The Semiotics of Translanguaging 1

The semiotics of translanguaging: An example and its application to critical language pedagogy

Kevin Rickman

University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

Keywords: semiotics, semeiotics1, translanguaging, multilingualism, Peirce, Eco, pedagogy,

critical pedagogy

1 This is not a typo; Peirce specifically states in his manuscripts that the work he is doing is semeiotic and should be spelled as such. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 2

Introduction

This paper concerns the topics of translanguaging and multilingual education as they stand in relation to critical pedagogy, and the main thrust of the argument is as follows. In multilingual classrooms, either language classes wherein monolinguals are progressing towards multilingualism or in general classes wherein the student population is already multilingual, a formal and systematized approach to education that employs semiotics as a foundation and model, which does not currently exist in language education and research, is shown to be a viable and fecund starting position for language educators particularly throughout this paper. The approach I am designing and exemplifying herein will also allow educators to apply sine qua non aspects and components of the critical pedagogy field to empower themselves and their students, enact a more democratic language policy and practices in the classroom and associated activities, and act as an ingress route into more deeply understanding how translanguaging works, how the students are using, and misusing, specific aspects of their languages. This will then allow those students to deploy their socio-cultural, heritage, political, personal, and other experience and knowledge to further both their language learning and developments as individuals and critically-aware members of their society. In order to do this, I must first describe translanguaging as it is approached now, and this will reveal to us the shortcomings of those approaches, namely, treating all material as though it all fits into one group with the same linguistics and cultural background despite the fact that semiotics fundamentally operates in a far more nuanced and detailed way. After reviewing a portion of the current literature, I cover the details and crucial difference between the two semiotic systems--the foundation in Charles

Sanders Peirce's as semeiotic system, which was bolstered by the phenomenology of his fellow The Semiotics of Translanguaging 3

American Pragmatists at the time including William James, and the extrapolation in Umberto

Eco's semiotics that focuses more closely on the language aspects that I am focusing on as well, for whichI am employing to make my case. After explaining the relevant aspects of these semiotic systems, I diagram this process to illustrate a portion of what is occurring in multilingual, multicultural translanguaging events that makes a multilingual language policy so crucial to the classrooms in which these events occur. As this is a proof of concept paper, I am employing utterances that I have made as an English as a First Language learner of Japanese and

Mandarin have made myself, and this allows us to see that, although these utterances are not data directly collected in the wild, they do serve my purposes in this paper, which is merely to show how a more detailed and specific employment of semiotics as a methodology for analysis can be productive in ways that current users of the term are missing out on. This acts as the gateway for us to connect my theoretical semiotic translanguaging discussion to critical pedagogy, which is essential to this discussion since those who are multilingual often exist in a power hierarchy that is not beneficial to them and a socio-cultural situation that disempowers them by pushing for uniformity and conformity rather than cherishing linguistic and cultural diversity. This proof of concept paper can then act as a prototype for how other researchers involved in semiotics to any extent can develop a more detailed and systematized approach to the semiotic resources with which they are engaged and act as a call to action for changes in both language and classroom policies. It can also act as the framework for language educators, or educators of any kind whose student body is multilingual, to understand their student's language use on a deeper functional level thereby facilitating a more meaningful and effective approach to educator-student communicative relationships. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 4

Current Use of the Term Semiotics and its Limitations

In the articles coming out of the field, generally, of Second Language Studies, the term semiotics comes up quite often, but the reference to semiotics is rarely accompanied by an explanation of whose semiotic--is it Peirce, Eco, de Saussure, etc.?--system is being employed, how that system works fundamentally, or why it is different from another system (e.g., Blommaert & Rampton

2011; Talmy, 2015). There are also cases of reference trains wherein the author of a main paper cites the work of another researcher or author who may do the same, but the works referenced do not include the information mentioned just prior (e.g., Wei, 2018). Occasionally, we find that an author explicitly states the name of the person who designed and developed a semiotic system, but, without an explanation of that system, the information is only helpful to those already in the know (e.g., Steffensen & Fill, 2014). Even rarer is finding authors or researchers who are employing a specific semiotic to both name and explicate how that system works by devoting a section to that explanation. Bitarello and Queiroz (2014) makes a good example of this since, in their article on skin as as semiotic niche and tattoos, they introduce their work, then devote the first section of content material to declaring the semeiotic they are using (Peice's) and how

Peirce's famous Sign, Object, Interpretant triad functions as well as how Peirce labelled functions of language in terms of the rheme, digisign, and argument format. However, in the arena of translanguaging events performed by multilinguals or progressing learners of an L2, researchers will often focus more on the linguistic landscape, polyglossic speech situations, and even the success of translanguaging speech acts in informal, personal settings and the oft-considered professional environment of a workplace rather than using the semiotics they reference to perform analysis of these other elements. Lüdi et. al. (2010) is a good example of this habit as The Semiotics of Translanguaging 5 this article focuses on the interactions in a workplace that rely heavily on semiotic resources but do not ground their analysis of these artifacts in a semiotic system. A researcher may use the term in the form of 'semiotic artifacts', which can refer to signs that exist in a linguistic landscape context, physical objects that an interlocutor makes reference to or employs as a storytelling device in order to express their thoughts, or elements of language that, when spoken in a certain way or syntactically structured in a specific pattern, point to the intended meaning the speaker wishes to convey or for their listeners or interlocutors to take up as the intended meaning as opposed to another, incorrect meaning, which I noted earlier in the Bitarello and Queiroz (2014) article earlier. From a social semiotics perspective wherein researchers and authors are drawing from Halliday's seminal work, the employment and deployment of the resources of teachers, learners, and interlocutors necessary for progress in a language--or in the material of a target content, multilingual classroom--is examined more from an affordances, scaffolding, or

Vygotsky-esque ZPD perspective, which is highly productive in and of itself yet does not fully draw out the value and power of semiotics in these situations, as we see in Wilson (2011).

Authors such as Kress & van Leeuwen, (2006) may also refer to semiotics and semiotic resources in a larger book by discussing recent developments--the social semiotics of Hodge and

Kress, for example--which can include, to a limited extent based on the author's intentions and data that they are necessitated to represent, the previous list, but semiotic resources may also refer to more cognitive and non-physical objects--a thought, a lecture, an epistemic resource from personal experience, or membership knowledge gained through practice--rather than corporeal objects as is the case in using a napkin to draw on or a salt and pepper shaker at a dinner table in order to symbolize actors in a story being told (as in Burch & Kasper, 2016). With The Semiotics of Translanguaging 6 this wide variety of types of semiotics and categories to which the term can be applied, it is difficult to pin down exactly what the intended meaning is in the field as a whole, and while some researchers in the field have noticed the limitations of specific terms like codeswitching, the next step towards rich semiotic analysis is absent (according to Budach, 2013). Even in cases of longitudinal studies where years full of references to physical objects, cognitive concepts, and language variables go into a person's development in a language, the interaction of all these factors, even from a social semiotics framework, the case is usually focused on the content of the interactions themselves without an analysis of the nature of the interactions and interrelationships between language user and other signs in their sign system surroundings (cf

Helle et. al., 2018). Instead, readers of any given article that does make use of the term semiotics must glean for themselves which semiotic system is being employed and what the specific definition of semiotics the author intends their readers to take from context within the article and within the context of that author's larger work across other publications if so germane. This is problematic because the broad, undertheorized, and unstratified use of the term semiotics has led to two issues.

