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Deleuze (1925–1995), in the early 1980s, adopts Peirce's (1839–1914) semiotics in order to classify the signs that the images of the cinema display. Aiming at insufflating the Peircean principles with the movement that animates the images of cinema, he provides Peirce's triadic logic with a new category – Zeroness – which stands for the semiotic movement of cinematic images. Deleuze's new category has impacts on the main domains of Peirce's philosophy. Accordingly, our inquiry will focus on the irradiation of Zeroness over the (a) system of categories, the (b) Peircean phenomenology (phaneroscopy), the (c) generative categorial role, the (d) semiotic effectiveness, the (e) doctrine of continuity, and the (f) logic of relatives. This article will show that for Deleuze nearly like more recent Peircean scholarship: (a) zeroth state holds a categorial status, (b) some phenomenon instantiates zeroth state, (c) zeroth state plays a generative role regarding Peirce's categories, (d) zeroth state as a phenomenological category is semiotically effective, (e) zeroth state and the doctrine of continuity, and (f) zeroth state is a "medad." In order to assess these topics, we recover Deleuze's advances on Peirce's philosophy and confront them with the Peircean studies on the zeroth state. Finally, we will see that Deleuze, far from being a Peircean scholar, developed the importance of the zeroth state for Peirce's semiotics in advance to the subsequent Peircean scholarship. Reciprocally, most of Deleuzian scholars understimate the importance of Peirce for Deleuze's semiotics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce's logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence" and Jorge Luis Borges' "Averroës's Search." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of technology, video games have become more and more realistic and indistinguishable from the real world. In this regard, this article takes a semiotic approach to create a better understanding of how possible worlds are created in video games, placing them on a continuum, which shows that the development of possible worlds is based on the reality we face in the real world. A video game called Player Unknown's Battle Grounds is used to demonstrate a new approach to analysis, which shows that each video game is created within its own possible world that is created through the selection and combination of entities from the real world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thus, the first level comprises the association of a modal with a full verb in a cluster, which can be basically interpreted as a form-functional operation, and a second level in which the semantics of the cluster fuse with argument structure constructions encoding embodied-agentive content. As shown in Table 3, by attaching modal meaning to core (central modal) verbs, the boundary between the possible meanings (epistemic, deontic, or both) of these items becomes fuzzy (see [50]). This embodied linguistic process requires abstract templates that organize in a recognizable manner the flux of referent objects emerging in and moving across mental spaces (arguments are arranged in specified syntactic patterns, e.g., X Verb Y, X verb Y Z SB LOC sb , etc.). 3.1.2 Modal intransitive-motion ASCs Modal intransitive-motion ASCs describe motion schemas in a modal space (the meaning expressed represents the intended literal or metaphorical movement of an agent along a path). Keywords: agency; Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar; argument structure constructions; embodiment; modal agentive constructions; modal referential constructions; Peirce; sign; triadic construction EN agency Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar argument structure constructions embodiment modal agentive constructions modal referential constructions Peirce sign triadic construction 195 225 31 02/18/22 20220101 NES 220101 1 Introduction In this article, I pursue an agentive cognitive construction grammar characterization of the English central modals I can-could, must, have got to, should, ought to, need to i and I will-would i . [Extracted from the article]

Our study focuses on the perception of the iconicity of handshapes – one of the formational parameters of the sign in signed language. Seventy Hebrew speakers were asked to match handshapes to Hebrew translations of 45 signs (that varied in degree of iconicity), which are specified for one of the handshapes in Israeli Sign Language (ISL). The results show that participants reliably match handshapes to corresponding sign translations for highly iconic signs, but are less accurate for less iconic signs. This demonstrates that there is a notable degree of iconicity in the lexicon of ISL, which is recognizable even to non-signers. The ability of non-signers to detect handshape to form is explained by the fact that word meanings are understood by both deaf and hearing peoples via the mental elaboration of simple iconic sources in which handshape meanings are grounded. The results suggest that while language external iconic mapping could ease the learning of direct iconic forms, it has a more limited capacity to help hearing non-signers learn indirect and opaque forms. The full semiotic distribution of handshapes in the lexicon and their use in language remain difficult for hearing non-signers to understand and depends on more specific language and cultural knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the member units of sign systems used in contemporary Iranian advertising slogans according to the Organon Model introduced by Karl Bühler. In dealing with this subject, the writer introduces Bühler's Organon Model and provides a short definition of the term advertising slogan. The next part of this article shows the three types of conative