In this special issue, we inspect material and nonhuman phenomena that contribute to interaction and meaning-making—among them sounds, visual signs, animals, images, digital devices, bodies, and movements—in order to stimulate new thinking surrounding the question of what language is from a posthumanist perspective. The contributors are language-oriented scholars who focus on material and technological environments in language. They interrogate how linguistic and nonlinguistic practices interrelate to produce meaning, concepts of the human, and social relations. The theoretical backgrounds of such posthumanist approaches to the sociomaterial practice of interaction are introduced in this article.

Cross-language internet memes have emerged as a unique and popular mode of online communication, combining bilingual elements with visually textual components. These memes exhibit distinctive characteristics at semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic levels, rendering them a noteworthy semiotic phenomenon in contemporary digital culture. To deepen our understanding of cross-language internet memes, this study investigates user perceptions through a questionnaire, employing SPSS Statistics software for analysis. Applying a social semiotic approach, we decipher the semiotic mechanisms of cross-language memes, shedding light on their potential implications for identity construction. Additionally, we reflect on two prominent trends in internet meme development: the shift from monomodal to multimodal communication and from monolingual to multilingual expressions. This research hopes to provide insights for meme research and online discourse investigations.

Many Classical Chinese words were derived through tonal/voicing alternations. New characters were specifically created for some derived words, while other derived words kept using the original characters, making the original characters multifunctional. In the evolution of the Chinese language, those derivations represented by specifically created characters have mostly been preserved, while multifunctional characters were not likely to stay multifunctional: it is common to eliminate some form-meaning pairs, leaving each character with only one pronunciation. Meanwhile, the form-meaning pairs represented by characters began to compound with each other, reducing syntactic freedom. Ideographic characters thereby stabilized the basic units, that is, root morphemes, for the Chinese language, while those phonological alternations that were not clearly represented in writing mostly disappeared, making the language increasingly analytic. This finding sheds light on the stabilizing effect of writing on (the spoken) language and thus challenges the traditional view that writing is secondary to language.

Pets using “talking buttons” to ostensibly tell their owner about their thoughts and needs have become a huge success on social media. With buttons that upon activation play a prerecorded message, these devices are marketed as tools in teaching human language to animals in order to allow them to “speak their minds.” This article investigates these practices of technologically mediated human-dog interactions through the analysis of social media videos and examines the claim that these button-based interactions are illustrative of animals’ language acquisition. This article concludes that “talking buttons” in human-dog communication should rather be understood as semiotic assemblages in which meaning is collaboratively constructed through the dynamic, situated interaction of bodies, linguistic resources, objects, and touch.

This text addresses the connection between the work of Charles Goodwin in interactional linguistics and contemporary semiotics, notably that of the structuralist Paris School, known today as Greimasian and post-Greimasian semiotics. The latter constitutes scholarship having further developed some great distinctions formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure, such as the one between langue and parole, in the study of multimodality (relations between natural and nonverbal languages). However, Goodwin’s texts consider not only Saussure’s structuralist semiology but also another semiotics, that is, the American cognitive Peircean tradition, specifically regarding the topic of diagrammatic reasoning in multimodal discourse. This article seeks to discuss these two semiotic approaches that I consider as a semiotic foundation of Goodwin’s work, helping him to study the creativity at play in multimodal languages and in scientific diagrammatic devices. I will first return to Goodwin’s contributions in order to reformulate the question of the relations between verbal, visual, and gestural languages in his notational system (transcription of exchanges). Second, I will examine the case of the dynamics of inscriptions in science, raising the issue of the diagram. Third, I will explore the points of encounter between Goodwin’s conception of the substrate of interactions and Jacques Fontanille’s enunciative praxis, in order to consider the dynamic relationship between sedimentation and transformation in social and scientific practices.