First, the field of semiotics is highly diverse yet very precise in what it can be used to accomplish, but since semiotic systems are not being delineated in any detail in articles and research, it is unclear what a semiotic artifact or resource is in detail as well owing to the fact that readers are not given a definitive semiotic model through which the artifact or resource is categorized and examined. Simply put, an author that is working from Saussure's semiotic perspective will mean something quite different than another author who is working from

Peirce's semeiotic perspective though both authors may use the exact same 'semiotic resource' The Semiotics of Translanguaging 7 term in their writing. The second issue that arises relates to the fact that authors are shortchanging both themselves as authors and their readers. When the term semiotic is employed in a majority of the current literature, analysis in this area, on this term, or about a certain artifact is not further performed from a semiotic framework, and this shows that the author is using this term more in lines with symbology. Symbology as a field is the study of what specific objects mean to the people who created them and the people for whom the object was created, but this field is largely examining objects in an "X means Y to Z" method. This has been a problematic distinction since the 1970s, and we can see this in Turner (1974) since he argued that

"[c]omparative symbology is narrower than "semiotics" or "semiology" (to use Saussure's and

Roland Barthes's terms), and wider than "symbolic anthropology" in range and scope of data and problems" (Turner, 1974). We can see an issue from the very beginning of this article in that comparative symbology is only narrower than semiotics because Turner has in mind here the nondescript and undetailed semiotics of Saussure, limited to le langue et la parole, and not the work of Peirce, which was indubitably far more precise and narrow than Saussure's semiotics.

While this is useful research of which I am not being critical nor denigrating, there is much more to objects than just one meaning that is derived from an object's raison d'etre. For instance, the semiotic systems of Eco and Peirce include this information, but reveal that there is far more to any given object than just its symbolic meaning: any given object can have symbolic meaning, but also socio-cultural, historical, political, phenomenological, indexical, and other meanings as well. Semiotic systems provide for researchers the tools and framework necessary to show the mesh of information, skills, and knowledge a speaker is combining in situ and impromptu to effectively express themselves in ways that symbology will not. For example, where an SLA The Semiotics of Translanguaging 8 researcher makes note that a target-L2 learner uses a pen to stand for an object in their story, X is symbolized by Y is often the extent of the analysis performed by any given researcher employing semiotics without declaring which system or describing how it functions. Symbology, then, will quite readily fill the same role that authors use the term semiotic for, and the use of semiotic without semiotic analysis is a wasted opportunity to make use of the rich frameworks present in the works of Eco, Peirce, or Hjelmslev. However, to get beyond the surface analysis of

"Participant 1 uses X to symbolize Y" requires that the researchers and authors have an established framework on which to build their methodology of analyzing events such as these in more detail. So, researchers who make full use of the semiotic frameworks mentioned previously will be able to detail in high quality and with great accuracy the mutual reflexivity, nuanced interconnections, and the multiple domains of epistemics and membership--socio-cultural, heritage, political, economic, or other class-based or power hierarchy roles--knowledge that are threaded together in any given interaction that is being studied or on which an author is writing.

Semiotics is not, however, an obscure way of thinking, and there are many semiotic systems, each with nuance that may be well-formed for different researchers and their goals, that we can employ. If, for instance, if a researcher is working in linguistic landscape or distributed cognition and languaging research, which are similar from a semiotic perspective as both are concerned with a person in an environment surrounded by objects of concern as a system rather than separate, then the semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce will be appropriate since his system is bolstered by American Pragmatism's focus on phenomenology, which would be related to experience of a landscape or the world as would be found in the aforementioned types of research. If researchers are working on corpus or other forms of textual analysis, then the focus The Semiotics of Translanguaging 9 of Eco on human languages more specifically than Peirce would fit better. Not only will employing semiotics with higher specificity and detail allow researchers to glean more from their data, it will also allow the situatedness of the participants to be foregrounded. Instead of discussing power hierarchies, dynamics, and, even, oppression, semiotic systems allow us to point out the exact nature of these, and we can see this in the employing of Eco's semiotic as his detailed categories, which are explored later in this paper, can encapsulate this information making it ever present in the analysis. Furthermore, this is not too outlandish a project as it does resemble the way language is treated in the field of ecolinguistics as a product of a willed speaker possessed of intention, situated in an environment, with a historical and socio-cultural background acting as a process or motor of change, and embedded in a specific spatio-temporal setting (Steffensen & Fill, 2014). It is in this context that critical pedagogy finds both relevance and traction within the scope of this paper: if my argument for the use of semiotics in detail allows researchers to draw out and allow their students to use life experiences and knowledge from outside the classroom, then we can become more egalitarian or democratic in our educational practices by empowering students to make use of those experiences and connect on a personal level the life they live and the education they receive. From an ethico-moral perspective, the value of this is tacit, but should there, for some reason, be debate on this, then it must be taken up outside of this paper. I, however, operate throughout this paper in the position that empowering students is both morally good and a good educational practice and that oppressing, limiting, forcing uniformity, or otherwise extirpating multiculturalism and/or multilingualism is morally wrong and a bad educational practice. This will be taken up in more detail in the final section I draw from and rely heavily on Crookes' Critical ELT in Action: The Semiotics of Translanguaging 10

Foundations, Promises, Praxis in order to connect the semiotic approach to translanguaging I am formulating in this paper with the larger ethical, moral, and critically-pedagogical ideals this approach finds itself in in terms of multilingual classrooms and larger educational institutions that influence said classrooms.

Beyond the review of work in the field that is related to this topic, it is also necessitated that the appropriate source material be discussed as well owing to the fact that this is a new framework of analysis. Since it is a new framework, or at least a new application of these semiotic frameworks, the primary sources from Eco and Peirce are examined (Eco, 1979) and

(Peirce, 1991; 1992; 1998). Additionally, my readers may be concerned that the semiotic framework employed in this paper may not accurately, productively, or saliently deal with the aspects of language claimed to be within the realm of analysis in other sections, of which the primary example is the claim that semiotics is not designed to get at the nuanced aspects of interaction and is rather much more akin to phenomenology or thoughts on our cognitive states.

This criticism can be overcome, and to do so will involve the work of Bergman, a Peirce specialist, who focused on the communicative nature of Peirce's lesser known works: Peirce wrote prodigiously and not all of his manuscripts are widely available to the public as of yet, but

Bergman has drawn this aspect of Peirce's semeiotics out in publications including his book

Peirce's Philosophy of Communication. Here I describe the methodology of this study, first, conceptually via textual analysis and application of the semioticians from whom I draw, and second, to act as exemplar by offering a model of this methodology that could be followed in future research. First the background of Peirce's semeiotics is established to explain the interaction, connection, and relationship between signs, signs and people, people as signs, and The Semiotics of Translanguaging 11 how interlocutors make use of signs to co-construct meaning. Second, the detailed mapping of a sign-vehicle by Eco is covered in detail to establish how exactly signs are used in conversation or written/spoken interactions to co-construct meaning, express intended meaning, and delineate meaning boundaries for interlocutors and listeners so that Grice's Cooperative Principle is upheld in any given talk event or speech act and intended meanings are arrived at as opposed to random or incorrect meanings that disrupt the flow of conversations or misunderstandings that collapse a conversation altogether. Third, an example of a translanguaging speech act is provided, itemized into semiotic categories, and then analyzed in semiotic detail by applying the frameworks of Eco and Peirce. This results in a thorough overview of the epistemic categories, knowledge, historical references, language use, intended meanings, and the nature of the translanguage sign. This is because Semiotic Analysis--only a working title for this category or type of analysis--can be applied to many categories. If Semiotic Analysis is applied to translanguaging events performed by multilinguals, as is the case in this paper, the analysis may share similarities with

