Foreign Languages & Literatures

G. Crespi Reghizzi, M. Delmestro (Rivista di diritto pubblico comparato ed europeo [Journal of Comparative and European Public Law], 2004, Vol. II, p. 575-599).

The paper is about the 2004 amendments to the PRC Constitution. It provides a brief introduction to the Constitutional history of the PRC, a background for the 2004 amendments, and an explanation of the content and significance of the amendments, with a detailed elucidation of the amending processes.

Juri Lotman's well-known distinction of primary modeling system versus secondary modeling system is a lasting legacy of his that has been adhered to, modified, and refuted by semioticians of culture and nature. Adherence aside, modifications and refutations have focused on the issue whether or not language is a primary modeling system, and, if not, what alternatives can be made available to replace it. As Sebeok would concur, for both biosemiosis and anthroposemiosis, language can only be a secondary modeling system on top of the biological experience of Umwelt or human sensory system. This paper proposes to explore the possibility of a "preverbal" modeling system suggested by Lotman's spatial concept of semiosphere, and discuss its implications in cross-cultural dialogue.

The dichotomy of system versus history is a time-honoured issue that has inflicted many scientific disciplines, including biology. Ever since the publication of his Systema Naturae in 1735, Carolus Linnaeus' position as father of taxonomy has been established, but his attempt at systematisation has also been severely challenged from time to time by natural historians. This paper will discuss the issue of natural system versus natural history, using Carolus Linnaeus and Charles Darwin as examples. The theoretical point of attack is Darwin's critique of systematics in his Origin of Species and Michel Foucault's critique of classification in his Les mots et les choses. While both Foucault and Darwin criticise Linnaeus for putting nature in the Procrastian bed of classification, the British evolutionist opts for narrativisation to present his version of natural history. This narratological project, though based on scientific observations and experiments, relies heavily on the many devices of textualisation. It can be seen especially in Darwin's voyage writings; it can also be seen in Linnaeus' less systematic writings, such as A Tour in Lapland, despite the latter's general reservation about rhetoric, especially in his debate with the French naturalists. If one compares the prototype of natural history, i.e., that by Pliny the Elder, one will easily find the long tradition of representing nature mediated by some set of discursive strategies. In this regard, neither Linnaeus nor Darwin is exceptional. An interesting example showing narrative encoding is the textual parallel between the first chapter of Origin of Species and the Book of Genesis, especially the experience of Foreword -This paper was originally delivered at the Seminar of 'Codes in Sign Systems' at the International Semiotics Institute, which met in Imatra, Finland, on 3 rd -9 th June 2004. As the organiser of the seminar, Dr Kalevi Kull of Tartu University, is by profession a biologist, and the Seminar was devoted to biosemiotics, I gave a brief survey of the changing concept of code in recent biological studies before shifting to my main concern of the controversy over coding in natural history and natural system. The latter part of the essay discusses how Linneaus' and Darwin's nature writings are encoded, and suggests that whilst code is indispensable to discourse, different types of discourse call for different ways of coding.

In his well-known essay, 'What Is a Sign?' (CP 2.281, 285) Peirce uses 'likeness' and 'resemblance' interchangeably in his definition of icon. The synonymity of the two words has rarely, if ever, been questioned. Curiously, a locus classicus of the pair, at least in F. M. Cornford's English translation, can be found in a late dialogue of Plato, namely, the Sophist. In this dialogue on the myth and truth of the sophists' profession, the mysterious 'stranger', who is most likely Socrates' persona, makes the famous distinction between eikon (likeness) and phantasma (semblance) (236a,b). For all his broad knowledge in ancient philosophy, Peirce never mentioned this parallel; nor has any Peircean scholar identified it. There seems to be little problem with eikon as likeness, but phantasma may give rise to a puzzle which this paper will attempt to solve. Plato uses two pairs of words: what eikon is to phantasma is eikastikén (the making of likeness [235d]) to phantastikén (semblance making [236c]). In other words, icons come into being because of the act of icon-making, which is none other than indexicality. Witness what Peirce says about the relationship between photographs and the objects they represent: "But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature." (Ibid.) Thus the iconicity which links the representamen (sign) and its object is made possible not only by an interpretant, but also by idexisation. Their possible etymological and epistemological links aside, the Peircean example of photographing and the Platonic discussion of painting and sculpturing in the Sophist, clearly show the physio-pragmatic aspect of iconicity. The paper will therefore reread the Peircean iconicity by closely analysing this relatively obscure Platonic text, and by so doing restore to the text its hidden semiotic dimension.