functions with regard to such slogans. The corpus of this study is the slogan of a hundred contemporary Iranian advertising messages used in Iranian markets which have not been studied from a semiotic perspective. The result of this research shows the tendencies of Iranian advertising messages to lean towards the descriptive type of conative function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We focus on a key IR Theory article by Alexander Wendt (1992) and two Jackson Pollock paintings. Our aim is to identify meanings Pollock's art communicates and reveals for Wendt (1992). It derives from an appeal to visual imagination and a desire for semiotic interpretation of Constructivist view of anarchy. The visual sign is an association such that there is Wendt's theoretical claim on the one hand and an abstract painting on the other. We do not gaze at Wendt's claim, we read it. We do not read a painting, look at it. This remark does not imply a one-way relationship. We can argue that a specific painting comes to life in our mind where colored movements are inextricably mixed up when we read the constructivist claim. Both Pollock paintings selected for our sign-making effort confirm the dynamic character of Constructivism and reveal not only three but countlessly many anarchies in international relations. They foment our assessments of abrupt changes of intersubjectivity among states. Cyclicality of dripped paints provides an anchor to fix Wendt's anarchy conceptualization in these structural-abstract paintings. As to Wendt's concept of anarchy, it acts as a helper, as a standard, against which interpretations of Pollock's artwork construct meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cet article se propose d'envisager le signe iconique à l'aune du modèle néosaussurien du signe et de la sémiosis qui se dégage des Écrits de linguistique générale. Après avoir exposé ce modèle à partir des propositions que François Rastier tire des textes autographes de Saussure, cette contribution transpose le cadre à la description du signe iconique, en réinterrogeant certains éléments de la conceptualisation que donne le Groupe µ de ce type d'énoncé visuel. Une brève analyse de la toile Le retour à la nature de Magritte permet d'illustrer et de valider la transposition théorique du modèle néosaussurien du signe et de la sémiosis. Cette démarche ouvre la possibilité de procéder à l'interprétation des images selon la théorie morphosémiotique développée par la sémantique de Rastier. This article proposes considering the iconic sign in the light of the neo-Saussurean model of sign and semiosis that emerges from the Writings in general linguistics. After having presented this model on the basis of the proposals that François Rastier draws from Saussure's manuscripts, this contribution transposes the framework to the description of the iconic sign by re-examining certain elements of the conceptualization which the Groupe µ provides about this kind of visual sentence. A brief analysis of Magritte's painting Le retour à la nature illustrates and validates the theoretical transposition of the neo-Saussurean model of sign and semiosis. This approach opens the possibility of proceeding to interpret images according the morpho-semiotic theory developed by Rastier's semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors try to review the Paris-Match cover page (No. 326 from 1955) analyzed by Roland Barthes and introduces a new model of analyzing sign system from a new semiotic approach based on the new definition of the context. This research is based on three layers of the context and shows that understanding the cover page of a magazine or any other kind of text is not only absolute but also somehow relative due to the different background knowledge of the audience. This means that human sees the Context A, or what is designed, in the situation of Context B, or situational context, and interpret based on their Context C, or background knowledge of the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his semiotic system Peirce distinguished between two interpretants and two objects of a sign: an immediate and a dynamical interpretant, and an immediate and a dynamical object. It is argued that Peirce's immediate object can be interpreted a qua-object which has the dynamical object as its basis, and the dynamical interpretant consists of an interpreter's conception of the object of the sign. Peirce semiotic system is compared with the accounts given by Frege, Husserl, Meinong, and the Stoics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article explains the tenets of an updated version of semiosic translation. Many of the ideas in this paper have been brewing for some time. For example, the integration of the Peircean notions of sign and abduction and the Wittgensteinian concepts of rule-following, complex-fact, and hypothesis. It turns out that this synthesis leads to some new proposals about translation semiotics that seek to move the field from the reification of objects, concepts and practices toward a broader conception of translation and translating centered on the translator's agency. What this means is, among other things, that semiosic translation avoids a delimitation of signification (things and actions conveying meaning) by rejecting any conceptual appeals tinged with foundationalism. Rather, my argument will concentrate on elucidating the unpredictability of semiosis as a determinant of all forms of translation across sign systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article inspects Peirce’s resonances on Deleuze’s semiotic. Whereas most of the literature agrees that Deleuze adapts Peirce’s semiotic to serve his Bergsonian-based theory of sign, this article claims that the relationship of Deleuze with Peirce’s writings is more foliated than it may appear at first. The development