This paper investigates noncommercial slogans, one prevalent type of linguistic signs in China, examining the stances and identities emerging from these signs, and the relevant contexts from which they emerge. Du Bois’ stance triangle model is adapted and employed in the case study of Zhengzhou urban–rural slogans, combining qualitative and quantitative methods via BFSU Qualitative Coder 1.2. Results show a higher proportion of evaluative and alignment stances than positioning stance, including affective and epistemic stances, in both urban and rural areas. A notable distinction lies in the proportion of positioning stance, with a relatively lower prevalence in rural areas compared to urban areas. Second, these stances index the identities as an object-centered evaluator, a collectively intersubjectivity-centered aligner, as well as the self-local/translocal identity. Third, the analysis reveals Chinese economic, administrative, cultural, social, and political contexts related to the emergence of the identities within these signs.

Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat, say that Muslims have abandoned religion (din) and been led astray by the world (dunya) and this has thrust the world into a state of moral chaos (fitna). They insist that only their form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) can remedy this situation. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of chronotope, or distinct imaginaries of space and time, anthropologists have argued that chronotopes produce a “plot structure” for social interaction that instantiates different social persona and forms of agency. In this article, I argue that dawat is organized around a chronotope of piety that encourages deference to others as well as defers the realization of piety to the future, thereby creating a self-limiting and self-regulating form of pious authority that Tablighis see as the basis for the creation and moral reproduction of the Islamic community. Pious authority takes on political significance as an alternative form of sovereignty against the backdrop of religious and political fragmentation engendered by state- and market-driven Islamization in Pakistan.

This paper aims to explore human beings as language animals, examining how language shapes them in the lifeworld. Biosemiotics and anthroposemiotics are both geared toward studying the relations between life and the environment. This paper thus concerns the semiotics of naming, exploring naming as meaning-making activity based on the interrelation of language and narrative. There are two ways of looking at the language functions in the act of naming. One is “languaging,” which is geared toward producing intimacy with the surrounding world in nature by naming things to establish a relationship with them. The other is “narrating,” which generates a dialogic relationship with fellow human beings by storytelling based on existence and place. This enables humans to cultivate the selves through semiotic cultural activity. Thus, I shall elaborate the semiotic process in naming and narrating things, which leads to culture-making activity, by analyzing the place Ieodo off the south coast of Korea within the biosemiotic perspective which connects language and cognition with the narrative world for culture-making activity.

The functioning of the liberal order relies on the semiotic indeterminacy of its key concepts—they need to be broad enough to encompass multiple, and at times conflicting articulations—but the denotational open-endedness of these concepts also renders them particularly useful for efforts to unsettle liberal political projects. In Brazil, state institutions’ secularist commitments to retaining “religion” and its derivates as denotationally indeterminant both constrain efforts to combat Evangelical Christian “religious intolerance” against African origin religious traditions and enable Evangelical Christian graftings of the discourse of “religious intolerance” onto claims that frame the efforts to curb their attacks on religious and sexual minorities as a form of religious persecution. These effects are, however, rendered invisible by the state emphasis on the denotational open-endedness of “religious intolerance,” which obscures the different forms of enregisterment that organize the entextualization of the term in religious activist and government spaces in Brazil.

Semiotic indeterminacy describes the basic observation that signs are always unstable and open to interpretation. As such, semiotic indeterminacy can become a resource for the strategic pursuit and exploitation of political goals. In this article, I examine the role and multiple dimensions of semiotic indeterminacy in nuclear nonproliferation, the global governance project to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Taking as an illustrative example the controversy around the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I demonstrate that when the transparency practices implemented to close down on the semiotic indeterminacy of nuclear materials fail, nuclear verification turns from a techno-rational project into a moral-evaluative one with the aim of uncovering the hidden intentions of a state. This transduction of one semiotic register into another derives from transparency’s dual tradition as both a rationalizing imperative as well as a moralized norm of sincerity. Attending to the semiotic dimensions of liberal forms of governance offers a new perspective on its contradictions.

This article documents the historical and semiotic factors that have entailed a normative ambiguity of “the internship,” both as an ideological sign and as a participant role that has increasingly mediated the relationships between higher education and careers in the United States. We present comparative life history narratives of two interns drawn from a longitudinal interview study, which illustrate the negotiations, experiences, and consequences that the ambiguity of the internship participant role entails for students attempting to navigate the transition between education and employment. We argue that the stable semiotic ambiguity of the internship participant role is a consequence of a political economy of collusion, in which employers, educators, and students benefit from the emergence and spread of the internship economy, with students finding it uniquely useful to establish credibility in the highly competitive employment market. We point out how students’ class-based resources, networks, and positionalities constrain the possible outcomes for them from this process.

The authors in this collection start with the insight that not all instances of semiotic indeterminacy are produced in the same way, that they can be located differently in the process of semiosis, and this fact shapes how and when semiotic indeterminacy is deployed by formulators and interpreters. The authors explore patterned uses of semiotic indeterminacy in Brazil, Bulgaria, Iran, and the United States to examine the role indeterminacy plays in institutional attempts at control and persuasion.

This paper examines the poetics and cultural significance of fanfa youth band performances in the rural commune of Limonade in northern Haiti. Drawing on observations during fieldwork in 2010 and 2016, it analyzes how fanfa bands, directed by maestros, create complex sign systems through music, movement, and materialities. Utilizing Roman Jakobson’s semiotic theory and Linda Waugh’s expansion of poetic function, the study explores the interpretive relations between these components and their role in constituting a unique cultural soundscape. By examining the selection and combination of musical pieces, routes, and accompanying elements, the research highlights the dynamic interaction between fanfa bands and their social environment. This semiotic analysis offers insights into the broader implications of cultural landscapes and the poetics of performance in Haiti.