Conversation Analysis, but Semiotic Analysis can also be used to examine how multilinguals or students learning a second language self-scaffold using epistemic categories and knowledge, which might gain traction in the areas of SLA and Critical Pedagogy, which, the latter, I connect to in this paper. Linguistic Landscape research, as it deals so readily and thoroughly with artifacts and people's interactions with those artifacts, may also greatly benefit from understanding semiotics to the point where sign system examination can become the main thrust or supporting framework in this type of research. As such, no data has been collected as of yet, but, as is the case with anything new, we must begin somewhere. Therefore, this paper focuses solely on examining potential utterances performed by a multilingual speaker towards the end of The Semiotics of Translanguaging 12 illuminating epistemological and linguistic resources used by the speaker to express a meaning with high specificity, which, in turn, allows us to examine which facets of the individual human being are sine qua non to that person translanguaging--aspects that are crucial to treating that individual as a whole human being rather than chopping them up in to socio-cultural units and categorizing them into types based only on a select few token pieces that go into their identity

(van Lier, 2014).

Theoretical Framework

Since this type of research and analysis has not been done before, it is necessary in this section to establish exactly how each semiotic source functions separately and what each contributes to the framework of this paper overall. Peirce’s work makes clear to us the phenomenological, interactional, interrelated, and reflexive nature of the sign. Eco's semiotic model of the sign-vehicle is detailed so that the categories which make up Eco's model can be made a home for the elements of the example translanguaging speech act examined in the last portion of this theoretical framework section. The model that comes out of the combination of these two allows me to perform a close linguistic analysis of examples of translanguaging. I begin by analyzing a simple translingual event to exemplify my method before moving on to a far more complex instance to reveal how powerful a semiotic approach can be, what it allows us to see that other approaches may not, and how important multilingualism and multiculturalism is to the expression of meanings that may not be directly possible in monolingual monocultural situations, which contributes to the connection with Critical Pedagogy.

Semeiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce The Semiotics of Translanguaging 13

Charles Sanders Peirce, born in Cambridge, lived from 1839 to 1914, and was a contemporary of Ferdinand Saussure. He developed his version of semeiotics--a spelling he specifically notes in his manuscripts--from the background and framework of the American

Pragmatism school of thought. This is important to note since the radical empiricism of William

James, a close friend of Peirce, was influential on how Peirce begins analyzing the relationships between signs and other aspects of sign interactions. We can see this especially in Peirce's

Subject-Object-Interpretant, or SOI, relationship, which links Peirce to Eco and these two to the analysis of translanguaging data later. However, before moving on to the more complex interplays present in the SOI relationship, it is necessary to explain what each facet is and the role it plays.

In the fourth chapter of Peirce on Signs, “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties

Claimed for Man,” Peirce raises several questions regarding the capabilities and limitations of human beings in regards to our faculties. Most, if not all, of these questions are related to cognition, but some go further and relate processes of cognition to the objects of those processes, that is, the signs about or of which we are cognizing. In the sixth question, Peirce focuses on whether or not we can think of a sign which represents something incognizable to human beings, and he comes to the conclusion that this is not possible. If anything can be cognized by a human being--a physical object or cognitive concept which gives off relevant sensory or information data, a singular human being receives and takes up that relevant sensory information, we cognize that object either through recognition of its spatio-temporal location or by its impact on our thought processes. At some point in time, then, that object, whatever its nature, is a sign to us.

Anything that cannot be cognized due to a breakdown at any point in the process of human The Semiotics of Translanguaging 14 perception or cognition is not a sign to us. That is not to ignore the possibility that some other species with a different sensory apparatus may be able to cognize it and therefore that thing, whatever its nature, is a sign just not a sign for human beings. For instance, a mantis shrimp can perceive a color I cannot—that color is a sign to the mantis shrimp, but that color is not a sign to me since I cannot perceive it and therefore cannot cognize it. While this encompassing theory can find applications more broadly in fields such as linguistic landscape research, it is not precise enough yet for the purpose of this paper, and so I focus on Peirce's semeiotics on human languages and sign systems rather than on all potential signs. Ultimately, there is far more cognitive science and phenomenological philosophy at work behind this semiotic processes, especially if we widen our scope to include other American Pragmatists and strict

Phenomenologists, but the importance of the linguistic sign to Peirce and our relationships as human beings to these signs--and language as a whole--has been established, which is satisfactory for the efforts in this paper.

However, what exactly does the relationship of a human being to a sign look like and what are the aspects at play or pieces necessary for a fully-functioning sign relationship? As mentioned earlier, for Peirce, all things physical and mental are signs so long as they can be cognized, but this must be expanded on to show that things must be in a relationship of some sort for the classification of a sign to be able to be applied. For instance, an object existing in a vacuum is not a sign since it is not giving off information to anything else since it exists alone in the vacuum. An object that is being cognized by a human being--human cognition is not necessary for the SOI relationship but it is the relevant form of the SOI relationship for this paper--becomes a Sign because it is being perceived and cognized about. For example, a word The Semiotics of Translanguaging 15 and the piece of paper it is written on are both Objects; they are physically existing entities. Once a person picks up the paper, perceives the writing, and cognizes the word, the paper and the word become Signs. The person perceiving the paper and the word and cognizing the word is the

Interpretant, and once the Sign, Object, and Interpretant roles are filled, there is a Referant, which is the reference being made. In terms of language, then, we can easily move from this

Sign-Object-Interpretant relationship, with a physical Object, to the signs of any given language with its not-necessarily-physical phonetic, lexical, grammatical, and syntactic constructs cum

Object, and this is because these elements of language are, by nature, in a relationship with a speaker of a language. Furthermore, when a speaker uses their language to express meaning and communicate with another person, their language, down to the choice of words and accented phonology, are signing to the other person: language is, for Peirce, a sign system with a unique set of rules rather than just the random interactions of objects, perception and cognition that might arise in phenomenological analysis of sense data and cognition. When there is an object acting as a sign to me as its interpretant that I wish to explain, define, or describe to another person that uses the same language as I, I use language to codify the sign system relationship of that object to me as its interpretant. At in this moment, my words become both my linguistic representation of the sign system relationship in question and a sign system itself--my thoughts are the Object, my language the Sign, and my interlocutor the Interpretant--simultaneously. This reveals that Peirce's semeiotics is accurately suited and powerful in terms of explanatory power and as a theoretical framework for how language works, and this relationship resembles what is the first step of Eco's semiotic model, which is now discussed.

Semiotics of Umberto Eco The Semiotics of Translanguaging 16

While Peirce's semeiotics is well adapted to studying human interactions, human experience, and language, it does require an understanding of some complex topics including phenomenology and pragmatism to make sense of. However, Umberto Eco's semiotic model, which he developed roughly 100 years after Peirce in Italy rather than in the company of other

American Pragmatists, allows us to move away from that complexity by focusing our attention more completely on language rather than perception and cognition, and this makes the discussion of Eco's semiotic model appropriate for two reasons. First, it helps us to understand how we can apply Peirce in a specific way, and second, that this application of both Peirce and Eco together on translanguaging later will reveal to us the validity of applying complex semiotics--as opposed to using the term semiotics just to mean things like linguistic resources and symbols--to research on language learning or linguistics and the practical usefulness and positive productions such an application will yield.