of this hypothesis invites to trace back Deleuze’s works before his very acquaintance with Peirce in the 1980s. Therefore, one of Peirce’s classical issues – the role that relations and habits play for the triadic conception of sign – is considered with Deleuze’s early studies, in which he developed this same issue as to approach Hume (habit and relation, 1953) and Proust (triadic sign, 1964). This background echoes years later in Deleuze’s incursion to Peirce’s semiotic in the 1980s ninety-two classes and two books on cinema. In fact, Deleuze’s own triadic conception of sign and his acknowledged pragmatist inclination prove to be closer to Peirce’s pragmatism than the scholarly literature tends to think or argue. The aim of this article is not, however, to build an overwhelming philosophical identity between Deleuze and Peirce, it sets up instead a steadier basis from where to understand their differences. Deleuze’s ignored five-year long lectures on cinema shows to be exegetically revealing with respect to his debts towards Peirce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the establishment of modern linguistics and the linguistic turn of western philosophy, various linguistic theories have been advanced and have given different interpretations to language and discourse. Different schools of thought have witnessed a direct collision of ideas and a deep academic dialogue between the theory of translinguistics advanced by the great master of dialogism, Bakhtin, and the outlook on language of the father of modern linguistics, Saussure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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As a branch of theoretical semiotics that aims to contribute to the development of the theory of both semiotics and education, edusemiotics must also problematize the most foundational semiotic conceptions of sign and semiosis. The biosemiotic notion that a sign relation is necessarily dependent on learning restricts semiotics to the biological sphere, to living beings. This fits well with education, which can be seen as transition from the zoosemiotic sphere to the anthroposemiotic sphere. However this radical discontinuity between living and non-living spheres makes it difficult to understand how signs and semiosis are viable at all and what their basic nature is. Ontologically we can imagine that sign relations must also be somehow based on the features of non-living beings. In this article I will analyze how a concept of a sign can be seen as a general model of interaction between any beings. This paper develops the conception of semiosis and signification with regard to the competence (or habits) of the subject experiencing the meaning. Such task requires the explication of the ontological basis of semiosis - a step often perceived as dangerous by semioticians or ignored by educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his divisions of science, Peirce placed pedagogy in the branch of practical sciences. This means that the profession of teaching can only be meliorated by experience, through practice. However, I argue that a holistic look at Peirce's semiotics reveals an implicit philosophy of education. The key lies in understanding his account of experience in the context of his theory of evolution. By experience Peirce meant semiosis (action of signs), not the modern empirical notion of experience. The sign, unlike an idea (purely mental entity) does not belong strictly to mental or non-mental phenomena. Experience is a characteristic of the Universe (CP 5.448), understood as a physiology of arguments (). According to Peirce's taxonomy of signs, learning is the evolution of signification from the Icon sign type to the Argument sign type, being the Universe's way of discovering itself through life forms. The Argument sign type is a result of agapasm, evolution due to creative love (CP 6.302). The paper explains how Peirce's theory of agapistic evolution underpins an educational paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Item-and-Arrangement models of inflection, morphemes are associations of form and meaning stored in a mental lexicon. Saussure's notion of the linguistic sign as a unit of an acoustic image (signifier) and a concept (signified) immediately suggests such a model. But close examination of the examples of inflectional morphology throughout the Cours brings Saussure's ideas more in line with Process morphology, a model in which recurrent elements in word forms are exponents of content features, and realizational rules license a word form inferentially from the word's content. The Saussurean sign allowed French structuralists to revolutionize the methods of modern social science, eschewing the motives and intentions of human actors to focus on the system of oppositions that make signification possible in each domain. Eventually, post-structuralism rejected the static nature of the linguistic sign, forcing linguistics into relative isolation (since it held on to sign-based models of language). The criticism of structuralist treatments of morphology in Process models of inflection, however, stands as an exception to this tendency. In retrospect, I argue, similar ideas can be found in Saussure's view of the langue as a complex algebra. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although legal terms are conventionally considered to have self-referential, self-closed meaning independent of context, a legal term only acquires its meaning within a given context. As long as the context varies, the meaning of the same legal term as a signifier may change correspondingly. Based on case studies by applying semiotics, we argue that a legal term is just a sign within its sign system; a legal term as an individual sign does not have any inherent meaning, and its meaning can only exist in the relationship with other signs or sign systems. In other words, a legal term only denotes in a particular temporal and spatial context. Through this study, we conclude four propositions about a legal term as a sign: first, the connection of a legal term with a legal concept is relatively arbitrary; second, the meaning of a legal term exists in a sign system; third, a legal term can be subject to multiple interpretations; fourth, the defining of a legal term may be affected by other sign systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies of children and apes realized in psychology address issues that are highly relevant to semiotics, but they often do so indirectly, or they use a terminology that is confusing and/or too vague from a semiotical point of view. The studies reported here, however, follow the paradigm of these psychological studies, but they are couched in an explicit semiotical terminology. They involve three classical semiotical issues: the nature of the sign, as opposed to other meanings; degrees and/or types of iconicity and their relevance for understanding; and the importance of temporal focus in different kinds of semiotical resources. The studies all involve one subject, the chimpanzee Alex, and all issues were studied looking at the actions accomplished by the subject after being exposed to different semiotic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the capacities of human voice to create meaning outside verbal or musical structures. Voice is viewed as human bodily expressive sound, ephemeral and traceless. If text is defined as any cultural object, voice may be considered a text as soon as the fetus develops the ability to hear. If text is defined as an analytical tool, voice must be analyzed as a process and not text-result. Voice is in the constant process of becoming text without ever attaining the status of text-result other than by being profoundly altered by writing or recording. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the development of Chinese cultural semiotics from the early age of reception to the present day. The return of Cultural Awareness in the late 1970s in China paved the way for the entry of diverse Western thought and led to the so-called "fever of cultural studies" since the 1980s. The dynamic nature of Chinese culture calls for equally dynamic theories and this has provided a perfect opportunity for combining the various newly introduced Western semiotic models and the contemporary studies of Chinese culture. A genuinely fascinating situation, which I name "a carnival pilgrimage," of cultural semiotics in China, is that each of the diversified semiotic theories has enjoyed a uniquely prestigious status and a fair share of practitioners. Nevertheless, there are four major Western models that are most influential in Chinese cultural semiotics: Saussurean structuralism, the Peircean model, the Russian School, and the Cassirer- Langer model. The seeming confusion of this carnival pilgrimage is actually a reflection of the dynamism and pluralism of global semiotics and is especially advocated and practiced by Chinese semioticians, who have already managed to explore the rich ancient legacies left by early Chinese thinkers of the sign and to establish semiotic centers and publications nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welby and Vailati both have a special interest in problems relating to language, sign, meaning, and knowledge. Both evidence the relevance of sign and meaning to every sphere of human life and experience. Vailati was fascinated by Welby's significs with its focus on the relation between signs and values. In this essay I propose the term 'ethosemiotics' for the first time, now developed in terms of 'semioethics.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Victoria Welby and the signific movement are discussed by Susan Petrilli, in the book Signifying and Understanding, chronologically and thematically, in connection with contemporary semiotics as well as with the intellectual and scientific landscape of Welby's own time. The book also contains priceless material from the archives that will permit anyone interested to continue this line of research. A selection of Welby's vast correspondence with intellectuals, researchers, and philosophers important to linguistics, semiotics, psychology, and anthropology, to mention a few of her interests mirrored in the exchange of letters, is included in the book. Appended to the book are also selections from Welby's writings. Some of the material is here published for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how white, as a sign, was metaphorized in traditional Chinese and the change of its metaphoric nature in modern Chinese. Kress's theory of the motivated relation of signifier and signified and object construction theory in CDA are employed to discuss how the different metaphoric natures of white are constructed, reflecting different interests underlying different cognitive process of conceptualization of metaphors. Out of the 'interest' in promoting obedience, and in setting up a unique Chinese cultural model, white in traditional Chinese language has a metaphoric nature of inferiority, mourning, and death. However, in modern Chinese it has a metaphoric nature of pure, which is consistent with the Western views of white. The change in its metaphoric nature reflects the ideological struggle between the powerful Western cultural model and traditional Chinese cultural model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Umberto Eco's semiotics, the encyclopedia is a multidimensional space of semiosis. It is a complex system of shared knowledge that governs the production and interpretation of signs inside communicative contexts. Every semiotic act involves the elements that form the encyclopedia. By means of several examples and comparisons with different