When ancient Chinese philosophy culminated in the 6th to 3rd centuries BCE, ¡ §hundreds of flowers [intellectual schools] were blooming¡¨. It has been often thought, however, that few theoreticians of the period devoted their attention to questions regarding the relationship between animal a nd human life ¡V despite their profuse discussion of, and heated debates about, both ¡ §nature¡¨ and ¡ §human nature¡¨ in thei ritings. This indifferent attitude towards creatures lower than humans is best illustrated by Confucius (551-479 BCE), who observed: ¡ §It is impossible to associate with birds and beasts, as if they were the same as us.¡¨ Later, however, this condescending attitude of the Sage would be challenged by the Daoist philos opher Zhuangzi (370 to 301 BCE), who untiringly advocates the equity of all creatures in the universe ¡V a pl ace where both living and fabulous organisms cohabit and co-evolve with one another, as well as with their environments. Morever, even Confucius¡¦ descendent Mencius (c.372-289 BCE) did not endorse his mentor¡¦s position, f or the latter¡¦s own writings are likewise inhabited by all kinds of creatures which not only serve t he passive role of poetic figuration, but actually also construct their respective Umwelten, paralleled by the umwelt-construction of human beings. Recent advances in biosemiotics and ecosemiotics have enabled us t o reread some of these philosophical texts, and to shed new light on this obscure aspect of Chinese thi nking. This paper will draw upon the sign reflections of C.S. Peirce and Jakob von Uexkull (1864 -1944, and make use of a composite analytical method of text semiotics and dialogue studies, to examine a number of political and ethical allegories by Zhuangzi and Mencius. Acknowledging the necessary circularity of i nterpretation and the homogeneity of observer and observed, the essay explores the ways in which ancie nt philosophical texts can be

In traditional Chinese literary criticism, textual strategies comparable to intertextuality have governed Chinese critics' and poets' reading and writing about literature throughout the dynasties. Drawing on the intertextual theories of Kristeva and Riffaterre, the paper probes into the phenomenon of sign system-mutations in two highly influential ancient texts: the Confucian Classic of Changes of the fifth century B.C.E. and Liu Xie' s The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, an ars poetica in the third century. The transformation of sign systems from nonverbal to verbal, in the case of the Changes, and from literate to literary or "creative" to "theoretical", in the case of the Dragons, bears witness to the Hjelmslevian reciprocity of object-semiotic and meta-semiotic.

Thomas A. Sebeok's global semiotics has inspired quite a few followers, noticeably Marcel Danesi, Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio. However, for all the trendiness of the word, the very concept of global should be subject to more rigorous examination, especially within today's ecological and politico-economic contexts. With human and natural disasters precipitating on a global and almost quotidian basis, it is only appropriate for global semioticians to pay more attention to such phenomena and to contemplate, even when confined to their attics, the semiotic consequences of disasters. The paper probes into the semiotic implications of the tsunami disaster that claimed quarter of a million lives in South and Southeast Asia during the Christmas holidays in 2004, and proposes a semiotics of disaster, developed from the discussions of the eighteenth-century British Empiricist philosopher Thomas Reid and the contemporary semiotician David S. Clarke, Jr. As the word's etymology indicates, disaster originally referred to a natural phenomenon, i.e., 'an obnoxious planet', and only by extension was it later used to cover man-made calamities, be it political or economic. Although the dichotomy of nature versus culture no longer holds good, the author uses the word disaster in the traditional sense by referring to 'natural' disasters only.

