Semiotic Possibilities Research Articles

Analysing persuasion strategies in online advertising for third-hand cars in Tanzania: translanguaging in the virtual linguistic landscape

ABSTRACT The main argument of this paper is that the Virtual Linguistic Landscape (VLL) of advertising allows the utilisation of persuasion strategies that transcend the traditional separation of named languages to produce the maximum effect on potential customers. The paper challenges the segregational view of language, which assumes that communication involves selecting linguistic resources from pre-determined sets of possibilities in a separate linguistic system from other communicative possibilities (Pennycook, A. (2017). Translanguaging and semiotic assemblages. International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(3), 269–282, p. 8). It used the Snipping Tool to collect 79 online car adverts from X, Facebook, Instagram, Kupatana, Jiji Tanzania, and Jamii Forums. Thematic and socio-semiotic analyses indicate that advertisers for used cars integrate icons, indices, and symbols in the VLL to communicate messages effectively. They also utilise repetitions, typography, nonce borrowings, nicknames, colloquialisms, endorsements, and testimonials to influence their audiences’ attitudes and behaviours. The paper also shows that communication in the VLL is shaped by the relations between users, semiotic possibilities, and referents in making meaning, lending support to translanguaging.

Review on the monograph: Evgrashkina E. The semiotic nature of semantic uncertainty in modern poetic discourse, based on the material of German and Russian poetry. NEUERE LYRIK. Interkulturelle und interdisziplinäre Studien. Herausgegeben von Henrieke Stahl, Dmitrij Bak, Hermann Korte, Hiroko Masumoto und Stephanie Sandler. BAND 5. Berlin: Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2019. 173 S. ISBN 978-3-631-78193-7

The monograph by E. Evgrashkina examines the semiotic possibilities of the language of contemporary Russian- and German-language poetic texts. Instrumental tuning of the theoretical field of research requires detailed coverage of the concepts of «language games», «poetic discourse», «semiotic reality», «semiosis». Poetic discourse is identified with a semiotic process in which a special kind of semiosis is realized – «mobile semiosis», involving the reader in the game of appearances and «flickering of meanings». The development of the semiotic potential of individual lyrical texts of German- and Russian authors is traced. Their poetic texts of these authors reveal a complex composition of signs, syntax decay, rejection of rhyme, lexical «innovations», changes in conventional graphics, playing with punctuation marks etc. The main significance of the monograph by E. Evgrashkina is determined by the theoretical understanding of individual poetic practices, the study of the semiotic potential of language and the field of its functioning in modern Russian- and German poetic texts.

How humour travels in the new and dynamic mediascape: a case study of a short video platform, Little Red Book, and an online teaching platform, Rain Classroom

As a vital part of translation studies, humour has drawn scholarly attention for decades, with classifications that range from Zabalbeascoa’s (The Translator 2(2):235–257, 1996) six types of jokes to Chiaro and Piferi’s (It’s green! It’s cool! It’s Shrek! Italian children, laughter and subtitles. In: Di Giovanni E, Elefante C, Pederzoli R (eds) Écrire Et Traduire Pour Les Enfants—writing and translating for children. Peter Lang, Brussels, 2010, p. 285) “Verbally Expressed Humour”. However, they are mainly related to printed pages, theatre, and film. Little research touches on the new media, which significantly impacts how information is produced and disseminated and how consumers react to and engage with these trendy platforms (Díaz-Cintas, Remael. Audiovisual translation: subtitling. Routledge, London and New York, 2021, p. 1). This significant gap in the video-sharing platforms on humour translation is the focus of this paper which intends to fill. This paper explores how humour is created and reconstructed in the dominant and constantly evolving new media era. Driven by the niche of an interdisciplinary study concerning humour and creative subtitles, the present research conducts a linguistic and semiotic analysis of humorous discourses and emojis in the Chinese contexts of the short video platform Little Red Book and the online teaching platform Rain Classroom. As the study implies, humour can be strengthened through diverse semiotic possibilities to provide better viewing experiences that bring about entertaining and educational outcomes.

Script and Language as Semiotic Media in Japanese Storytelling: A Theoretical Approach through Haruki Murakami’s Noruwei no mori

In contrast to the writing practices of many modern languages, Japanese routinely employs four denotative systems that operate in conjunction, but which are actively recognized as distinct from one another: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and the Roman alphabet. Simultaneously, English, as well as English-derived language usages have been noted for their significant intralinguistic roles in Japanese, going far beyond straightforward loan borrowing functionality. Convention informs the implementations of both script choice and language, and yet neither subjective phenomenon is perfectly uniform. Approaching these issues from a perspective of semiotic theory, this article identifies the flexibility and creative syncretism that is made available by virtue of written Japanese’s systemic open-endedness in terms of script and linguistic multiplicity. It assesses the emblematic functionality that is achievable through deliberate variation or shift in these semiotic media of print, and it demonstrates how auxiliary associative, ideological, and emotive meanings are ascribed to specific language instances. Finally, as an applied literary analysis, it evaluates Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel 『ノルウェイの森』 (Noruwei no mori; Norwegian Wood) in order to clarify prominent semiotic possibilities and to emphasize the easily taken for granted creative aesthetic potential of Japanese’s media-based multiplicity.