semiotic theo-ries, my paper aims to show how semiosis is governed by semantic categoriza-tions, pragmatic rules, and narrative frames that the encyclopedia articulates and makes operative for interpreters and producers of signs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is a discussion of the analysis of proper names within the city space, viewed not so much from the perspective of the user of an arbitrary sign but rather from the perspective of the icon. The view of language as a structure that includes nonconventional elements is the starting premise for the article, in which iconicity (despite its subordinate character) plays an important function, as represented by such authors as Jakobson. Different types of proper names (mainly those of apartment blocks, shops, firms, restaurants and cafés) that realize endophoric and egzophoric iconicity are presented and discussed. The former type denotes iconic relations of the type sign (name)-referent, i.e., the relationship between a sign and a non-linguistic element, while the latter type of similarity includes the references, sign (name)-sign (name). These refer to relations between proper names. Appropriate names that fulfill a given iconicity are subsequently identified and distinguished within the two types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1890s, Peirce reformulated quantification theory by expressing it in a language of diagrams, called existential graphs. Peirce thought that the iconicity of his graphs made them suitable for analyzing logical reasoning. Iconic signs can be said to show their meaning, and this paper studies the ways in which graphs do this. Peirce's pragmatic analysis of propositions resembles game-theoretical semantics, and existential graphs show what they mean by displaying the structure of the semantic game for the proposition represented by a graph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terms 'sign' and 'symbol' have often been used with similar meanings and functions in several different fields (religion, science, art, philosophy, linguistic, semiotics, etc.). This causes not only terminological confusion, but also creates paradoxes as disorders in understanding and perceiving, and confusions of mind as to what, where, and how these words are to be perceived and used. This article aims to contribute to delineating sign and symbol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the conceptual history of the sign, as recounted by John Deely in Four ages of understanding, is immensely enlightening, history is never enough. If, before Augustine, it had occurred to no one that such diverse phenomena as are covered by this term had something in common, and if, in the time of Aquinas, Fonseca, and Poinsot, different usages of the term were in competition, the reason is not simply intellectual confusion, but rather that meaning is of many kinds. In this essay, I have shifted the terrain from socio-history to phylogeny and ontogeny, suggesting that, in the child, as well as in the human species, perception is the primary type of meaning, whereas true signs are acquired much later, followed by signs systems and organism-independent artifacts. The whole point of having a semiotic theory, it is argued, is to be able to account for the differences, and not only the similarities, of different kinds of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic idea that makes John Deely's Four ages of understanding an innovative one is that the notion of the sign is at the center of philosophical development from the start, and proves basic to a postmodern development of thought as well. A full awareness of this notion of sign can be traced way back to the beginning of the fifth century AD, in the works of Augustine, where the two different theories of signs present in the Greek period — the semantic theory of the linguistic sign (following an “equational” model) and the logical-epistemological theory of non-linguistic signs (following an “inferential” model) — are amalgamated. The aim of this paper is to show that Augustine makes a move that is both symmetrical with and a mirror image of what Saussure does: the latter unites the two theories and two classes of sign, setting up the linguistic sign as the guiding principle, while Augustine subsumes all types of sign within the class of non-linguistic signs. But it is the Augustine's move that opens, as Deely also says, a link with the postmodern era, proposing a semiotic model that is homogenous with that of Peirce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the sixth in a series of papers on an algebra derived from mythology. A hierarchical lineup of sets, functions, relations, and operations is used to model symbolic processes. In this algebra, multiplication is defined as association. This allows the classical laws of association to be modeled with the algebra, leading to a process of sign creation. As an example, cargo cults are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural language as an example of a structural system is compared to programming language as a constructive system through analysis of how differently humans and computers process self-reference. An alternative handling of the halting problem in computer systems holds the key to a more natural computer environment and enables a greater understanding of human thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the so-called ‘meme’ concept, originally introduced by Richard Dawkins and modelled analogously after the phenomenon of gene, has aroused much discussion. There have also been attempts to develop a systematic discipline of ‘memetics’ upon this notion, and suggestions that this opens up unforeseen possibilities for studying human culture in a new way, as compatible with biological evolution. This article argues that these attempts are misguided. The meme is a new word but not a new concept, it is only a new version of the traditional semiotic concept of sign. More pointedly, the meme is not merely an old idea in new clothing, it is in all important respects an inferior alternative to the semiotic sign. The consequence of this is that the suggested memetics would leave open the cleavage between the study of nature and culture that semiotics traditionally has attempted to close. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The production of meaning from visual messages has been largely uninvestigated in the Arab world, particularly in such visually intensive areas as advertising, even though the question is of tremendous importance to designers of advertising messages. The reason could be the difficulty of capturing visual meaning and the lack of structured research approaches to code and categorize information related to advertising. This article investigates the practices used in billboards and store banners, and how the meanings of the images and texts in these advertisements are interpreted by university students in Jordan. A population of one-hundred senior English major students at university level were involved in this study. The data for this study consists of a representative sample of three billboards and store banners out of a population of twenty advertisements collected from major cities in Jordan. Each of these represents one or more discursive practices. The analysis consists of three stages: description, interpretation, and explanation. Three main practices have been identified: metaphoric representation, code- mixing, and defamiliarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The images of globalization one encounters in China today signify the anguished anxiety of the Chinese for modernity. This article proposes a four-level model of semiotic analysis for interpreting ubiquitous images of globalization in China. The author argues that every image of globalization encountered in China signifies to viewers at the following levels: first, transmission of the informational message; second, signaling of the desire of consumerism; third, pointing to the presence of TNC (transnational capital); fourth, speaking to the Chinese drive for modernity. While the first level is where one locates neutral, self-evident information, all of the other levels deal with ideology or ideological symbolism; hence, the terms for the following analysis: the informational, the consumerism-symbolic, the TNC-symbolic, and the CAM-symbolic (Chinese Anxiety for Modernity). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the semiotic thought of I Ching (Book of Changes). This Confucian canon and the subsequent commentaries on it constitute the origin and one of the most important legacies of traditional Chinese theories of the sign. A central notion of I Ching is xiang — variously translated as ‘sign,’ or ‘image.’ The author approaches the idea of the ‘sign’ in I Ching and the later exegetical tradition in four aspects: 1) definition of the sign; 2) typology of signs; 3) hermeneutics of signs; 4) epistemology of signs. The purpose is to outline an indigenous Chinese theory of signs that has flourished for over two thousand years. At the same time, this article aims at a comparative study of semiotic theories between East and West. The author brings in relevant ideas of Western scholars and theorists such as St. Augustine, Leibniz, Peirce, Needham, Sebeok, and Todorov. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine lambda calculus as a sign system and show that it explains important properties of language. First, we verify that a lambda-term has two essential functionalities of signs — articulation and naming — and argue that a lambda-term can thus be regarded as a sign model. Then, when signs are defined by self-reference, we show that these two functionalities become tightly coupled and that dyadic/triadic sign models become equivalent. Last, we show that the difference of structuralism is explained in relation to the undecidability of the equivalence of two arbitrary lambda-terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three basic semiotic modes are presented that show an increasing number of referential relations: passive semiosis (monadic semiotic mode), active production of a sign referring to a state of the utterer (dyadic semiotic mode), and active reference to an external event or object for a partner (triadic semiotic mode). Symbolic systems arise when the third semiotic mode is combined with a combinatorial principle typical of information processing. Symbols are not directly representational, since they do not show the associative relation typical of the first two semiotic modes. The brain is not able, with its intrinsic resources, to give rise to a symbolic system, but needs external, physical units (phonemes, gestures, and so on) to be combined to form communicative structures as sentences and discourses. These units are both discrete and codified. Nonhuman primates' inability to possess a true language is due, at least in part, to their failure to discover the principle of combination. Symbolic systems may have arisen phylogenetically in close connection with cooperation for tool making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mythic algebra was developed in a trio of papers in the Journal of Literary Semantics. It models mythology and storytelling with algebraic sets. Expanded into a proto-mathematical system, it provides a hierarchical range of functions which can also apply to language and symbolic processes. Its relation to the three basic 'laws of thought' of classical logic is analyzed Correspondences are also found with the Peircean division of a sign into icon, index, and symbol Further applications are made to metaphor and irony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]