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.

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 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.

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.