To First, a replication of Eco’s “Table 17” from “A revised semantic model”, which appears as follows:

/c1 , c2 etc. /[circɑ]---c3

/(conta)---d3 , d4---[circβ]----c4

/sign-vehicle/--sm…=«sememe»--d1 , d2 \ (contb)---- d5 , d6 , -----c5 , c6 , etc.

\ (contc)--- d7 , d8 , ---c7 , c8 , etc.

\ [circy] /

\ (contd)---- d9 , d10 , ---- c9 , c10 , etc.

\[circઠ]---- d11 , d12 ----c11 , c12 , etc. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 17

In "Table 17," we are meant to work from left to right, but this is not meant to be a temporal progression that we might find in code switching dialogue wherein the sign-vehicle appears first followed by the other elements for the hearer to uptake and decode. Rather, this is a scalar process, which means that, as languaging is occurring, these facets of Eco's model are being made known to us almost concomitantly. I say almost because not all utterances will make use of all the facets, some utterances will hinge on a different facet than others, and other utterances will be the same. A person yelling "duck!" is making use of the immediacy of the utterance to either draw another person's attention to a duck (the bird) or to duck (crouch down) because there is a bird flying at them, but a complex piece of literature--historically situated, fecund with meaning, and relying on socio-cultural nuance--will not and cannot be analyzed the same way as the immediate imperative of a warning. I now move through this diagram to explicate what each word, variable, and connection means.

First, the sign-vehicle. Generally, this term stands for the way or method in which a sign is given to a person, but it can also stand for the shape or form a sign takes in order to convey that data. For instance, a siren in one culture can signify a tornado, but in a culture where there are no tornadoes, the siren can mean something entirely different such as an earthquake. This is, as was discussed earlier in the section on Peirce, a process that is occurring at all times, to all people, in innumerable ways; that is to say, Eco's sign-vehicle does not differ in any way that is meaningful enough to consider the two as separate and distinct concepts. However, Eco does add to his sign-vehicle slightly more than Peirce attributes to his signs, and this is seen in the fact that

Eco includes the relevance of a Nishida-esque historical body.2 A sign-vehicle carries with it

2 Nishida Kitaro was a Kyoto school philosopher of the 20th century. His work over time led him to realize the importance of embodiment, not only as a physical body, but as a subject of history and co-creator of the world in the present. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 18 some aspects of the society, culture, and citizens of those socio-cultural bodies that created the sign-vehicle. For instance, a 'No Smoking' sign is only effective because the people who design and produce these signs and those who are subject to the rule, or law, that the sign conveys operate on the foundational assumption that the knowledge of the sign's intended meaning are present in both parties, i.e., the producers and those subject to it. Anyone can design a random sign, but for it to be effective, then there must be a commonality across the knowledge bases of the creator and those who are exposed to the sign, which will become even more relevant and examined further in the two subsequent sections. This is why Eco explains that “[a] sign-vehicle denotes and connotes various cultural units… [t]his means that among the various denotations and connotations that make up a sememe alternative, complementary or mutually exclusive readings may occur, thus producing semantic incompatibilities.”3 This aspect of the sign-vehicle also draws our attention to how it behaves linguistically, and in the specific field of translanguaging, the substitution of a sign-vehicle in one language for a sign-vehicle in a second or third language involves a shift in the mode of sign-vehicle presentation. A sign-vehicle substitution, a Japanese sentence wherein one word is given in English, constitutes the simplest form of a shift in the mode of sign-vehicle presentation. However, a shift in the mode of sign-vehicle presentation is not the upper limit of what types of translanguaging events can occur in a multilingual conversation. For instance, sign-vehicle may convey many potential meanings especially considering a mode of presentation shift, but two of those potential conveyances may also be mutually exclusive based on an overlap of extra-linguistic, socio-cultural, and experiential knowledge. Therefore, further notation is required to avoid missing what a

3 Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. “Advances in Semiotics”. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1979. Paperback. Page 95. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 19 sign-vehicle is conveying merely because it seems contradictory. This is the value and purpose of the "sm" facet as it narrows potential meanings down and clears up some of the potential misunderstandings.

Next, the sm (syntactic-markers). Syntactic-markers are further cultural units which help a member of a given culture or society determine what the sign-vehicle is conveying in particular: to limit the number of potential meanings out of the many possible meanings, you need guides, and these sm are those guides which narrow what the sign-vehicle is conveying to a smaller grouping of options from which to choose. Syntactic markers can also be grammatical, linguistic, visual, and contextual.

Third, the sememe. A sememe is the ‘fuzzy concept’ which is the result of encountering a sign-vehicle, applying syntactic markers to limit the range of possible conveyances, and coming to a general ideation of what the sign-vehicle is conveying. The sememe is the category in Eco's model that encapsulates a languaging individual's social, cultural, and linguistic knowledge.

While yet a 'fuzzy concept,' the sememe is crucial to the content of this paper in that this is where the multilingual begins to mentally deploy their linguistic repertoire towards the end of understanding the translanguaging event of a speaker or to the end of producing a translingual sentence of their own for their listener. This is not to claim that sign-vehicles themselves--or syntactic markers for that matter--cannot be tools to translanguage, but, rather, that any translanguaging event that occurs at any stage in Eco's model previously must be negotiated through the sememe for it to be a successful translanguaging event for both producer and receiver. This sememe, however, is still not perfectly accurate, and to arrive at a higher level of accuracy, we must look further into the contents of “Table 17." The Semiotics of Translanguaging 20

We will now inquire into what both c and d stand for in Eco's model. First, d stands for denotation whereas c stands for connotation. A denotation is akin to a hard fact: a stop sign denotes that you come to a complete stop at the intersection. Conversely, a connotation is a more general or suggestive meaning, relative to cultural units, that can convey possible reinterpretations of the conveyance of the sign-vehicle. Denotation tends to rely on prior knowledge of a sign-vehicle so that the understanding of what is being denoted is, essentially, instantaneous and does not require mediation through a complex process of interpretation and introspection. Connotation, however, requires some cognitive mediation on what is being connoted, and connotations often look to denotative markers for assistance in demarcating the proper interpretation of what is being connoted. For example, a stop sign cannot connote that you stop, that is, it can not be a veiled suggestion that you must cognize about in order to realize that you must stop as in the denotation example prior. Conversely, the connotations in a complex poem full of nuance cannot be directly denoted without either ruining the poem with dozens of annotations and footnotes or changing the very syntactical structure of the poem and the poet's word choice: essentially, to force a connotative poem to denote to the reader what it is saying is to alter the poem so fundamentally that it is no longer recognizable in comparison to the original.

