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Abstract
This article employs Tzvetan Todorov’s ‘triggers of interpretation’ to examine how Song Confucian classicists disproved the omenology of the Five Phases. Since the first century, the omenology has shifted to being the paradigm of interpreting omens and disasters. However, many Confucian classicists during the Song dynasty grew dissatisfied with this paradigm and offered arguments to challenge its authority and validity. A few studies have noted this but have not dissected why Song Confucianists could discredit the system deeply ingrained in the Chinese intellectual landscape. To address this gap, I first revisit the omenology of the Five Phases and identify that its feasibility rests on the authority of Confucian learning and the analogy between signs and interpretants. Next, I discover that the counterarguments of most Song Confucianists not only elucidated this omenology as a misinterpretation of Confucian classics by Han Confucian classicists, but also found the analogy unreasonable and devoid of any ground.
Abstract
Both ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ are words with a long and polysemic history in Western culture. Moreover, the 120-year history of the modern semiotics movement has failed to provide a highly needed definition of these most basic terms, thus resulting in ambiguity of the definition of the discipline itself. This paper proposes defining ‘sign/symbol’ as ‘a sensuous entity to be regarded as carrying meaning’. Furthermore, the terminological chaos that arises between ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’, which originated in Western languages, has caused chaos for translators in selecting the appropriate Chinese term from the options Fuhao and Xiangzheng, since a phonetic rendition is hardly possible in Chinese. On this basis, the paper attempts to define ‘semiotics’ as ‘the formal study of meaning-making’. In this understanding, semiotics covers not only signification but also communication and interpretation of meaning.
Abstract
This article discusses new developments in the field of literary theory and literary praxis in the era of new media from the perspectives of media theory and interology. It takes new media as a McLuhanesque formal cause and holds that a conspicuous characteristic of literary works in the era of new media lies in the salience and normalization of interality. This development means art forms like mosaic and Pointillism have acquired a paradigmatic significance as a result. In revealing this new paradigm, the article also points to some current social maladies that have come with new media. It holds that literary writing should go beyond the mere embodiment of symptoms and make an intervention in media-induced maladies. The article affirms the irreplaceability of experimental literature and serious literature in an era of attention deficit, and points out that form should occupy a paramount position in literary theory, literary criticism, and literary praxis.
Abstract
This study looks at the grammatical category of evidentiality in Qiangic languages within the typological framework developed by Aikhenvald. An examination of nine Qiangic languages, with a total of sixteen dialects and varieties, shows that the evidential systems currently identified can be grouped into three categories: the Rgyalrongic type, which is characterized by a firsthand and a non-firsthand subsystem in the past tense, the Qiang type, with a visual, an inferential, and a reported evidential, and the southern Qiangic type, which consists of a direct, an inferential, and a reported and/or a quotative evidential. After comparing these systems, it is found that there is little or no conclusive evidence for them to be inherited from a proto-language, instead, they are more likely to have developed independently. The special properties of the direct evidentials and the unusual composition of the reported and quotative evidentials recurrent in several languages are also discussed.
Abstract
The Chu ghosts and spirits are divided into those “above” and those “below.” “Above” and “below” cannot be understood only as referring to heavenly spirits and earthly deities but should include also ancestral spirits. The Chu people’s sacrifices and prayers are also divided into those “internal” and “external.” This distinction is a spatial one that is not based on blood relations. The complete, well-organized system of heavenly spirits, earthly deities, and human ghosts had not fully formed in Warring States Chu culture.