The metaphor of parasites or parasitism has dominated literary critical discourse since the 1970s, prominent examples being Michel Serres in France and J. Hillis Miller in America. In their writings the relationship between text and paratext, literature and criticism, is often likened to that between host and parasite, and can be therefore deconstructed. Their writings, along with those by Derrida, Barthes, and Thom, seem to be suggesting the possibility of a semiotics of parasitism. Unfortunately, none of these writers has drawn enough on the biological foundation of parasitism. Curiously, even in biology, parasitism is already a metaphor through which the signified of an ecological phenomenon involving two organisms is expressed by the signifier of "[eating] food at another's [side] table". This paper will make some preliminary remarks on semiotics of parasitism, based on Jakob von Uexküll's notion of Umwelt, and Maturana/Varela's notion of structural coupling. It will look into the phenomenon of co-evolutionary process in community ecology. With reference to empirical history, the project will briefly survey the literary and medical praxis of the 17th century England where large number of creative writings referred to the phenomenon of parasitism, which was deeply embedded in religious practice (e.g., the Eucharist) and political life (e.g., the courtier ecology in monarchy) of the times. Finally, it will touch upon the possible 'parasitic' relationship between language and biology.

Like other sciences, biosemiotics also has its time-honoured archive, consisting of writings by those who have been invented and revered as ancestors of the discipline. One such example is Jakob von Uexküll. As to the people who ‘invented’ him, they are either, to paraphrase a French cliché, ‘agents du cosmopolitisme sémiotique’ like Thomas Sebeok, or de jure and de facto progenitor like Thure von Uexküll. In the archive is the special issue of Semiotica 42. 1 (1982) edited by the late Sebeok and introduced by Thure von Uexküll. It is in the opening essay that Thure von UexküIl tries to restore Jakob von Uexküll’s role as a precursor of semiotics by negotiating the Elder with Saussure and the linguistics-oriented ‘semiology’ in his wake. However, semiotic mapping, in the strictly ‘disciplinary’ sense, of Jakob von Uexküll is no easy task because he ‘knew neither Peirce nor Saussure and did not use their terminology’ (Thure von Uexküll 1982,2). Because Thure prefers to call the Elder’s science ‘general semiotics’ (Thure von Uexküll 1982), this paper begins by assessing Thure von Uexküll’s semiotic configuration of Jakob, probe into the force and limits of the linguistic analogy, revisit the already time-honoured debate on the primary and secondary modelling systems, which was made famous by the Moscow-Tartu semioticians in the early 1970s, but severely criticized by Sebeok and his followers. The paper engages Sebeok from several fronts, directed first at his relegation of the Saussurian linguistic model, then at his critique of the Primary Modelling System, and finally at his reservation about evolutionism in light of the current debate on gene/meme co-evolution.

Like other sciences, biosemiotics also has its time-honoured archive, consisting, among other things, of writings by those who have been invented and revered as ancestors of the discipline. One such example is Jakob von Uexküll who has been hailed as a precursor of semiotics, developing his theory of "sign" and "meaning" independently of Saussure and Peirce. The juxtaposition of "sign" and "meaning" is revelatory because one can equally legitimately claim Uexküll as a hermeneutician in the same way as others having claimed him as a semiotician. Such a novel temptation can be justified by Uexküll's prolonged obsession with Sinn and Bedeutung since his first book in 1909. This paper attempts to reconstruct the immediate intellectual horizon of Uexküll's historicity, a discursive space traversed by his contemporaries Frege and Husserl, in order to see how Uexküll's discussions of Zeichen and Gegenstand, Sinn and Bedeutung, were informed by other philosophers of language, and to establish Uexküll as a phenomenological hermeneutician in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer. To forestall and counter possible criticism that hermeneutics is primarily concerned with textual interpretation, while Uexküll is at most an interpreter of animal life, the paper will discuss his unfinished parody of the Platonic dialogue Meno, which is entitled Die ewige Frage: Biologische Variationen über einen platonischen Dialog (1943). It is through such textual practice that one witnesses the emergence of an Uexküll who embodies at once the addressee exercising his understanding of ancient texts as well as the second addresser recoding his explanation to another group of targeted addressees. This textual practice already goes beyond the confines of biology and in fact involves the linguistic pragmatics of rhetoric and speech act.

