Semiotic Practices Research Articles

Streetscapes and memories of real socialist anti-fascism in south-eastern Europe: between dystopianism and utopianism

Abstract Historical revisionism towards the Yugoslavian experience of real socialism is gaining ground in Croatia and Slovenia, as exemplified, for example, by the 2017 renaming of Zagreb’s Marshal Tito Square and similar cases in Šibenik or Karlovac, as well as parallel developments in Ljubljana. However, the spaces that once represented the Yugoslavian workers’ movement and the anti-fascist struggle can be also subject to nostalgic practices termed Titostalgia. This study employs an analysis inspired by a discourse-historical approach to scrutinize the arguments used in naming controversies in nine Croatian and Slovenian localities from 2011 to 2022. The investigation of semiotic landscapes draws from extensive fieldwork, including photographic documentation consisting of 1,658 images. Dystopian interpretations of Yugoslavia’s past turn out to be propagated through top–down discourses, circulating in media outlets and endorsed by local authorities through infrastructural signage. These discourses are typically initiated by civil society actors aligned with right and far right politics. Besides mild media opposition, which mainly invokes anti-fascist values, smaller urban centres exhibit passive resistance or inertia towards the renaming, observable in grassroots signage. Conversely, capital cities emerge as hubs of intense expressive and predominantly progressive ideological semiotic practices within the renamed spaces.

Linguistic landscape as a way to construct multiple identities in the context of globalization: the case of an ancient town in China

ABSTRACT This article explores the linguistic landscape (LL) of Wuzhen, an ancient town with a history of more than 2,000 years and became the permanent venue for the World Internet Conference in 2014. The LL of Wuzhen is influenced by various factors, including globalization, urbanization, the tourism industry, heritage conservation, and government planning. In light of this, the study has made several field investigations into Wuzhen, examining the LL of four different areas and capturing 1602 photos of signs. Simultaneously, semi-structured interviews are conducted with residents to discuss their perceptions of the local LL and identity. The findings indicate that Wuzhen reshapes its local public space through various semiotic practices, constructing multiple identities that integrate traditionality, modernity, and internationality. It has also been found that LL should be regarded as a crucial semiotic resource anchored in sociocultural and historical space, whose mobility in the context of globalization and urbanization provides more possibilities for identity construction and reconstruction in peripheral regions.

Empathic listening as a social semiotic practice within the tradition of Nonviolent Communication

Abstract This article investigates empathic listening as practised in the tradition of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), noting that this tradition is understood as a designed register of interpersonal connection, “concerned with progress toward a better world” (Hughes 2018). In the tradition, empathy is considered “a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing, … we give to others the time and space they need to express themselves fully and to be understood” (Rosenberg 2015: 91–92). The analysis in this article applies the tools of systemic functional linguistics to demonstrate that this empathic understanding is achieved by the empathiser supporting the speaker’s exploration of their emotions via a linguistic pattern of co-created, continuous thematic progression of resonated new information. The article provides insights into the linguistic machinery powering NVC empathy practice.

Puerto Rican welfare queens and the semiotics of respectability: The language of race, class, and gender

AbstractIn this article, we explore how raciolinguistic parody functions in a society that hegemonically denies racial divisions. Through an analysis of Puerto Rican comedian Natalia Lugo's YouTube portrayals of her character, Francheska the Yal ‘welfare queen,’ we argue that covert racialization operates through a semiotics of respectability, whereby disreputable forms of femininity, class expression, and nonstandard language are co‐indexical with the yal’s failure to normatively “whiten” herself. We contend that US colonial narratives that scapegoat poor women of color for the island's poverty are reconstructed in Lugo's parodies by depicting the yal as provincial and excessive. Lugo's performative choices underscore the interplay of linguistic, material, and discursive elements that marginalize the yal, enabling parody without challenging structural inequalities. Our analysis sheds light on the ways in which semiotic practices reify such social hierarchies where they are systemically denied.

