Abstract Many research studies in semiotics and communication make important contributions by describing, interpreting, or explaining particular phenomena. Yet relatively few culminate in the development of a theory that integrates their findings into a broader conceptual framework. As a result, valuable insights often remain tied to the specific context in which they were generated rather than contributing to a more general understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. This essay explores how scholars can move from the findings of a completed study to the development of a theory by offering a systematic process for transforming empirical insights into abstract theoretical explanations. We describe the steps involved in two forms of theory construction – inductive and experiential. Inductive theorizing is a bottom-up approach in which researchers collect and code data, identify recurring patterns, develop theoretical constructs, and explicate the relationships among those constructs to generate a new theory. Experiential theory construction begins with the recognition that an existing theory is inadequate for explaining a phenomenon. Researchers then articulate an alternative starting point and develop a new theory that offers a more compelling explanation. We illustrate these two approaches with the theories of visual enactment and constricted and constructed potentiality.
Abstract In October 2025, Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef reappeared on the state-affiliated ON TV program Kalema Akheera ( A Final Word ) after nearly a decade of mediated exile. Applying a qualitative multimodal discourse analysis to the complete corpus of the four-part interview series (totalling N = 80 coded segments), this paper conceptualizes Youssef’s return as a performance of negotiated visibility – a hybrid communicative formation in which critique, nostalgia, and conviviality are recalibrated within conditions of managed tolerance. Drawing on a multimodal Incongruity-Relief (I-R) analytical framework synergized with strategic narrative theory and digital celebrity diplomacy, the study finds that Youssef’s humour operates as a chronotopic satire, reactivating the collective memory of Egypt’s revolutionary decade (2011–2014) while re-scripting dissent into forms of affective reconciliation. The analysis suggests that such a satirical performance can be leveraged as a soft-power resource within constrained media ecologies, mediating critique and spectacle. The present case study indicates a potential recalibration of satire into an affective statecraft, a communicative practice that strategically mobilizes emotion and performative visibility to produce the appearance of pluralism while maintaining discursive control. In doing so, this research extends humour theory into the domain of digital diplomacy, demonstrating how televised laughter operates simultaneously as mnemonic practice, political negotiation, and para-diplomatic performance designed for contemporary networked media regimes.
Abstract This editorial introduces the special issue, Proceedings of LCR Forum 2025: Innovations and Emerging Technologies in Media Arts . Moving beyond instrumental views of technological progress, this transdisciplinary collection interrogates emerging technologies, such as generative AI, algorithmic infrastructures, and mixed reality, as complex sites of power, visibility, and sociopolitical negotiation. The eight featured articles span diverse sociocultural contexts, exploring phenomena including TikTok algospeak, YouTube participatory endorsement, human-machine affective interaction, AI-generated post-digital personas, gendered illness narratives, political satire, and the interactive remediation of sacred history. Grounded in methodologies like multimodal discourse analysis, affect theory, and critical design fiction, the contributions examine how digital publics both reproduce and resist algorithmic regimes. In its entirety, this issue illuminates the dynamic entanglement of human agency and machine affordances, emphasizing the enduring, irreplaceable value of human consciousness in an increasingly automated communicative landscape.
Abstract The International Fair and Museum of the Prophet’s Biography employs immersive, technologically enabled multimedia to depict socio-historical moments from the life of Prophet Muhammad and his companions in Medina (formerly Yathrib) following the sacred event of hijrah . Informed by this, the study develops a tripartite theoretical framework to analyze these depictions. Data are drawn from selected exhibits, including representations of ancient Medina after hijrah , the Prophet’s Chamber, and the Minbar within the Prophet’s Mosque. The analysis yields three key findings. First, Sacred Timespace emerges as a dialectical construct linking past and present, generating a-temporal moments that transform historical archetypes into an enduring present. Second, the museum cityscape of Medina post- hijrah illustrates a kinetic semiosis that evokes topophilia – an affective bond between visitors and sacred place. Third, the resemiotized visual-ideational meanings of the Prophet’s Chamber and Minbar articulate Sacred Timespace, where interactive narration and architectural representation confer sanctified, extratemporal qualities.
