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From the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it became clear that the practices of naming the disease, its nature and its handling by the health authorities, the news media and the politicians had social and ideological implications. This article presents a sociosemiotic study of such practices as reflected in a corpus of headlines of eight newspapers of four countries in the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis. After an analysis of the institutional naming choices of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, the study focuses on the changes in newspapers’ naming patterns following the WHO’s announcement of the disease name on 11 February 2020. A subsequent political controversy related to naming in the United States is then examined in reports of The New York Times and The Washington Post as a further illustration of how public discourses and perceptions can rapidly evolve in the context of health crises.

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Human cognition affects the result of symbolic activity. Evidentiality is a linguistic concept which encodes the source of information and expresses the attitude and confidence of speaker. This paper collects 31 judgments from the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) and local people’s courts in the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C) as the research corpus, and analyzes the evidentiality in four aspects: information source, lingual form, evidential function and speaker’s attitude of the information. It is found in this study that: 1) The information sources are divided into four types as cultural belief, sensory experience, verbal rumor and inferential hypothesis; 2) Lingual form consists of three categories: vocabulary, phrase and compound sentence; 3) Evidentiality in court judgments performs four functions: support with citation, induction with description, paraphrase with less responsibility and summarization with reasoning; 4) The reliability of evidentiality presents a two-tier structure based on different information sources. From the perspective of Peirce’s semiotics, the paper analyzes the judicial practice of court judgments with actual data and proposes some suggestions.

The present study employs a bibliometric analysis to examine the research trends in the field of evaluation, appraisal and stance. The bibliometric information of publications between 2000 and 2015 was retrieved from the Web of Science SSCI Core Collection database. The indicators analyzed include the number of publications by year, most frequently explored topics, most cited works, major individual contributors, publication venues, distribution among countries/regions and institutions. Our findings showed that the annual publications increased dramatically, revealing an upward trend in this research field. The results concerning the most frequently addressed topics suggested that EAP has been a fruitful domain in terms of the evaluative dimension of discourse. Besides, future research will feature more discipline-specific and language-specific empirical studies and comparative cross-linguistic studies. Pedagogical applications of evaluation research also need to be explored. Citation results indicated that the groundbreaking monographs in this field generate the highest citation counts, and that the most cited works cover a variety of sub-fields of linguistics, which may further prove the heterogeneous nature of the evaluative dimension of language.

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Genre has been a critical issue in discourse analysis as well as in other disciplines. Based on a literature review of the concept of genre and taking judgments as one type of genre in legal settings, the present study provides a c orpus-based insight into the nature of genre. The literature review per se reveals that genre has one typical feature of a sign, that is, being subject to multiple and alternative interpretations; in other words, genre as a sign may have various interpretants. The present study unravels the actual generic structures, distinguishes different types of generic structures within the given genre, and then defines the dominant generic structure of judgments in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. This study also examines and contrasts the generic structure potential of judgments in each jurisdiction. In addition, the variation of Mainland China's judgments over time is briefly discussed. Comparing the generic structures of judgments among the three jurisdictions, as well as the structures of judgments in Mainland China over time, the paper argues that genre also has the essential features of a sign, that is, the characteristics of temporality and spatiality.

This study investigates some cases related to the interpretation of law in Right of Abode cases heard by the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong, and discusses the sharp contrast between the different versions of interpretation of the same legislative expressions as the same signs in similar cases heard by the same court. This study does not aim to find out the legislative intent of legislation, but to investigate the process of meaning-making in general and the intent seeking in these cases in particular from a socio-semiotic perspective. The study concludes that meaning-making in legal settings is neither purely a jurisprudential operation nor the choice among different canons of legal interpretation. It is rather the dialogue demonstrated in various forms, such as power negotiation and interest weighing. The study, therefore, argues that legal interpretation is a social practice and meaning-making in legal settings is an enterprise of social dialogue and power negotiation; in other words, legal interpretation is in a sense an inter-semiotic operation between law and its interfaces with society and politics.