Semiotics: Principles & Problems

This book attempts to build semiotics on a new foundation, which is meaning-making. At the very beginning, the central terms of signs and semiotics are redefined, as the old definition for sign (one thing standing for another) is far from satisfactory. Sign is a perception that is regarded as carrying meaning. In this way, semiotics, now built on the foundation of meaning-making and meaning-cognition, is a science of meaning. All the principles are now under the scrutiny of the new definition, and many issues are answered more succinctly. Therefore, the new definition is extended to the new fields of cultural activities in human society, and a series of problems arise.

This book intends to discuss and explore these questions, such as the middle reclining in the cultural markedness, the sliding of motivation in art, the difficult distinction between falsehood and untruthfulness, and the driving force of modernization in China.

Is the first of its kind to call attention to the necessary breakthrough in order to build a cultural semiotics Serves as the first attempt to systematically advancing new concepts on such important issues as cultural markedness Makes a careful distinction between lies and fictionality which results in serious problems on the truthful of semiosis

Autorentext

Yiheng Zhao is Professor of Semiotics & Narratology, Sichuan University, and Director of the Institute of Semiotics & Media Studies (ISMS). Born in 1943, he did his M.A. in 1981, and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. He started teaching at the University of London in 1988 and resettled in the Sichuan University in 2005. He is Member of the Collegium of the International Association of Semiotic Studies and Chair of the Academic Committee of the Chinese Association of Semiotics & Communication Studies. He has written and edited around 30 books, including his "Three Books on Meanings": Semiotics Principles & Problems, A General Narratology, and Philosophical Semiotics. He has won numerous awards including Fulbright Award for Research in the USA (1981), Foreign Literature Study Award(1984),Comparative Literature Association Award (1986), Sichuan Social Sciences and Philosophy Honorary Award (2015), Chinese University Press Award (2018), Ministry of Education Award (2020), among others.

Inhalt

Composition of Sign.- Semiosis and Incomplete Signs.- Co-text.- Coordination of Two Axes.- Semiotic Rhetoric.- Code and Metalanguage.- Motivation and Its Sliding.- Semiotic Veridiction.- Markedness.- Semiotics of Art.- The double forces of modernization.