective of Peirce’s semiotic philosophy, linguistic communication, Chinese lexical structuring, and technological exchange. The four articles in this special section examine a number of meaning topics, such as constructs of meaning transference in a coherent framework, semiotic tracking of meaning, contextual mapping of lexical meanings, and digital pragmatic communication, to gain a more comprehensive view of the nature of meaning-making.