The (Re)surgence of Sinophobia in the Australian Far-Right: Online Racism, Social Media, and the Weaponization of COVID-19

ABSTRACT In this article I critically examine the role of the Australian far-right in the racialisation of the COVID-19 pandemic. A Discourse-Historical Analysis of (n = 133) Facebook posts from Australia’s most prominent far-right populist party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, revealed a range of discursive strategies, linguistic and rhetorical devices, and multimodal semiotic practices were employed to scapegoat China and Chinese-Australians throughout the pandemic. The findings highlight the unique role played by the Australian far-right in the racialisation of the health crisis which engendered a wave of Sinophobic and anti-Asian racism on a global scale. This research furthers our empirical understanding of how crises are exploited by the far-right to advance their racial politics in the twenty-first century.

Doing citizen sociosemiotics in the Covid-19 pandemic

In May 2020, in the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we set up the transmedia space PanMeMic, and involved our social networks, in a snowball fashion, to exchange observations and reflections on the changes in communication and social interactions ensuing from the restrictions imposed. We adopted a citizen approach towards co-constructing knowledge about semiotic practices, by integrating tenets of social semiotics, ethnography and citizen sociolinguistics. The article reports on the activities and discusses the potentials and limitations of the approach through analysis of the posts and discussions that took place in the PanMeMic Facebook group. It shows results quantitatively and then zooms in to offer a qualitative analysis of one discussion thread, with the aim of illustrating the potential and limitations of PanMeMic as a platform for citizen semiotic research and providing indications for future socially engaged and engaging research.

Through the Translingual Lens: Persian Calligraphy in Mana Neyestani’s L’Araignée de Mashhad

This article examines L’Araignée de Mashhad (Neyestani 2017), a graphic narrative by Iranian-born Mana Neyestani, now residing as a political refugee in France. Though he continues to write in Persian, his work is published in French translation, which becomes the source for translations into other languages. This article applies the framework of literary translingualism to shed new light on Neyestani’s L’Araignée de Mashhad. Literary translingualism, which encompasses “literature written in a language not native to the author, in two languages, or in a mix of languages” (Kellman and Lvovich 2015, 152), brings into sharper focus the narrative’s languaging practices, both beyond traditional approaches to graphic narratives and in relation to the global literary market. The translingual nature of L’Araignée de Mashhad emerges from its publication process, where the “original” is already a translation. This article argues that the untranslated Persian calligraphy within is neither an expression of cultural exoticism nor a form of multilingualism that a reader could overlook through glossing. Instead, it disrupts the ideology of monolingualism, redefines the meaning of “multi-” in multilingualism, and situates language within a broader spectrum of semiotic practices. It also demonstrates how those unfamiliar with Persian script may still access its aesthetic and narrative functions by drawing on the visual in the graphic narrative.

Motivated signs and multimodal analysis in Gunther Kress’s semiotics

Abstract This article addresses the issue of motivated signs in semiotic theory and practice. It examines two influential versions of the term, Saussure’s and Kress’s, focussing on and triggered by Kress’s influence. It claims Kress’s importance lies not so much in theory as such, as in his analytic practice, multimodal analysis, as underpinned by this theory. Accordingly, it deploys a version of this practice on Kress as he is ‘doing theory’. It uses his late work Multimodality (Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality. London: Bloomsbury) as the main source of examples of theory and objects of analysis, and applies a similar approach to Saussure. The outcome is a theoretically-informed corpus including many examples of motivated signs in use. From this empirical corpus the article makes some indicative generalizations about the role of these signs in semiotic practice. It shows how pervasive these signs are, and how important these are for analysis. It connects them with a crucial but under-researched aspect of all social uses of meaning, the modality meta-function (checking validity/modality of all semiotic acts), in which motivated signs play an essential role. It reveals a more complex Saussure, more complementary to Kress, and enables more powerful multimodal analyses of social meanings and functions of text and talk.

Extending the methodology of critical discourse analysis using Haraway's figurations: The example of The Monstrous Perpetrator within contemporary responses to child neglect and abuse.