Abstract As generative Artificial Intelligence achieves unprecedented levels of linguistic sophistication, the traditional boundaries of literary authorship are undergoing a profound “semantic devaluation.” This article examines Jack McDevitt’s 2005 short story, Henry James, This One’s for You , as a prophetic work of critical design fiction that anticipates the contemporary “science friction” between algorithmic output and human creative integrity. Central to this tension is the subversion of the Jamesian axiom – the principle that the “deepest quality of a work of art will always be the mind of the producer” (James 1934. The art of the novel: Critical prefaces . Richard P. Blackmur (ed.). New York: Scribner’s: 21). Adopting a semiotic lens, the study explores the crisis of the “hollow signifier,” where AI-generated prose mimics the “solidity of specification” of a masterpiece while lacking a lived human referent. Utilizing Jeffries’ (2010. Opposition in discourse . London: Continuum) framework of oppositional discourse, the study analyzes how the narrative’s diegetic prototype – the AI “Max” – constructs a binary between the autonomous machine and the Jamesian “Mind of the Producer.” The article argues that McDevitt’s work functions as a “probability adjustment,” exposing the violent erasure required to maintain the myth of the “lone human genius.” Ultimately, AI’s lack of sentient origin produces a semiotic collapse that institutional guardrails struggle to contain.
Abstract This qualitative study explores the narratives of poverty and the lived experience of the Filipino poor through the semiotic frameworks of Charles Sanders Peirce and Yuri Lotman. Based on conversational field encounters with poor farmers, fisherfolk, market vendors, and video documentary testimonies of the Filipino poor, this study interprets poverty, faith, and destiny as interconnected signs that permeate a semiosphere shaped by tropical geography, the development lens, Catholic moral doctrine, postcolonial discourse, and fatalism. Using Peirce’s triadic model of the sign, object, and interpretant, this paper deciphers how statements from the poor, such as “we are destined to be poor” or “we don’t have a choice because we are poor,” function as symbolic signifiers that both limit and empower meaning. Applying Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere, these utterances are situated within a sociocultural space where religious faith, destiny, and tropical geography intersect as profoundly meaningful communicative texts. Poverty thus appears not merely as a socioeconomic condition but as a semiotic phenomenon. It acts as a language of survival and identity negotiated in the tropics as a realm of meaning-making. By examining the narratives of the Filipino poor through semiotic and critical lenses, this article shows how meaning-making operates both as a tool of submission and a resource for resistance, revealing that emancipation begins with the reinterpretation, reconstruction, and resignification of poverty and its complex relationship with religious faith, destiny, and the tropics.
Abstract In 1934, Jan Mukařovský stated that ‘art is a semiotic fact’. This statement raised two issues that haven’t as yet been satisfactorily dealt with. The first concerns the nature of the sign : what, and when is a sign? The second relates to the consequences, for the humanities, of the semiotic nature of its object. While the focus is on literature, this paper aims at tackling both issues, thus contributing to a scientific semiotics of culture and literature. Three aspects of the semiotic are deemed to be of particular importance if we want to understand literary semiosis within the broader context of culture: the dialectical nature of the semiotic process, its four basic strategies, and its recursivity. Together, these three aspects constitute the building blocks of culture and, with that, its logic . The four strategies, that cumulatively build upon each other, are: perception of similarities, imagination of artefacts, conceptualizing, and the analysis of structures. On the basis of the theoretical analysis, literary semiosis is then characterized as reflexive semiosis , at the intersection between the artefactual and the conceptual , that is, as imaginative reflection on experience, through language . The paper concludes with a short reflection on semiotics and hermeneutics in the humanities.
Abstract This paper explores the potential of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a critical tool for interrogating the discursive construction of race and racism in institutional contexts, drawing on data from a doctoral study of media discourse on racism in football in Brazil and England. Rejecting an approach that treats language and race as independent, parallel variables, the analysis treats discourse as both shaped by and constitutive of structural inequalities, with a particular focus on the ideational metafunction and the Transitivity System. In dialogue with Critical Race Studies (CRS), the paper demonstrates how dominant ideologies are embedded in linguistic choices that regulate the visibility of racialised experiences. By analysing who is given agency, who is backgrounded, and how experiential meaning is distributed, the study exposes the discursive strategies through which structural racism is sustained in supposedly neutral mediatic environments. The findings underscore the importance of semiotic scrutiny in revealing the sociopolitical operations of language and suggest that SFL provides a robust framework for CRS by enabling the analysis of ideological reproduction at the level of grammar. The paper positions this collaboration not as a merger of disciplines but as a dialogic exchange in which linguistic method and racial critique mutually enhance each other.