Finally, we cover (cont) and [circ], which stand for context and circumstance respectively. While these two seem similar enough to question why the two terms are not used interchangeably, they do have a significant difference. Eco describes the difference between the two by saying

...(cont) are contextual selections, giving instructions of the type: ‘when you find

(conta), use the following ds and cs when the sememe in question is contextually associated with the sememe «a»’; [circ] are circumstantial selections giving

instructions of the type: ‘when you find [circα] use the following ds and cs when the sign-vehicle corresponding to the sememe in question is circumstantially The Semiotics of Translanguaging 21

accompanied by the event of the object //α//, to be understood as the sign-vehicle belonging to another semiotic system’”.4

Circumstance differs from context in that the former relates to objects and events whereas context can regard visible or otherwise relatable sign-vehicles such as words. That said, context and circumstance may both come into play when dealing with a complex sign-vehicle so it would be too reductionist to say only one or the other is at work in every given effort of delineating a sign-vehicle. A word in a text you are reading, which would appear to be only related to (cont), may also rely on [circ] such as the circumstance you are in when you read the word or when that word was written or by who. It is important to note, in concluding this section, the final line of the above quote. For us to understand that a sign-vehicle is not limited to only one version of “Table 17”, as Eco claims, is to make ourselves aware that a sign-vehicle can be the beginning of a multitude of variations of “Table 17s."

Semiotics Applied to Translanguaging

This section concerns the crucial transition from discussing semiotics and translanguaging in theory to their application in educational situations. In order to illustrate this transition, I examine a simple example of a translingual event, and out of this foundation, I move to more complex examples, which will, in turn, allow the final transition in this paper from semiotics and translanguaging to critical pedagogy. If we map a translanguaging event via Eco's

"Table 17", then we can begin to see which types of knowledge are active, which structures are important to the production's format, and how well a multilingual person understands what they can or cannot do in their languages. For example a Japanese learner of English writes or says [I like 子犬.] rather than [I like puppies]. Here, the speaker fails to replace the Japanese word for

4 I bid. Pgs 105-6 The Semiotics of Translanguaging 22 puppies (koinu, literally ko for baby or child and inu for dog) with the English word puppy/ies.

The syntactic-markers show that the speaker, X, likes Y, and the sign-vehicle for Y has been substituted for translingually, which reveals an understanding of English grammar and syntax but a lack of English vocabulary in terms of not knowing the word puppy.5 It is beneficial to the language instructor to allow this translingual event to occur as it A) reveals that the student is simply unaware of the word puppy and is not struggling with the more complex aspects of learning English in terms of grammar, which allows the instructor access to the quick fix of correcting the vocabulary (koinu equals puppy) and B) the student is not immediately shut down for breaking a monolingual class policy. By allowing translanguaging in the classroom, we immediately get these positive benefits on both ends of the teacher-student relationship, and these positive benefits are conducive to language education in general as well as being motivational, or at least not diminishing of the student's confidence, for their future target language productions. However, translanguaging events are not always this simple in terms of the structure of sentences or complexity of topics, and, in cases where things get far more difficult, how can we still maintain semiotics and translanguaging in tandem?

Sign-vehicle replacement can involve more than a single word, and we can see this in phrase replacement. For example, if a multilingual speaker of Mandarin, Japanese, and English whose first language of these three is English, we can see a production such as [昨天晚上, I ate

鍋物.] [Last night, I ate hotpot.]. We still have simple sign-vehicle replacement, as we saw in the example of liking puppies, with the English word hotpot being replaced by its Japanese

5 English, as in the example sentence as well, is an SVO language, but Japanese, which is the speaker's first language in this hypothetical situation, is an SOV language. That the example sentence maintains SVO structure even though the object of this sentence (O, puppies) is given in Japanese is revelatory of a management of target language SVO structures despite the limited vocabulary. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 23 counterpart (nabemono, 'cooking pot' + 'thing'). However, the beginning of the sentence is a noun phrase in Mandarin (Zuótiān wǎnshàng, literally, yesterday's evening) with a specifier that offers temporal information to the meaning. Furthermore, the complexity of mixing three languages together in a sentence that is itself more complex than the bilingual Noun Verb Object (I like puppies) sentence in the previous example shows that linguistic resources of multiple languages can be deployed as needed. This English as a first language multilingual speaker of Mandarin and Japanese could easily produce this statement completely in English, but they may also be incapable of producing it entirely in Mandarin only or entirely in Japanese only, and only in allowing this speaker to translanguage do we see them being able to produce a highly complex utterance. If a person can utter this level of production, with its complex translingual elements, then it can serve as evidence they are somewhat proficient in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in three multifaceted languages. This is pushed further if we consider this utterance to be written rather than verbal as it reveals they are capable of writing, even if only basic terms, the traditional hanzi, kanji, and English required for this sentence.

Returning to Eco's "Table 17" allows us to map this out in a specific way.

/c1 , c2 etc. /[circɑ]---c3 /(conta)---d3 , d4---[circβ]----c4 /sign-vehicle/--sm…=«sememe»--d1 , d2 \ (contb)---- d5 , d6 , -----c5 , c6 , etc. \ (contc)--- d7 , d8 , ---c7 , c8 , etc. \ [circy] / \ (contd)---- d9 , d10 , ---- c9 , c10 , etc. \[circઠ]---- d11 , d12 ----c11 , c12 , etc.

If everyone involved in the conversation is fluent in a common language, English in the confines of my example, then we can focus our linguistic efforts and attention on that common language The Semiotics of Translanguaging 24 including its lexicon, grammar, and syntax. For instance, our word choice and sentence structure

(such as simple vs. compound-complex in English, which are in the categories of sign-vehicle, syntactic-markers, and sememe from Eco and highlighted in green in the table above) can be done purposively to express a specific denotative meaning. However, not everything human beings want to express--I like puppies, and I ate hotpot last night, for instance--can be expressed in a purely denotative manner; the statement "[d]o I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"6 cannot be taken as denotative alone as this would imply that Walt Whitman was somehow physically larger than other people in some meaningful way and that he possessed something more than other people (perhaps more internal organs but that is a ludicrous interpretation of the poem), which, in turn, does not allow us to see the connotative meaning Whitman appears to be giving us, namely, that human beings are complex, nuanced, and often difficult to understand creatures due to the fact that it is somehow in human nature to be self-contradictory. The latter interpretation is also indicative of why semiotic analysis of statements is not only crucial for us to do well and in detail, but also that we do this automatically anyways. People who read poetry do not have to read the poem once looking for its denotative meaning and a second time for its connotative meaning; they already have in mind that the poet is going to be playing with both types of meaning simultaneously making our job as readers not to determine if both are present--this is tacit--but to determine what they both are. Expanding and returning this to my thesis, while our language learning students may not be up to writing poetry at the level of Whitman or Li Bai yet, they will be trying to use language in more than just a denotative method, and we can better understand their

6 Whitman, Walt. “Section 51, Song of Myself.” Section 51 | IWP WhitmanWeb, 2021, iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/section-51. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 25 productions based on a semiotic approach--being aware of which semiotic categories they are making use of and struggling with in any given translingual event--in a way that allows them to deploy more of their resources rather than limiting them, which is effectively silencing them.

Borrowing from Eco's "Table 17" again, we can move away from poetry and return to a more focused analysis of translanguaging events.

/c1 , c2 etc. /[circɑ]---c3 /(conta)---d3 , d4---[circβ]----c4 /sign-vehicle/--sm…=«sememe»--d1 , d2 \ (contb)---- d5 , d6 , -----c5 , c6 , etc. \ (contc)--- d7 , d8 , ---c7 , c8 , etc. \ [circy] / \ (contd)---- d9 , d10 , ---- c9 , c10 , etc. \[circઠ]---- d11 , d12 ----c11 , c12 , etc.