Critical discursive analyses offer possibilities for equity-oriented research, and are a resource for addressing resistant social problems, such as child neglect and abuse (CN&A). A key challenge for discourse analysts in health disciplines is the tensions between materiality and social constructions, particularly at the site of the body. This paper describes how Donna Haraway's ideas of figuration and technobiopower can augment critical discourse analysis to address this tension. Technobiopower, an intensification of biopower in the context of technoscience, is seen as underpinning the melding of material and semiotic practices. The subject is no longer a material body, but a hybrid body that exists in tropic figuration between the real and unreal. This paper uses an analysis of the figuration of The Monstrous Perpetrator from a study of nursing responses to CN&Ato illustrate how Haraway's figuration aligns with and provides an analytical tool to extend critical discursive analyses. Specifically, this methodology offers new ways to identify the discursive qualities of bodies, and how material aspects of bodies are exaggerated, concealing their hegemonic ideologies and discriminatory effects. By identifying discourses within or inscribed upon the body, they can be disrupted, opening new possibilities for social change.

Intersectional highlighting in queer immigrants’ English learning through dating: Dominant ideologies, individual agency, and implications for second language education

Drawing on a combined framework of raciolinguistics, imagined community, and language learner agency, this article presents an ethnographic case study exploring two Chinese queer immigrants’ English learning experiences embedded in dating relationships in Canada. Applying the theoretical construct of “intersectional highlighting”, I scrutinize critical events in which racial hierarchy intersects with gendered sexual values in key participants’ dating stories and further investigate how language leaner agency plays a key role in overcoming ideological constraints in English learning processes. Findings reflect performativity in language learning, highlighting the interplay between micro-level semiotic practices of learners’ doing and talking of identities and macro-level social structures of racial, gender, and sexual ideologies circulated in Canadian society. Further, I argue for a race-centered decolonial approach in the study of racialized queer immigrants’ English learning and propose pedagogical strategies to stimulate language learner agency assisting marginalized learners navigate disadvantageous discourses in and beyond second language classrooms.

“Ironic memes” and digital literacies: Exploring identity through multimodal texts

This study examines so-called “ironic memes,” a seemingly inscrutable genre of memetic Internet content, as meaningful digital multimodal text. Considering Internet memes’ semiotic construction patterns and their social functions, this study connects these two concerns, asking: How is the provocatively “nonsensical” design of ironic memes organized and connected to the construction of (group) identities online? Adopting a digital ethnographic approach, we employ a combination of multimodal discursive methods in order to jointly analyze semiotic design patterns and the social actions underlying them. The analysis suggests that, despite their nonsensical appearance, ironic memes rely on distinct design strategies that contribute to the construction of (group) identities rooted in digital literacies. Specifically, ironic memes constitute generic hybrids where semiotic practices are associated with personas that are “less literate” in Internet memeing. Our findings indicate that digital literacies can feature as central in the construction of superdiverse identities through digital text-making and text-sharing.

The geosemiotics of ethno-political graffiti in Kosovo: polyphony, emplacement and heteroglossia

ABSTRACT This article examines the nature of graffiti semiotics in the public space of Kosovo’s capital Pristina. By adopting a perspective on graffiti as a historically situated and semiotic practice, we identify distinct ethno-political voices, each relying on highly multimodal-linguistic resources to convey their respective political messages to a wider audience. The corpus was gathered during a specific period in Kosovo’s history (2013-2014) and as such allows us to capture the idiosyncratic nature of the encountered graffiti as a phenomenon which emerges as a non-transgressively emplaced and dynamically constructed medium allowing conflicting views on the political future of Kosovo to enter in dialogue with one another for everyone to see in the public heart of the capital. Moreover, the dynamic nature of graffiti inscriptions in the Kosovo capital makes it a conversationally layered, inherently heteroglossic speech act with several dissenting authors at work. Our fieldwork and analysis contribute not only to insights in the nature of graffiti as a political medium but also to our understanding of the phenomenology of ethno-political graffiti in Kosovo, the complexities of which can only be appreciated against the history of both the country as a contested geographical entity, and the Balkan region at large.