Abstract Neutral thought, as a core thinking paradigm transcending Sino-Western civilizations, manifests itself as a deconstructive critique of binary opposition in the West and presents as a constructive wisdom of dynamic equilibrium in China. This paper traces the theoretical trajectory of Western neutral thought, from Barthes’ dismantling of paradigmatic relations to Derrida’s deconstruction and then to Peircean semiotics, and contrasts it with Chinese neutral thought, “Linguistic-Image Integration”, rooted in the “Neutralization” philosophy of Confucianism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism, in Chinese character semiotics, and the academic practices in contemporary Neutral Semiotics. A Sino-Western comparison is conducted across four dimensions: philosophical foundations, core objectives, modes of thinking, and practical approaches, revealing the essential differences between the Western emphasis on “deconstruction” and the Chinese focus on “construction”. On this basis, by integrating the gist of Sino-Western thought, this paper constructs a theoretical system of Neutral Semiotics with both explanatory power and practical value, encompassing a “Human-Machine-Sign” Symbiotic Ontology, a “distributed negotiation” theory of meaning, and an “Algorithm-Aware” inter-semiotic analytical methodology. The application value of this system is verified through case studies such as AIGC creation, virtual idols, and cross-cultural communication, ultimately clarifying the triple missions of Neutral Semiotics in promoting the paradigm innovation of semiotics, guiding the “good governance” of human-machine collaborative semiotic practices, and fostering a diverse and inclusive semiotic civilization.
Abstract This article investigates a textual mechanism in Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose linked to ekphrasis, in order to highlight how literary writing produces various visual, auditory, and kinesthetic effects that mimic a cinematic effect. In my hypothesis, these effects, linked to the poetic nature and iconicity (Greimas, Algirdas J. 1984. Sémiotique figurative et sémiotique plastique [Figurative semiotics and plastic semiotics]. Actes sémiotiques. Documents 60. 1–24) of an aesthetic work, can be interpreted and translated intersemiotically. This happens in different but effective ways in the 1986 film directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud The Name of the Rose and in a 2023 graphic novel based on the novel and illustrated by Milo Manara, likewise titled The Name of the Rose . Through a comparison of Eco’s novel and the 2019 TV series The Name of the Rose , directed by Giacomo Battiato, I will demonstrate how derivative texts can reopen the narrative structures of the original novel, unlocking its potential and creating new narrative paths that utilize transmediality.
Abstract Digital platforms have transformed political talk shows from one-directional broadcast formats into participatory environments in which audiences actively evaluate, reinterpret, and publicly judge mediated debates. YouTube enables users to engage with political infotainment content through visible interaction metrics such as likes, comments, and emojis. Drawing on the theory of participatory culture, this study examines how YouTube users collectively construct power relations through engagement with a viral political talk-show episode: “Israel-Hamas War: Piers Morgan vs. Bassem Youssef on Palestine’s Treatment.” Conceptualizing audience engagement as participatory endorsement, the study argues that users do not merely react to political content but publicly evaluate speaker credibility and performance, producing a “winner versus loser” narrative through collective evaluative practices. Using quantitative content analysis, the study examines 486 top comments. The analysis focuses on verbal appraisal, emoji use, and engagement metrics to assess how users evaluate and endorse the two main social actors. Findings reveal a strong asymmetry in audience response: Youssef is overwhelmingly endorsed through positive language, high engagement, and affective emojis, while Morgan is predominantly framed through criticism, and disbelief. These patterns suggest that YouTube’s participatory affordances facilitate audience-constructed symbolic authority, enabling users to collectively position Youssef as the rhetorical “winner” of the debate.