In the case of conversations that cannot be had in a common language or that can rely on linguistic resources from more than one language, we should look to how to get those resources into the conversation, which will empower students of a second or third language by increasing rather than decreasing the linguistic resources they can bring to bear on any conversation or interaction. A first language English speaker who is learning multiple Asian languages and has lived and/or taught in a number of Asian countries possess far more linguistic resources than the average person, but this example is necessary to show that there may not be limits on how far

Semiotic Analysis of translanguaging events can go. For instance, our English speaker in this example may be relying on the foundational sign-vehicles and syntactic-markers of English, as highlighted in green in the model, to formulate an utterance to an interlocutor, but their topic, 生

き甲斐,7is a product of Japanese socio-cultural or philosophical background--a Japanese sememe in Eco's model. Our English speaker, relying on Japanese sememe knowledge of ikigai, is

7 Ikigai, 'iki' meaning to live and 'gai' meaning value or benefit, translates as reason for being or purpose in life; comparable to the French raison d'etre. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 26 discussing how they discovered their ikigai in a Korean context during a teach-and-study abroad experience in Seoul, for example's sake, and their interlocutors at the moment of making the utterance are from Taipei, which means that the circumstances require our English speaker to make reference to this in order to express their meaning in such a nuanced way that yet makes sense in a Chinese set of circumstances. Essentially, our English speaker must make full use of their linguistic, life, lexicon, grammar, syntax, socio-cultural, historical, and even political knowledge to be able to express the meaning they intend to denote and connote while being culturally aware and sensitive to the historical and political interactions that speakers of these many languages have had. To help make this clearer, I provide a color-coded model of this:

/c1 , c2 etc. /[circɑ]---c3 Ikigai /(conta)---d3 , d4---[circβ]----c4 /sign-vehicle/--sm…=«sememe»--d1 , d2 \ (contb)---- d5 , d6 , -----c5 , c6 , etc. \ (contc)--- d7 , d8 , ---c7 , c8 , etc. \ [circy] / Ikigai+ \ (contd)---- d9 , d10 , ---- c9 , c10 , etc. \[circઠ]---- d11 , d12 ----c11 , c12 , etc.

If we follow a monolingual policy, then our English speaker will only be able to reach d2 of ikigai (Denotative Meaning #2) if they can translate ikigai into English for the conversation; conversely, a Japanese monolingual policy will allow us to speak of ikigai as is but will not allow the English speaker to use their sign-vehicle and syntactic-marker information to help them express their meaning. In either case, we arrive at d2 of Ikigai and find it difficult if not impossible to go further along the tree. However, if we follow a multilingual policy, then our

English speaker can make use of their proficiency in their native language of English fundamentals, Japanese socio-historical and philosophical knowledge, Korean contextual event wherein they found their Ikigai (whatever that may be; teaching English for example), and the The Semiotics of Translanguaging 27 nuance of the circumstances that go into a standard conversation as people in Taipei would perform. This allows the speaker to get to c9 (Connotative Meaning #9, which I have termed

Ikigai+, or, Ikigai plus nuance, experience, personal opinion, etc. and not just the dictionary definition of the term) that carries with it all of the detail and complexity that goes into Ikigai+ as our speaker experiences it, lives it, and lives by it in their life as an embodied human being in a certain spatio-temporal location situated historically. It is to the far right branches of this tree wherein the human being as lived experience resides; I am not just my sign-vehicles (lexicon) and syntactic-markers (grammar and syntax). I am my memories as an embodied human being in a certain spatio-temporal location, stage of history, and citizen of a particular socio-cultural situation comprised of all manner of examples of cooperation and competition, and this is where the content of our consciousness and conversation--the reason for using language to express myself and my meaning to another person at all in the first place--comes from. The meanings I can make, co-construct, and express to others when I am allowed to include the contexts and circumstances that are sine qua non to me being who I am, however broken my utterances are at first, are far more relevant to, accurate in expression of, and reifying of me than a correct yet simple target-L2 structure can ever be. I am self-capable (do not require any technological, dictionary, or interlocutor assistance) and able to say 我愛哲學8 of my own volition when I want with the correct lexicogrammar and syntax, but I do not, at the time of writing this paper, know how to express in Mandarin how essential it is to me as a person and member of society.

Allowing me to say "I love philosophy" in Mandarin and add on that essential-to-me characteristic in English, or even in Japanese or French, can allow and inspire me to keep

8 Wǒ ài zhéxué. Literally, I love philosophy. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 28 speaking Mandarin in the future. Forcing me into a situation wherein "if I cannot say it in

Mandarin, then I cannot say it at all" also forces me as a person to become only what I can express in Mandarin. The parts of me that I cannot find the language for in Mandarin effectively cease to exist in Mandarin-only conversation since they cannot and ought not be talked about in order to maintain the monolingual classroom policy. This creates a kind of insurmountable tension in my mind as a target-L2 student; I grok9 philosophy, what it means to me, and how fundamental it is to my character and so live philosophy and exist philosophically yet it is not a part of me since I cannot express it in Mandarin monolingually. Am I somehow suddenly less of a person? No, that grok-level knowledge is still me immanently and concomitantly. Then why can I not make others aware of this absolutely essential piece of information about me that, if they do not know it about me, then they do not really know me at all? Well, this is a monolingual exchange wherein you are only what you can express. Therefore, my personal identity and my social identities do not overlap and I find myself in some sort of liminally schizophrenic existence: I am one person in the classroom and that person is different from who I am as soon as

I leave the classroom. This is not the case for me alone; any target-L2 students who are in a monolingual policy classroom or environment will experience versions or variants of this themselves, and I suspect this can be especially damaging for very young learners of a second language.

Teaching grammar is necessary for language educators--better grammar in a target L2 makes for smoother communication in that target L2--but this in no way necessarily entails that the method of teaching grammar must focus solely on grammar and syntax. Rather, by making

9 Neologism coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land meaning "to understand something so intuitively and completely that it becomes a part of oneself." The Semiotics of Translanguaging 29 target-L2 students aware of the semiotic categories of Eco, the students can also become aware of just how rich, nuanced, and deep their well of knowledge that can be deployed in any interaction really is as opposed to feeling limited in what they can say or express due to their progressing yet not fully attained or realized target-L2 capabilities within a "Target Language

Only" classroom setting. If you cannot say it properly in Mandarin, Japanese, Tagalog, or

German, etc., then you cannot say it at all. This mentality is tragically misguided since students of these languages can say it; they have already thought of the concept or idea they wish to discuss monolingually in their native language or multilingually in a translanguage, but they are struggling to reconfine, recategorize, and express all of the multilingual semiotic categories and nuanced detail that goes into that concept back to the language educator. Rather than being incapable of saying 'it' at all, they may have a speech production in mind that includes socio-cultural, historical, and personal knowledge that far exceeds where the language educator may determine their abilities to be. By limiting that target-L2 student to a monolingual production, the language educator enacts a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts; the student is then oppressed linguistically, cannot perform according to the educator's standards, struggles towards silence rather than progress, and the educator points to this process as a sign that they had correctly assessed that student's abilities rather than realizing that they forced the situation. We can, prima facie, see how this is problematic, but we can examine this in more detail if we approach it systematically, and that is the purpose of the subsequent, and final, section of this paper.

Connecting to Critical Pedagogy The Semiotics of Translanguaging 30

Glimpses of the theoretical framework and approach I am arguing for in this paper have made themselves visible at different points in this paper so far, but, in this final section, my aim is to make the connection explicit and distinct. To do so, I place my work under the components of critical pedagogy that Graham Crookes lays out in Chapter 3 of his Critical ELT in Action text to determine whether or not the semiotically translingual model comports itself to a critical method of teaching and critically-minded educators. For each of the components, I introduce them as found in Crookes (2013), expound upon them, and then examine the model I have constructed in this paper with an eye towards congruence or a failure or shortcoming on my part or that of my model.