Practice and product: a social semiotic approach to visual communication in sexual and reproductive health promotion

This article investigates the use of visual communication in sexual and reproductive health information resources produced by an Australian Family Planning organization for different populations – people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (especially recent immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and young people from both these groups. Co-authored by a semiotician and the manager of the organization’s Health Promotion Team, it combines visual analysis of semiotic products with firsthand experience of the organization’s semiotic practices. The article shows how the same medical information leads to different health information products for different groups on the basis of ideas about what can be considered culturally acceptable to these groups. In this way, it demonstrates a social semiotic approach to the analysis of visual communication in which the findings of analysing visual products are understood in relation to the practices of their production.

Developing Multimodal Literacy in the Business English Reading Class: A Case Study of Students’ Presentation PowerPoint Slides

This study aims to investigate the students’ multimodal literacies by analyzing their presentation PPT slides in Business English reading class in two dimensions of discourse genre and multimodality. It discovers certain preferences and patterns in their multimodal semiotic practice as well as some drawbacks in the meaning-making process. Students tend to adopt visualizing genre over other genres to demonstrate factual events in their PPT presentations. They are inclined to use language and image more frequently than other semiotic modes in their PPT meaning making. Besides, their technology and media literacy needs to be strengthened in searching, criticizing, analyzing online information resources. Eventually it provides teachers with pedagogical scaffolds to teach the viewing and representing of multimodal texts effectively.

What do we understand by Islamic “fundamentalism”? A review based on our hermeneutical limits and the sense of history in terms of the juridical-political legacy of such a creed.

Objective of the study: to examine the thesis according to which a criterion of synonymity can be predicated between the notion of "Islamic fundamentalism" and the universe of juridical-political predicates inherent to the practice of this creed. Conceptual foundation: it will be studied what is to be understood by such "Islamic fundamentalism", as well as the historical course on which the typification of the juridical-political manifestations stemming from within the Muslim religion as “extremist” became generalized. Methodology: a critical hermeneutic method was used, analyzing, by means of sociological and discourse analysis provisions, the content of those doctrines that preached the effective virtuality of the synonymy in question. Main results: the conclusion of this paper supports the idea according to which the criterion of identity between the so-called “Islamic fundamentalism” and the plurality of juridical-political predicates inherent to the practice of such dogma can only be predicated for very concrete historical processes which are, as such, limited in the annals of such religion. Consequently, this article contravene the validity of the referred analogy. Contributions or implications: This article vindicates the need for a heuristic exercise that contests the hegemonic representations according to which the Islamic socio-political logos is constructed as intrinsically fundamentalist, especially in those cases in which the discursive and semiotic practices that validate such readings are structured on the basis of the radical suppression of the universe of ideas, values and beliefs of the identity of the Muslim as an otherness.

Body and senses in the production of cultural meaning: from Middle Ages to TV series, films and video games

In medieval times, the literary nature of the works, including written ones, were determined by contextual elements such as the acoustic and momentary channel of communication along with the domain of gestur-al, instrumental and vocal codes. These elements conditioned writers and performers when they improved and perfected their capacities and perfor-mance, on which the message as a whole depended. Today the media and entertainment industry also use complex and rich connections between verbal and visual signs to produce highly symbolic messages through im-aginary re-enactments of the past. The wide range of discursive productions of the Middle Ages can be ana-lysed through the study of the elements and factors that become carriers of meanings and the way in which they do so. We consider that a comparable perspective is also suitable for contemporary semiotic practices that, when interpreting documentary sources of various types and incorporating them into suitable fictional formats for the general public, constitute playful re-configurations of the historical, literary and fantastic Middle Ages. Accordingly, this paper attempts to examine certain components of mass culture which have transformed narratives, characters and fictional worlds, distinctive of the Middle Ages, into communicative and semiotic practices reinterpreting historical and literary texts as a way of reflecting on people, social life and its problems in the present world. It starts from con-sidering that semantic plurality and diachronic bases of the idea of body and senses enable an interdisciplinary and comparative study, in order to understand their historicity, their ideological effect and the innumerable aesthetic possibilities which they promote in different areas of culture. The reflections take into account the bodily and sensory aspects of the Middle Ages selected by series, films and video games with an impact, as signifi-cant elements, on current cultural orientations and attitudes.