Abstract This study investigates how students’ interactions with embodied and disembodied generative conversational AI in an English for Specific Purposes classroom indicate anthropomorphism and meaning making during interaction. Fifty ESL students interacted with two different modalities of generative AI for six weeks: an embodied conversational agent (ECA) in mixed reality (MR) and ChatGPT voice applications. The study employed multimodal social semiotics (MSS) and computational linguistic analysis (LIWC) to examine both observable multimodal conduct (gestures, gaze, and spatial orientation) and linguistic markers of social orientation. MSS findings revealed higher modal density in the MR condition, with learners demonstrating sustained gaze, forward lean, and spontaneous co-speech gestures, positioning the agent as socially accountable. LIWC analysis showed that ChatGPT interactions contained significantly higher social processes, affiliation language, and self-referential pronoun use, whereas MR interactions demonstrated higher emotional tone. The results indicate that anthropomorphism operates as both an embodied semiotic practice and a linguistically enacted social stance, shaped by interactional affordances and technological modality.
Abstract This paper examines the emergence of agentic AI in post-digital musical storytelling through a case study of Xania Monet , an AI-generated R&B persona whose sustained narrative coherence and affective specificity circulate across platformed digital environments. Building on algorithmic ventriloquism and phonographic theatricality , the study conceptualizes Monet as a techno-vocal human–machine compound, a relational assemblage in which human lyricism, generative architectures, training data, and platform infrastructures co-produce a culturally legible musical identity. Theoretically, the paper mobilizes an integrated Affective Actor–Network Theory framework in dialogue with Afrofuturism. Within this dual lens, AI is treated as an actant embedded in heterogeneous creative networks, while Monet ’s artistry is interpreted as a speculative intervention into Black futurity that reanimates diasporic musical epistemologies through computational voice synthesis. Rather than reproducing a disembodied simulation, her post-digital storytelling enacts a form of synthetic affective sincerity structured around resilience, spiritual endurance, relational rupture, boundary-setting, and reflexive engagement with post-digital culture.
Abstract As a sacred site providing concrete evidence of China’s 5,000-year civilization, the archaeological ruins of Liangzhu City shine brightly among ancient cultures. In exploring early regional cultural memory and its restoration, inscribed symbols on precious artifacts offer crucial insights into the profound connotations of Liangzhu, which serve as vital indicators of its cultural sophistication as unique evidence of Liangzhu civilization. Grounded in semiotics and taking the bird totem as a point of departure, this study applies Charles S. Peirce’s triadic model of signs – icon, index, and symbol – to conduct a layered analysis of the materiality, social function, and cultural conventions embedded in the “Bird Standing on Platform” inscriptions, situating them within the dynamic process of “representamen-object-interpretant”. This article delves into the surface of the signs to reveal their cultural essence, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of this early civilization. Ultimately, it aims to enhance global recognition of the humanistic value of Liangzhu culture as a “golden national emblem,” thereby advancing the dialogue between Chinese and other ancient civilizations.
Abstract The present corpus-based study of 1,247 Russian metaphorical expressions extends Conceptual Metaphor Theory by specifying how different dimensions of embodiment contribute to metaphorical grounding. Drawing on construction grammar and embodied cognition research, I develop a multidimensional annotation scheme distinguishing sensorimotor, proprioceptive, interoceptive , and motor embodiment . Analysis reveals systematic patterns: ontological metaphors associate strongly with tactile embodiment (42.6 %) and nominal constructions (63.7 %); orientational metaphors align predominantly with proprioceptive embodiment (68.2 %) and prepositional phrases (38.6 %); structural metaphors favor verbal constructions (48.6 %) with balanced embodiment profiles; primary metaphors show strong interoceptive and motor grounding (64.4 % combined). Chi-square tests confirm highly significant associations (χ 2 = 547.23, p < 0.001, Cramér’s V = 0.42). These findings demonstrate that embodiment operates through multiple distinct channels rather than as a unified grounding mechanism, offering a more fine-grained specification of how bodily experience structures metaphorical thought.
Abstract The expansion of automated content moderation has fundamentally reshaped communicative practices on social media platforms, particularly within short-form video environments, namely TikTok. In response to increasingly opaque systems of algorithmic governance, users have developed algospeak : a repertoire of coded linguistic and multimodal strategies that enable the expression of sensitive content while mitigating the risk of algorithmic suppression. This study examines algospeak as a form of algorithmic negotiation, through which users actively recalibrate meaning-making practices under conditions of computational visibility control. Adopting a mixed-methods design that combines multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), digital ethnography, and corpus-assisted semantic exploration, the study analyses a dataset of 550 TikTok posts. The findings demonstrate that algospeak operates as a multimodal semiotic ecology, in which meaning is systematically redistributed across textual, visual, auditory, and performative channels. Strategies such as orthographic manipulation, emoji encoding, euphemistic reformulation, translanguaging, and multimodal masking function not as isolated linguistic innovations but as coordinated practices that sustain a dual intelligibility. Algospeak emerges as a creative self-censorship and an adaptive response to platform governance, reflecting growing forms of algorithmic awareness and anticipatory self-regulation among users.