First, the initial component of "language organization and classroom management prerequisites"10 centers on how language in a language education classroom must be carefully considered ahead of time, which we have seen an example of earlier in this paper in the form of deciding on a language policy of multilingualism rather than monolingualism, but expands to include a policy of classroom management in terms of possible interactions, behaviors, and potential negative situations that could hinder student's progress in their target language. As

Crookes writes,

[r]elated to classroom management is the subject of learner's emotions, and their expression. Learning a language is not easy; opening the door to aspects of life that are in need of improvement means that emotions are more likely to be expressed, but failure to express emotions in a constructive way can lead to unproductive forms of interaction and breakdowns in classroom discipline.11

Here, we find that allowing translanguaging via multilingual policies can help student's voice those emotions rather than limiting them to monolingual productions on sensitive topics that

10 Crookes, Graham. Critical ELT in Action: Foundations, Promises, and Praxis. Routledge Publishing Company, New York, 2013. Paperback. Page 47. 11 I bid. 51. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 31 stoke emotional responses in addition to the frustration that can come with the struggle to produce monolingually in the target language. Semiotics allows us to see, first, what sort of information is relevant to stoking those emotional responses--is it a social injustice or inequality coming out of the sememe category, or, is it the specific context of an injustice that students respond to emotionally since it makes visible an obfuscated yet underlying injustice--in a way that can focus class discussion activities on those informational nodes, and once the informational nodes of Eco's model are clear to the instructor, they can then design prompts for the discussion that focus student's efforts to translanguage from and to the target language structures without detracting from the topic of the discussion. Students, then, get the opportunity to express their emotions, vent their frustrations about the inequality for instance, and use their words in a way that does not lead to more frustration stemming from monolingual class policies.

Second, the component of "[c]ritical or otherwise oppositional stance by the teacher" focusing on the side of the educator and their means and epistemology yet being towards the ends of the students. Crookes notes that "[t]eachers are increasingly asked to produce [a philosophy of teaching] for practical job-related administrative reasons, but engaging in the effort to produce a philosophy of teaching one truly owns can be part of developing a critical perspective."12 If semiotic translanguaging be adopted as a part of such a philosophy of teaching, then we easily move to the critical perspective aspect, and this is because the semiotic approach to translanguaging allows an educator, as seen in the previous paragraph, to create classroom environments wherein critical thinking and discussions on socio-cultural issues can be had without furthering those frustrations with a monolingual policy. Additionally, translanguaging

12 I bid. 53. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 32 can be achieved critically simply by its nature, and we can see this in the adoption of and borrowing from critical movements around the world. Japanese learners of English, for instance, can discuss racial injustices by referring to the Black Lives Matter movement (in English) while making reference to a similar issue in Japan via Japanese or any such mixture of languages as appropriate to the age or proficiency level of the students and their target language, and this can be used as a classroom activity and dialogue that can create the affordance for those Japanese students to gain experience reasoning through racial injustice as a problem with a moral quality.

Creating the space for students to think and speak critically while also allowing them to deploy linguistic resources from the entirety of their repertoire is itself a critical move since it tears down colonial thought, the oppressiveness of majority versus minority languages, and can even subvert the dialogue of the oppressor by denying their language use. This last point is crucial since news outlets and media often manipulate sentiments based on language, which we can see in a headline written "man succumbs to injuries sustained at a protest" versus "peaceful protestor killed by police when shot multiple times with rubber bullets at close range after surrendering," and this is a perfect opportunity to teach students how connotative and denotative meanings differ in their native or target language, which is a fundamental aspect Eco's model covers as seen in detail in an earlier section.

Third, the component of "critical needs analysis"13 is pivotal for language educators and educators generally since it allows students to voice their needs, issues, and problems and educators a view of what they need to or should be doing in their class design in order to maximize the benefits their students gain from their instruction. This is not easy, however, and so

13 I bid. 47 The Semiotics of Translanguaging 33 deserves a pointed effort on behalf of the educators and their institution of employment. While standardized testing may determine the lexical, grammatical, and syntactical "needs," that which the students must know for the exam, may be readily apparent, the needs of these students in this class during this semester can vary widely: teaching a language in 2019 was very different than teaching a language during the lockdowns, quarantines, financial and residential instability resulting from them, and the health scares and lost loved ones that was the situation in which languages were taught post-March 2020. As Crookes writes "[t]urning to what could be done to improve the immediate situation, which is viewed with some critical concern or suspicion, is typical of a critical needs analysis," and I argue that, while semiotic translanguaging will not itself act as a form of critical needs analysis, it is highly conducive to productive discussion on these topics and so acts as a tool to enable the analysis rather than being a tool of critical needs analysis. By examining the statements of students while they discuss their needs in a classroom, they may make references to socio-cultural issues, historically-entrenched power structures, or certain contexts and circumstances that, if the instructor is not aware of these details, they may not notice without doing a more thorough semiotic analysis of the student's statements. Not only is it important for educators to be aware of the needs based on the learning outcomes desired for any course, it is important that we make ourselves aware of the needs that come with a student being human. If our students are in a monolingual policy classroom and are attempting to explain issues in their life that make learning difficult, little to none of that may make it across to their classmates or instructor owing to their inability to accurately represent their issues, concerns, and problems in life. In this way, and as we have seen, allowing a semiotic approach to The Semiotics of Translanguaging 34 translanguaging as a viable route of expression for these students can mitigate those misunderstandings and shortcomings of monolingual-only expression.

Fourth, the component of the "negotiated syllabus" that centers on a democratic, egalitarian, and empowering view of the oft neglected action of burdening students with work via the syllabus. Semiotic translanguaging lends itself well to this component in that it helps both the student and the instructor become aware of the problem areas of the target language the student is struggling with, and this allows the instructor to tweak the work each student is doing so that they are not all held to the same standard. While the semiotic translanguaging model is not a tool for designing or otherwise altering the syllabus, it does help instructors to see how or in which ways the syllabus needs to be negotiated as it relates to each student. This empowers the instructor in that it creates the affordances for them to instruct more effectively thereby, hopefully, raising the performance of the students, and this empowers the student in that it can make their progress in learning the target language more efficient, which may itself mean more motivation and confidence though that is outside the scope of this paper. Engaging students in the framework of their language education and not just the language education itself is a far more democratic process, and this is seen in the fact that students who negotiate their syllabus are enacting a microcosm of the social contract: they are directly responsible for their burdens, but they can benefit from the class more efficaciously than normal. These two concepts combined--empowerment and democracy in the classroom--can then give rise to a more egalitarian classroom wherein we can reasonably expect students to produce in their target language because we have given to them a more appropriate and relevant form of instruction. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 35

Fifth, the component of "codes"14 which focuses on physical objects in the world and cognitive objects of the mind as being "...more than visual aids for teaching. They are at the heart of the educational process because they initiate critical thinking."15 This shows that Crookes' perspective on education and his use of the term code is already in line with principles of translanguaging, and we see this in why the term translanguaging came about at all: code switching implies that language is merely a code, but translanguaging implies and entails so much more including the person as agent in the world, their experiences, their linguistic repertoire/s, and the fluidity of their transitions between and mixing of languages for poetic, prosaic, dramatic, philosophic, etc. effect. However, this component is not about translanguaging, rather, "[the] code… is a projective device which allows learners to articulate their own, somewhat unpredictable interpretation of a potentially problematic situation relevant to their life."16 The code is, therefore, an established norm in a classroom that allows students to approach content from an indeterminate starting point, and translanguaging is conducive to this since it allows students to start from an indeterminate linguistic origin in their expressions.

