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Abstract
Along with the development of semiotic theories by Saussure and Peirce, there emerged another branch of semiotics, social semiotics, in the last few decades. In a way, it is a natural development of general semiotics, and is complementary with it. In contrast to general semiotics, it focuses on parole and the application of the semiotic theories to other fields. In the present article, it shows its features different from the Saussurian and Peircian semiotics,traces its path of development and proposes six characteristics which characterize it as appliable semiotics; social in nature, practical in orientation, resource for meaning-making, cross-discipline, variable and changeable, and multimodal. As appliable semiotics, social semiotics works with the following four aspects; resources for social interactions, liability to change along with the change of contexts, following certain semiotic principles, and performing two major functions; representational and interactional. The result of the application of social semiotics is multimodal discourses, whose areas of research include the following four aspects; discourse and social practice, genre, style and modality. Multimodal discourses are coherent in terms of the following four aspects; rhythm, composition, information-linking and dialogue. Finally, a relative comprehensive theoretical framework of social semiotics as appliable semiotics is designed and presented.

This volume brings together a collection of papers on the general theoretical and methodological problems in the historiography of semiotics. It is not a history in the conventional sense, even though the main periods and figures in the development of semiotics are given due prominence. Nevertheless, it should offer the reader stimulation and food for thought in the critical approach to even the least questioned facts of semiotic history and the emphasis given to hitherto neglected problems and persons.

This article provides an overview of recent scholarship on postcolonial semiotics: processes through which linguistic and other signs are linked to the colonial and its ongoing relevance in the construction of value. After tracing the question of colonialism across scholarly lineages in linguistic anthropology, this article focuses on elite formations as a key realm within postcolonial semiotics and on "fake," "mix," and "excess" as central qualities that constitute chronotopically anchored dimensions of ambivalent, aspirational postcolonial eliteness. Linguistic anthropological work on postcolonial elite formations illuminates how economic interests are advanced through the creation of ambiguous value around emblems presupposed as colonial and attached to differentiated elite types in fractally recursive forms. Scholarship on postcolonial semiotics reveals how colonial hierarchies persist through the continuous production of divisible interior alterities that create nested categories of the formerly colonized, inventing elite types that are both denigrated and admired for their supposed approximation to imperial modes of being and speaking.