Symbols are central to the ways in which youth articulate emotions in digital environments. This study examines the Kong Yiji literature movement, a Chinese online phenomenon, conceptualizing youth-anxiety memory as a form of counter-public memory embodied mainly by symbolic forms. Extending the framework of recontextualized rhetorical economy and adopting a mixed-methods approach that integrates online ethnography with a symbol-focused discourse analysis, this study traces the uptake, circulation, and effects of the movement to reveal how symbols both embody and complicate youth-anxiety memory. Specifically, this study foregrounds the socio-historical context, places (social media), symbols, and various rhetorical agents in shaping the uptake, circulation, and effects of the movement. Moreover, this study identifies key structural characteristics of youth-anxiety memory in the digital context. Implications arising from the movement are also provided.
This paper defines the relationship between units within a single, homogeneous sign as intrasemiotic relations , while the relationship between heterogeneous semiotic elements discovered within a sign is termed intersemiotic relations . The principle of differentiation , also referred to as the heterogeneous double-coding principle , aims to uncover intersemiotic relationality where intrasemiotic relations are conventionally assumed. Based on this principle, the paper analyzes the intersemiotic relationality of Chinese characters, specifically: (1) the object-sign relation and langue-image relation on the expressive plane of Chinese characters; (2) the object-signification relation on the content plane; and (3) the instance relation on the signification (mode) plane. The paper argues that Chinese characters belong to heterogeneous intersemiotic relations rather than the homogeneous intrasemiotic relations of alphabetic writing. Chinese characters pertain to semiotics rather than linguistics. The implicit heterogeneous intersemiotic relational model of Chinese characters may facilitate a civilizational-level dialogue and mutual learning with Western formalized homogeneous semiotics, which is rooted in alphabetic culture.
This study explores how gravestones at Kinondoni Cemetery in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, serve as multimodal communication tools that convey cultural, spiritual, and socio-economic narratives. Using a qualitative method, data were gathered through field observations and photography. During these visits, the researcher documented the general layout and key features of the cemetery through observations and photographs. The study used social semiotic theory and multimodality to analyse the inscriptions, symbols, and designs of 65 intentionally selected graves. Results showed that gravestones at Kinondoni Cemetery express complex meanings through a mix of linguistic and visual elements, including multilingual inscriptions, metaphors, and material choices. The research further highlighted that gravestones reflect the cultural identities of the deceased, their socio-economic status, religious beliefs, and collective memory as inscribed by their survivors. Moreover, metaphors and inscriptions on gravestones offer insights into grief and loss, tributes, and the legacy of the deceased. These results deepen understanding of cemeteries as spaces for cultural texts that mirror the linguistic landscape and interaction between individual legacies and broader social contexts of the departed.
To English readers, Chinese academic prose can appear insubstantial, a perception that scholarly discussion has often reduced to impressionistic views of interlingual difference. This perception fuels a “deficit” view prevalent in language pedagogy, which persistently characterizes Chinese academic authors without identifying a root cause beyond intercultural rhetorical patterns. This article argues that this “deficit” view rests on biased epistemological foundations that prioritize center languages over peripheral ones. Through a semiotic reappraisal of blankness – using examples from scholarly translation and cross-linguistic writing – this study recasts features typically deemed deficient as strategic omissions. Deconstructing disciplinary meaning-making with blank-sign theory, the analysis demonstrates that these features function as polysemantic relational markers whose interpretation depends on discursive norms and the reader’s situated knowledge. The study concludes that such a reappraisal is crucial for situating academic authors within the authentic socio-cultural context that shapes their choices. Integrating output features with authors’ linguistic backgrounds, this approach enables a more just and informed understanding of multilingual academic writing. The discussion offers an alternative to mainstream approaches, providing a linguistically neutral perspective to support pedagogical innovations aimed at fostering mutual understanding and reciprocal learning in intercultural scholarly communication.
