Abstract
Just three years after Susan Petrilli's Signifying and Understanding was published in 2009, the one-hundredth anniversary of Victoria Lady Welby's death (1912) has arrived. Susan Petrilli's book is a great work manifesting a great English scholar, a significian, a “founding mother” of semiotics. In this paper, the author gives a brief introduction to Susan Petrilli's Signifying and Understanding, a milestone work in promoting the development of semiotics, indicating its important role in discovering Lady Welby and making her better known to the world, and then analyzes the commonalities between Lady Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin, following Susan Petrilli to establish an “ideal relation” between Welby and Bakhtin and to get them into a “dialogue,” which will help readers to understand the great significance of recovering an almost forgotten figure – Victoria Lady Welby.
About the author
Yongxiang Wang (b. 1967) is a professor at Nanjing Normal University and researcher at Tianjin Foreign Studies University 〈nshdyxwang@163.com〉. His research interests include second language acquisition, TEFL in China, discourse analysis, and critical linguistics. His publications include Action research in foreign language teaching and professional development of FLT teachers (with Zhi Yongbi, 2011); “Lotman's legacy in modelling of semiosis” (with K. Kull, 2012); “The weakening of strong talk and the strengthening of weak talk – How to realize the dialogicity of teacher talk in classrooms” (2012); and “The theoretical core of Bakhtin's Marxist view of language” (with Pan Zhaoyi, 2012).
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
