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.

The specificity of acts of reference emerges from their indexical nature, not from any fixed denotation inherent in referring expressions. Referential indeterminacy is generally not an issue or is easily corrected. But it can be taken advantage of when hierarchic relations are in play: people can deploy the semiotic potential of indeterminacy in ways that covertly index advantageous alignments based on shared values, while seeming to make the same acts of reference as participants in (apparently) the same discourse who are not angling for such alignments. The indexicality of such alignments provides ethnographic insight into the importance of these fields of discourse for those involved, how social actors exercise control or authority, for whose benefit, toward what desired outcome. To this end, I have coined strategically deployable shifter (SDS) as an analytic term for such discursive action, examining its use in higher education as linked to the financial and corporate spheres. I further explore how SDSs can figure into the processes of indexicality and rhematization (as proposed by Gal and Irvine) that are central to the modeling of those status-driven worlds.

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.

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.

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.

Preservice teachers are in the process of constructing their own personal and professional teacher identities. In order to explore questions and assumptions implicit to such an undertaking, this study examined teacher images created by preservice teachers over the course of a 15-year case study, focusing (in this essay) on the results of the clothing and color choices attributed to teachers in the resulting images. Semiotic analyses of these images showed that preservice teachers drew images of teachers that were most often clothed in some interpretation of casual professional clothing. The dominant colors of the rendered clothing were most frequently shades of blue and black. Communicative, cultural, and functional dress codes indicate that these clothing and color choices signify that these preservice teachers saw the teaching profession as one that was conformist, service-oriented, chaste, and modestly prestigious. The examination of preservice teachers’ “teacher” and/or “teaching profession” ideologies through communicative non-verbal cues in their constructed teacher images can be an important part of understanding their beliefs and values about the teaching profession, as well as their professional identity development and career choices.

Far-right political leaders, supporters, and regular Bulgarian citizens deploy swastikas in ways that play with the indeterminacy of the token-type relationship in strategic ways. As they highlight the swastika as a perpetually unstable token, they work to prevent it from being apprehended as an instantiation of a Nazi type. Such deployments rely on strategically mobilizing semiotic indeterminacy across different contexts. Tracing actors’ deployments of signs like the swastika allows us to better understand how people mobilize token-type relations—and to what ends—within the public sphere of an expanding European Union.

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.

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.

This article examines some characteristics and functions of multiplex tactics in small storytelling. It uses a case-study based on three long informal interviews with a participant from the Gauteng, South Africa. Analysis and discussion raise questions of conversational resources and involvement, and thereby of a critical understanding of creativity and cooperation in interactional doing being. Multiplex tactics produce effects on several levels of interactional and discursive organisation simultaneously: signalling participative and narrative framing, footing and stance, whilst also effecting story entry and exit, or providing coherence between storied elements, for example. Multiplexity is a resource for accessing intersubjective meaning-making and narrative co-construction. Furthermore, it contributes to the vast body of work on indexicality and discourse marking. The article focuses on the creative, affective, and evolutive nature of involvement in interactional work.

Some people have become disenchanted with modern bureaucratic forms and modern governments, and in their attempts to imagine an alternative, have joined the sovereign citizen counterpublic, a right-leaning movement comprised of loosely affiliated groups rejecting the validity of national laws that are present in the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other countries. These groups focus their energies on legal systems as they resist modern institutions and have developed a shared semiotic ideology about how legal language works and how legal texts should be interpreted. This semiotic ideology hinges upon a particular form of semiotic determinacy; our article unpacks its implications. Sovereign citizens’ ideology is antithetical to how institutionally entrenched actors understand the interplay of semiotic determinacy and indeterminacy in legal contexts, which leads their logics and historical narratives to resonate with conspiracy theories. We conclude by exploring how this counterpublic re-configures older strands of Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation logics as resistance in this neoliberal moment.

The process by which “common knowledge” is created via chains of communicative activities is now well understood, especially due to the work of linguistic anthropologists. This paper draws upon this work to examine how “common knowledge” about the causes of tidal flooding in Kendal Regency is created in communiques’ published on Kendal’s municipal government website over a period of seven years. We argue that there are five particular processes at play in the creation of “common knowledge” about flooding in general and tidal flooding in particular as a “natural disaster” in this social domain. We end by pondering why dire predictions about the impact of future tidal flooding events on hundreds of thousands of Indonesians have not yet produced any sustainable solutions within different levels of the Indonesian government.

This article presents the theoretical concept of language de-socialization, which refers to processes through which the declining linguistic and interactive capacities of an individual, as well as the loss of personhood as defined in a particular cultural setting, are managed in and through language. The article discusses de-socialization as an extension of a theoretical forebear, language socialization, which has been defined as “how young children and others become communicatively and culturally competent within their homes, educational institutions, and other discourse communities, both local and transnational, and how language (in its many varieties and modes) mediates that process”. However, language de-socialization is not simply the inverse of language socialization, because understanding language at the end of life requires expanded sensitivity to a range of topics that are not usually treated in linguistics, such as assumptions about abledness and impairment that underpin determinations of linguistic and communicative competence.

Replika, an artificial intelligence (AI) companion, is part of a growing number of social chatbots. This paper examines the multimodal semiotic signs influencing how users perceive realness in their chatbots. I argue that what users describe as real/alive in relation to the bots refers to an iconization of humanness, following Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal on the semiotic process of “iconization.” Users reflect and share their experiences of voicing contrasts of Replika in digital spaces that function primarily for sociability. I draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “heteroglossia” as a framework for thinking about the multiplicity of voices implicit in the conversational exchanges with the chatbots and among users in reflexive texts. I look at the relationships with the chatbots through frames of language ideologies, historical discourse, and visuality.