Shen-ti Wen-hua: Discourses on the Body in Avant-Garde Taiwanese Performance, 1980s–1990s

The article explores historically and theoretically the phenomenon of shen-ti wen-hua (culture of the body) in the context of Taiwan's experimental performance in the 1980s–1990s. By highlighting different corporeal discourses in various sociopolitical contexts across time, it addresses such critical issues as the relation between the individual and the collective in the history of Taiwanese modernity, the quests for identity in art and culture, the transformation of the role of the avant-garde in aesthetic and political pursuits, and the ultimate question of the relationship between art and society from the colonial era to a contemporary world dominated by consumer culture and global capitalism. The body, with its materiality and rich semiotic possibilities, has at certain historical moments served as a potent metaphor for questioning the sociopolitical status quo and envisioning new identities and alternative power relations in Taiwanese society: the period under consideration in the article was one of those moments.

Signs of status: language policy, revitalization, and visibility in urban Amazonia

This paper examines the implications and implementation of official language policy designed to support endangered Indigenous languages in the municipality of Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira, Amazonas, Brazil. The policy, in place since late 2001, declared three of the region’s many Indigenous languages (Nheengatu, Tukano, and Baniwa) to be “co-official” at the local level; the practical implementation of this policy, however, has remained limited. I specifically use the linguistic landscape of the city of Sao Gabriel as an entry point for considering the contested ideologies relating to the use of this official language policy as a strategy for language revitalization, and how some actors in the city have responded to the limited “top-down” implementation by creating space for the use of these languages in public and prestigious settings. I argue that the impact of the policy must be considered not simply in direct examination of the degree to which its articles have been implemented, but also in relation to the semiotic possibilities that it has created for Indigenous people and their allies in language activism. Signage in the official Indigenous languages reveals that the official language policy is embedded in a series of linguistic ideologies that make its implementation (or lack thereof) a complex question.

Translanguaging and semiotic assemblages

ABSTRACTThis paper asks what translanguaging could start to look like if it incorporated an expanded version of language and questioned not only to the borders between languages but also the borders between semiotic modes. Developing the idea of spatial repertoires and assemblages, and looking at data from a Bangladeshi-owned corner shop, this paper suggests on the one hand that it is important to include a wide range of semiotic possibilities in any analysis. On the other hand, however, we cannot merely add more semiotic items to our translinguistic inventories, but need instead to seek out a way of grasping the relationships among a range of forms of semiosis. The notion of assemblages allows for an understanding of how different trajectories of people, semiotic resources and objects meet at particular moments and places, and thus helps us to see the importance of things, the consequences of the body, and the significance of place alongside the meanings of linguistic resources.

The Pataxó baptism rite at Aragwaksã

Abstract This paper frames the baptism rite conducted at the Aragwaksã ceremony as a performance of the Pataxó Indians undertaken in an inter-cultural arena. Using ethnographic data, the article highlights the participative and creative interaction of Indians and tourists in the execution of the event. Attention will be drawn to the functions of the performance and its semiotic possibilities, but especially to the experiential fact. The ritual has multivocal potential, and the article focuses on how meanings emerge. Culture and indigenous identity are important topics and here the rite is perceived in terms of the communion that it provides, as it involves players and audience in the construction of the authenticity of ethnic and potentially traditional elements among the Pataxó.

‘Like wand’ring gipsy’: fortune-telling, the Spanish gipsy, and the Cassandra myth on the Victorian stage

This article aims to shed light on the semiotic possibilities of Victorian theatre as well as uncovering hidden substrata of the reception of the Cassandra myth in England. Nineteenth-century refigurations of Cassandra manifested ambivalent contemporary attitudes towards women and knowledge. Thus, Cassandra paralleled prevailing conceptions of social stereotypes on the periphery and was equated with false prophets, fortune-tellers, mendicants, witches, and most important for this article, gipsies. An intertextual analysis of comic refigurations of the myth and stage adaptations of Miguel de Cervantes’ La gitanilla (The Little Gipsy) allow us to understand how Priam’s daughter became Cassandra the gipsy both in highbrow and popular reworkings of the myth in the Victorian period. As shall be demonstrated, the aesthetic links between Cassandra and the Spanish gipsy respond to cultural and political paradigms which question the association between women and knowledge.