HSDUWPHQW RI )RUHLJQ /DQJXDJHV DQG /LWHUDWXUHV 1DWLRQDO 7DLZDQ 8QLYHUVLW\ 1R 6HFWLRQ 5RRVHYHOW 5RDG 7DLSHL 7DLZDQ HPDLO FKDQJKO#FFPVQWXHGXWZ $EVWUDFW 1DPLQJ DFFRUGLQJ WR 6HEHRN FRQVWLWXWHV WKH ILUVW VWDJH RI ]RR VHPLRWLFV 7KLV VSHFLDO EXW FRPPRQ XVH RI ODQJXDJH DFWXDOO\ LQDXJXUDWHV PRUH FRPSOLFDWHG SURFHGXUHV RI KXPDQ GLVFRXUVH RQ QRQKXPDQ NLQJGRP LQ FOXGLQJ FODVVLILFDWLRQ RI LWV PHPEHUV %HFDXVH RI ODQJXDJH ¶V GRXEOH DUWLFXOD WLRQ LQ VRXQG DQG VHQVH DV ZHOO DV WKH JUDSKHPH ¶V SOHUHPLF PHDQLQJIXOO UDWKHU WKDQ FHQHPLF PHDQLQJHPSW\ FKDUDFWHULVWLF DFFRUGLQJ WR +MHOPVOHY &KLQHVH VFULSW LV FDSDEOH RI QDPLQJ DQG JURXSLQJ DQLPDOV UDQGRPO\ EXW HIIHFWLYHO\ 7KLV SDSHU DWWHPSWV WR GHVFULEH WKH VDLG VFULSWRULDO ³QHFHVVLW\ RI QDPLQJ´ .ULSNH LQ FODVVLFDO &KLQHVH E\ FLWLQJ DOO WKH FUHDWXUHV UHDO RU IDEXORXV ZLWK D PD KRUVH UDGLFDO

Primary verbal composite modelling, as manifested in cognitive poetics, raises serious theoretical questions over the nature and function of the linguistic sign. This chapter attempts to assess Chinese poetics popularized by North American sinologists in the 1960s to 1980s, re-read the so-called 'Old Style' Chinese poetry produced before the sixth century, and, finally, investigate why classical poetry in general lacks figurative and imagistic intricacy, characteristic of highly conceit-laden Western poetry, e.g. in the metaphysical and modernistic traditions. Specifically, the essay analyzes the ways in which mental spaces in classical Chinese poetry are mapped and examines how vital relations, scales, force-dynamics, and image-schemata, are integrated or 'blended' in creating mediated poetic 'space' . Through close readings of sample poems in terms of current Language and Space studies, the author argues that the commonly assumed iconicity in classical Chinese poetry should be more properly called poetic indexicality rather than iconicity.

This essay traces the reception of Tartu semiotics in the Chinesespeaking world, including Mainland China and Taiwan. Our preliminary survey covers materials of three main categories: (1) research projects, (2) postgraduate degree theses, and (3) publications in Chinese and other languages. A number of common features in cross-cultural reception are identified, such as the temporal gap in theory travelling, the role of a third language mediating source and target languages, the phenomenon of negative influence, and the political interference with the introduction and reception of foreign cultural products. Because of its predominant interest in the dynamics of culture as sign system and inter-systemic dialogue, Tartu Semiotics is becoming increasingly attractive to the growing Chinese semiotic community.