MOBILIZANDO RECURSOS LINGUÍSTICOS E SEMIÓTICOS, CONSTRUINDO IDENTIDADES NOS MUNDOS DA VIDA LOCAIS: TRABALHADORES MIGRANTES DE TIMOR-LESTE E SEUS CLUBES DE FUTEBOL

ABSTRACT This paper is based on research of a sociolinguistic and ethnographic nature, which was carried out with young migrants from Timor-Leste, who were based in a small town in Northern Ireland (CABRAL; MARTIN-JONES, 2017). Through this research we traced their migration trajectories (via Portugal or England), and we documented the agentive ways in which they were dealing with local conditions of settlement and employment, and, at the same time, creating new spaces of solidarity and conviviality within local life worlds. We focus here on one particular life world – that of sport – and on the nine football clubs formed for Timorese men and boys in this local Irish setting. We describe and analyse three different aspects of the communicative practices that were developing around the football: (1.) The linguistic, cultural and semiotic practices involved in the naming and branding of the clubs e.g., practices that indexed different Timorese identities (from different regions of Timor-Leste) and practices that indexed different globalised cultural worlds of football; (2.) the language resources of the Timorese club managers (including Tetum, Portuguese and English), and their organisational practices, their ethos and their funds of knowledge; (3.) the significance of the scheduling of football tournaments around key dates in the establishment of the nation of Timor-Leste – a regular practice that indexed an orientation to a shared national origin.

Indicating ideology: Variation in Montenegrin orthography

This contribution discusses variation in orthography on a standard language level as a semiotic practice of extra-lingual exclusion and intra-lingual stylistic differentiation in a South Slavic language, Montenegrin. I will address recent orthography reforms and their use following the emancipation of Serbo-Croatian. Orthographic variants, I argue, function as semiotic means of exclusion from the former common language concept and as an emphasized differentiation to other standard varieties emerging from Serbo-Croatian, and therefore hold sociocultural indexicality. Such variation needs to be examined in its ideological embedding. Consequently, I will discuss how competing orthography reforms and variants following from these are connected to ideological disputes in the post-Serbo-Croatian linguistic sphere and how the use of either one orthography or another is constructed as stylistic representations of ideological perspectives.

Michel Pastoureau and the history of visual communication

Despite early and ongoing calls for a systematic engagement with history, social semiotics has largely emphasized research on the synchronic rather than diachronic dimensions of meaning-making. And while the ‘instability’ of semiotic practices (see Kress’s Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, 2010) and the importance of semiotic change (see Van Leeuwen’s Introducing Social Semiotics, 2005) have become key themes in semiotics, there is still a need for a dynamic approach to the study of visual and multimodal communication, focusing not only on describing how meaning-making resources and their uses are changing, but also on why they are changing. In this article, the authors focus on the importance of the work of medieval historian Michel Pastoureau for the social semiotic study of visual communication, highlighting that this work can help us further refine and even rethink key social semiotic concepts such as modes and media, provenance, and context. Pastoureau’s work shows how we can make theoretical statements about instability, change and innovation more concrete and, ultimately, empirically based. His approach can also help us understand semiotic change and its relation to social and cultural (and also economic and technological) change more broadly, often with the aid of the (crucial) normative discourses that shape semiotic practices over time.

Indexing the ‘included’ migrant? Social categorization and interpersonal digital interaction between labor migrants, teachers and employers in Norway

This paper investigates the co-construction of identities of inclusion and exclusion in digitally mediated migrant-host community interaction. Through both interview and digital interactional data, we look at the discursive social categorization of and by Lithuanian labour migrants and their majority population interlocutors and analyze the semiotic practices by which identity categories are talked and written into being in home-school collaboration and workplace interaction. To capture the negotiation of power, (in)equality and authority, we apply the concepts orders of indexicality (Blommaert, 2007), and adequation and distinction (Bucholtz & Hall 2005). Our analysis shows how participants draw on various semiotic resources to interactionally construct identities as included, such as media choice, punctuation, text composition and multimodality.