This article focuses on the Nechung kang-so (bskang gso), a ritual performed at Nechung monastery in exile, and deemed secret (gsang ba) by the monks. In my interactions with the monks, this secret presented itself as an unremitting series of contradictions and conundrums. I attempt here to portray and understand them. I posit that the secret invoked an implicit “cultural concept” (Silverstein 2004), namely, the kang-so’s transmissibility. For the kang-so’s transmission within the monastery involved a specific semiotics of authorization, rooted in a karmic ethic. To reveal the secret to me was to extricate the esoteric ritual from that traditional “social organization of interdiscursivity,” and the ethic shaping it (Gal 2018). The monks’ citations of the esoteric ritual, whereby they spoke to me of the secret, thus performed an alteration in the kang-so’s transmissibility, a reorganization of the esoteric ritual’s interdiscursivities, toward enabling its “circulation” among academic publics.

Asset tokenization, a financial practice that generates tokens based on distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain, is a representational practice in which token issuers establish artificially devised sign relationships between tokens and assets, despite some issues and complexities of blockchain. Human confidence in this practice is critical for its successful implementation. This article suggests that human confidence in blockchain is supported and circulated by the doxa of blockchain, which the article frames as a linguistic phenomenon where people talk more about how to use a given object than about the object itself. By paying attention to the artificially devised sign relations between tokens and assets and confident stance-taking toward blockchain by users, the article argues that a linguistic approach is necessary to understand how human confidence makes asset tokenization happen.

This article makes a case for understanding International Sign (IS) as a distributed practice. IS, a translingual practice, arose from interactions among individuals from diverse linguistic backgrounds, integrating signs from multiple national sign languages and leveraging iconic and transparent features of sign language lexicons and grammars. At the heart of IS is the principle of calibration, an adaptive process aimed at aligning signs to foster mutual understanding. This study delves into the use of IS in an adult education classroom in Denmark, where IS includes not only the use of signs but also their interplay with technology and writing. The discussed examples suggest that IS is a fluid process in which people shift between conventional and adaptive signing. Furthermore, the examples showcase an intricate relationship between signing and forms of writing, suggesting that the latter should not be seen as separate from IS.

This study focuses on crowdsourcing platforms developed by the Romanian government and civil society for the support of Ukrainian refugees to gain an understanding of the symbolic battles, contested problematizations, and discourses about Ukrainian refugees in the Romanian public sphere. We take these crowdsourcing platforms as dispositives that have a strategic function. They are both infrastructures of problem-solving and discursive fields constituted around the public problem of refugees. Our methodological approach, derived from a semiotic perspective on dispositive analysis, explores how meaning is built on crowdsourcing platforms and what strategies are employed to mobilize the public toward politically significant action. We construct a typology of crowdsourcing initiatives and identify two distinct categories of actors that gain visibility in the public arena: crowdsourcing professionals and aid entrepreneurs. Overall, our analysis highlights that actors employ a variety of semiotic resources and strategies to educate the public and get them involved in humanitarian action.

In the twenty-first century to answer the question “Is it art at all?” has become a matter of heteronomy. The work of art is subject to historical accidentalities that define aesthetic criteria. Meanwhile, beauty is no longer part of the definition of art. John Fowles’s novel The Collector engages the reader with the story of a kidnapping, a postmodern enterprise where reality and fiction overlap, making it impossible for the reader to distinguish the boundaries of each. However, the dynamic relationship of Miranda and Clegg can also be read as the historical clash between the modernist avant-gardes versus the postmodern conceptual art, with Miranda’s final death symbolizing the end of art.

Drawing upon a multimodal corpus consisting of 48 farmer-themed cartoons retrieved from the China News Cartoon Network, this research aims to undertake a comprehensive analysis of farmers’ images constructed through the utilization of various multimodal metaphors and metonymies in news cartoons. A multimodal critical metaphor/metonymy analysis approach will be adopted to lay bare the hidden evaluative attitudes that underlie these tropes. Thorough scrutiny, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the study reveals the existence of five primary stereotypical media images of farmers in the Chinese news media. These include the depiction of farmers as economically disadvantaged laborers, powerless takers reliant on protection, contrasting figures to urban citizens, poorly educated criminals, and beneficiaries of agricultural policies. The predominantly one-dimensional, weakened, and biased images are intentionally (or unintentionally) crafted by the media through the use of metaphorical and metonymic mappings, which involve highlighting certain aspects while concealing others. The negative attitudes, discrimination, and stigmatization toward the least powerful members of Chinese society unveil the underlying unequal power dynamics, social hierarchy, and economic duality.