A FIGURA DE JESUS CRISTO NO DISCURSO DA MÍDIA CONTEMPORÂNEA

A figura de Jesus Cristo foi representada de formas variadas no decorrer da história, e essas representações heterogêneas estão relacionadas aos valores das culturas produtoras dos discursos. A sintaxe discursiva que estrutura essas representações é um encadeamento de atos que conjuga a dimensão da intensidade (o sensível, o afetivo) e a dimensão da extensidade (o inteligível, o compreensível). A semiótica discursiva possibilita, por meio de análises, entender a ocorrência das transformações culturais nos discursos produzidos em períodos históricos diferentes e em culturas distintas.

A Multiliteracies Pedagogy: Exploring Semiotic Possibilities of a Disney Video in a Third Grade Diverse Classroom

Disney videos are used across the US as important materials for teaching language arts and literacy in elementary schools. However, how pupils make meaning of the videos has not been sufficiently investigated in educational research. Twenty-five third-grade pupils were taught comprehension skills using Sleeping Beauty. The students created their understanding in visual images. Their drawings and explanations were analyzed using a social semiotic theory. The findings indicated that the students’ interpretations of Sleeping Beauty were not a decontextualized practice; rather, they used the specificity of their gender, social-cultural experiences and available multimodal resources at their disposal to construct interpretations of the video. The implications of the findings were discussed.

The Conceptual Contours of Sex in the Chinese Life Sciences: Zhu Xi (1899–1962), Hermaphroditism, and the Biological Discourse of Ci and Xiong, 1920–1950

This paper “maps” a number of trajectories through which the conceptual contours of sex could be traced in the bioscientific discourse of Republican China. Focusing on the writings of the embryologist Zhu Xi (1899–1962), I analyze the epistemic functionality of such biological terms as ci (“biological femaleness”) and xiong (“biological maleness”) that acquired an unprecedented scope of cultural discursiveness in China only alongside the arrival of Western biology, which replaced classical learning and natural studies as the authoritative field of inquiry about life. I first show that when Chinese scientists used these terms to describe the sex of biological species, they relied on an epistemological framework of visual knowledge that granted some foundational operative power to a signifying order in which one could know by seeing the differences between ci and xiong (and, ultimately, sexual differences). These two terms' lexicality and indexicality thus mutually reinforced one another in the production of their semiotic possibilities and epistemo-logicality. I then show that while they adopted ci and xiong as the bioscientific synonyms of the more culturally anthropocentric words such as nü (woman) and nan (man), Chinese biologists also incorporated sophisticated biological theories of sex from Europe and North America, including the theories of “gynandromorphism” and “intersexuality.” The implicit and explicit figurations of hermaphroditism reveal the ways in which at the heart of the entire bioscientific discourse of ci and xiong resides its key conceptual anchor: the human–non-human divide.

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Constructing a Sociology for an Icon of Aesthetic Modernity: Olympia Revisited

I address the problem of constructing a sociology of the artwork through analyzing one particular painting—Manet's Olympia. The painting is an acknowledged icon of modernist art and has been variously located in discourses concerning modernity, gender, and sexuality in the modern world. My purpose is to locate this painting and modernist painting generally in the social formation. While the interpretation of a particular work of art plays a central part, here the ground of that interpretation lies in social theory. Modernist art, and Manet's work in particular, is seen as a response to the growing disjunction between “instrumental” and “solidary” social relations—a disjunction fully acknowledged in the development of classical social theory. This changing relationship is reflected in the construction of discourses centered on value and motive. It is argued that Manet's modernism instantiates a spiritual resistance to the corruption of value by motive inherent in modernity and marked by a whole range of sociological discourses— commodification, alienation, rationality, disenchantment, and so forth. I identify a specific cultural configuration at the heart of bourgeois ideology involving gender and social class, and seek to show how Manet's painting subverts and deconstructs this configuration as a discourse of social formation. The semiotic possibilities made available by a modernist “presentationalcode”—the cultivation of flatness, the suppression of modelling and interaction, the use of dense allusive cultural reference, and the adaption of foreign and exotic pictorial techniques, etc.—are all seen as key to the deconstructive work that the painting accomplishes.

Satisfying Khlestakov's Appetite: The Semiotics of Eating in The Inspector General

“The belly is the belle of his stories, the nose is their beau.“Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (1944)The subject of gastronomy—as it touches upon the significance of what, how, and why man eats—has begun to receive increasing attention in recent years, during which time quite a number of books on the history of food and drink have appeared. Scholars, moreover, have demonstrated a heightened interest lately in the anthropological aspects of this topic. Since eating is a human activity that by its very nature encompasses a social, a psychological, as well as a biological dimension, the depiction of fictional meals in literature allows this ritualistic event to be transformed into a narrative sign with vast semiotic possibilities—not only within the world of the literary work itself (intratextually) but also within a broader cultural context (extratextually).