Furthermore, [t]he code allows reference without determining content. It may allow material to surface that the teacher is not expecting or is unfamiliar with, and besides being important pedagogically also is important ethically, since it means that the teacher is not totally controlling content,"17 which returns us to the earlier points on empowerment, egalitarianism, and democracy in the classroom. What Crookes means here by ethical, I assume, is that it is an immoral philosophy of teaching to dictate everything one-sidedly as this is detrimental to the

14 I bid. 47. 15 I bid. 61. 16 I bid. 61. 17 I bid. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 36 education of the student. If the purpose, the telos, of teaching is to effectively transmit knowledge and not just lecture to hear one's voice heard looming large over the uneducated, then, deontologically, we can argue that it is a moral obligation of the professor to profess, and the instructor to instruct, well. Creating more ways to communicate about and raise problems as well as to engage in critical thinking and discussion about those problems is, then, deontologically moral, and semiotic translanguaging in a classroom is, therefore, a moral approach to doing so. If this is so, then it also covers the sixth component, "dialogue," from

Crookes in that instructors should not force interactions between students to go a certain way merely for the sake of good grammar, instead, "...through critical dialogue, students come to name the world in a way that could lead to the world being changed."18 It is not enough to create a situation wherein students can think and speak critically without a monolingual policy limiting and frustrating them, and it is not enough to create codes for them do so, but we as educators must also connect this to the world that students live in as citizens of a nation and a member of a species on the planet. In other words, our empowerment of our students must not be hollow; they must come to the realization that they are empowered but that there are larger power structures in play as well. They will need to contend with changing a world that may not want to be changed, and in order to contend with that world, they will have to contend with some of the people in it. I argue that semiotic translanguaging can help prepare students for those situations wherein they will have to think globally, multiculturally, and multilingually with the people they inhabit the world with.

18 I bid. 64. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 37

This leads us to the seventh component of Crookes, namely, "[c]ritical content in materials; participatory material development."19 The world that we just discussed as needing to but not wanting to be changed that our students must contend with can be overwhelming, but if we design our lectures, slides, recordings, topics, questions, essentially all of our material from great to small with our mind on how we can bring the world and all of its positives and negatives into our classrooms, then we can begin to prepare students for that contention. As mentioned earlier in this paper, teaching lexicon, grammar, and syntax are necessary for language education, but the content, the example sentences, need not be arbitrary. Instead, we can focus our students' attention on critical topics by making those topics the situations which we structure our class exercises and homework around. As seen in the examples I gave earlier about translanguaging, we see a simple discussion about puppies, but I could just as easily have given the example [I like Earth.], which can act as a very early encapsulation of criticality in linguistic education.

Young students can be exposed to climate change, not by focusing on climate data and statistics, but by getting them to think about their relationship to the plant in simple ways: maybe even by talking about puppies and how they too need a healthy home to be happy. In contrast with

Crookes' concern "...that popular culture is so colonialized by mainstream concepts that relying on it alone might be a dangerous strategy. There's always the problem that the teacher is usually a few years (if not decades) behind whatever younger students think that popular culture is[,]"20 I argue that there is no danger here so long as the concepts that we include have a universally moral trait: climate change will only fall out of popularity once the human race has learned not do change the climate negatively, and, similarly, things like social injustices, economic

19 I bid. 47. 20 I bid. 66. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 38 inequalities, immoral cultural traditions, and cultural prejudices will only be a bad reference once they are no longer an issue. This, although out of order, can also lead to the ninth component

Crookes delineates, namely, "action orientation,"21and this is because students can be inspired to take action in relation and response to the instructor's criticality, which, in turn, the instructor can interact with as an affordance for students to engage with the world around them via the language they are learning. In these real life situations that students put their language to use towards the goal of making their world a better place--however much they accomplish is irrelevant; a little is better than nothing and those who know and still do nothing--while they live in it, and their multilingual status allows them to interact with others in unique ways, to use

Crookes' codes in a way to problem solve that others have not thought of, and to engage with the world as an empowered active citizen in it while still improving, ever-forward is the language learning march, their target language skills.

Lastly, we have the eighth component of "critical (participatory, democratic) assessment" wherein the instructor's tabulation and application of standards for grading is assessed. This component is actually more helpful in supporting semiotic translanguaging policies and frameworks in the class than in comparison with the combination of my framework and the other components from Crookes since, as Crookes writes, "[b]ecause so many of the problems of

[assessment] also come from levels above that of the individual teacher…," we as educators may have to prove to everyone above us in the power hierarchy and everything that overarches us in terms of our need to answer to our students and their families expectations of us in terms of language learning students of a young age, the educational institutions in which we work as

21 I bid. 48. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 39 educators, the local and federal forms of government that have education as their purview and to which we are held accountable to by laws and regulations, and those who decide a national language policy. Since this is the situation, I argue that semiotic translanguaging can be used to show both why a monolingual language policy is not only a bad educational policy but immoral as well, and, additionally, that we as language instructors can better assess students if we allow them to bring to bear all of their forms of knowledge and their relative contents. For example, allowing students to translanguage, examining their utterance semiotically, and confirming the analysis with the students allows them to express their concerns as I mentioned in the critical needs analysis facet earlier. Additionally, the fact that semiotic analysis of translanguaging can reveal the rich detail, nuance, and considerations that learners, language or otherwise, have, a case can be made to people in positions of power who may be unaware of these details until someone can clearly demonstrate them to an audience. Semiotic analysis of translanguaging can accomplish this, and we can glimpse this in my discussion of ikigai from earlier, which may be a simple term but evidences that a more detailed analysis in the future is both possible and viable.

In doing so, we may find it easier to educate students in their target language, but, from the critical pedagogy side, we may also be able to use language as a way to democratically educate those same students to be critically minded, aware, conscientious, and active citizens of our societies and as human beings in the larger species that lives on this planet.

Conclusion

This paper has been an initial foray into a methodology for using semiotics as a framework by which to analyze translanguaging, which I have termed Semiotic Analysis. I have suggested that this methodology is more accurate both in terms of understanding multilingual The Semiotics of Translanguaging 40 students and student-teach interactions and in gauging how much students possess in their linguistic repertoire/s than that associated with other previous investigations associated with the term ‘semiotics’ in applied linguistics First, I discussed Charles Sanders Peirce in detail since his semeiotic-cum-phenomenological system helps us understand what sign systems are and what perception and cognition are at their foundations in relations to those signs, and this allowed us, second, to move into the more language focused semiotics of Umberto Eco. Eco's "Table 17" in particular was employed to show how complex and nuanced translanguaging really is as opposed to the misplaced view that mixing languages leads to more miscommunication, which Garcia

(2005) covered. After using Semiotic Analysis to examine translanguaging events, I used

Crookes' components of critical pedagogy to meta-reflexively examine my own framework and methodology as constructed in this paper, and this was done towards the end of seeing whether or not this model worked and was viable as a pursuit while also keeping its moral quality in mind as well. The Semiotics of Translanguaging 41

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