This article examines how the “arbitrary content of culture” (Bourdieu 1977) comes to be inscribed onto patterns of sociolinguistic variation. Specifically, we consider the role of iconicity in this process. Studies of iconicity and variation to date have tended to focus on the iconic properties of the speech signal itself (e.g., an association between higher-frequency sounds and smallness). We bring these ideas about sound symbolism into dialogue with research on embodied behavioral codes, which link particular forms of bodily comportment and their associated qualia with specific social categories and positions. We suggest that certain claims about sound symbolic meanings may be better interpreted as derived effects of socially meaningful bodily hexis. Our arguments are illustrated through a consideration of two variables, both of which have received widespread attention in the literature on variation in English: the backing and lowering of the short front vowels and the fronting/backing of /s/. We discuss how treating these variables from the perspective of socially inculcated bodies can provide a unified account of their observed sociolinguistic patterning and help to shed light on how variables accrue social meaning more generally.

This article analyzes the semiotic representations of gender through the language practices of Cameroonian youth observed in Tu Know Ma Life (You know my life), a YouTube series popular among the French Cameroonian diaspora that follows the daily life of nine young middle- and upper-class Cameroonian immigrants (five women and four men) living in Paris. This series is regarded by its audience as an authentic representation of Cameroonian identity, partly due to its remarkable use of Francanglais, a hybrid youth slang spoken in Cameroon. I analyze how the mediatized representation of Francanglais practices in the first season of the YouTube series contributes to the linguistic construction of gender differentiations. I argue that through the highly gendered use of Francanglais and French by women and men, the series reproduces hegemonic gender ideologies while reinforcing the ideological association between Francanglais and hegemonic heterosexual masculinity.

The existing literature on political satire has focused primarily on the effects on audiences and their responses to satirical messages, neglecting the exploration of the implications of these effects. This article takes a reproduction perspective and argues that audiences regenerate and spread satirical messages to continuously denounce a political figure. By examining the circulation of “689,” the humorous nickname of former chief executive C. Y. Leung in Hong Kong, this article introduces a new conceptual framework called the “collective reproduction” process, which includes three processes: (1) production, (2) circulation, and (3) reproduction. This framework is used to analyze how the opposition effectively utilized this nickname to criticize the leader throughout his term of office. Theoretical contributions include providing political satire with an ongoing approach that facilitates its circulation. Empirically, the case of Hong Kong enriches the understanding of opposition movements within the context of political satire.

This article analyzes the semiotic links between embodied, linguistic, and nonlinguistic signs found in a Bikram yoga studio in Oslo, Norway, and on its website, which are informed by other hegemonic sites of yoga circulation on a more global level, which include the Bikram franchise and Lululemon. Drawing on (digital) ethnographic data, I employ the analytical concepts of enregisterment (Agha 2007) and mediatization (Agha 2011), in order to trace these interlocking processes within three institutional sites that disseminate and transmit a (Bikram) yoga register through the analysis of multimodal images both offline and online. The mediated messages of flexible, embodied, and highly commodified practices that attain high cultural and social value are dialectally embedded in physical, material, and technological environments contributing to posthumanist theorization on how we understand language in relation to people, objects, and place with the aim of broadening our understanding of communication to relocate where social semiotics occurs (Pennycook 2018b).

Posthumanist thought brings a set of ethical and political concerns to the (socio)linguistic table to do with human relations to the planet and its other inhabitants. This opens up a space for reconsideration of language and materiality. In some accounts, language is an immaterial medium whose relation to the material world is only symbolic or representational. New materialist accounts of language, by contrast, view it as embodied, embedded and distributed activity (language is assembled and extended by bodies in physical space). This is to suggest that language, both material and symbolic, is deeply entwined with a world both material and symbolic and that any approach to sociolinguistics that seeks to grasp language in the world needs to work with an understanding of the dynamic entanglements between an animated world of matter and a material world of language. This is to focus on the material foundations of communication, the corporeal, physical, or technological conditions of human and nonhuman communicative interaction and on the relationships between material realities and discourse. This is to ask what and where language is and to suggest that without material relations there is no language.