The Play of Semiotic Repetition and Intertwined Semiotic Agency:

Ba in the Reciprocal Singing of Chinese Mountain Song

Abstract

Peircean semiotics is characterised by its totality and inclusiveness. Paul Kockelman proposed a neo-Peircean semiotic framework, in which he incorporated agents into Peircean trichotomy, distinguished and formulated residential and representational agency, discussed the semiotic relationship between agents and other semiotic components, and figured out how agents are distributed in the world. Kockelman's discussion of the semiotic agency is highly detailed, but there are problems with the important missing part about the distribution of agency and the fact that he only discusses agency in the real world. This paper takes Han'ge, a reciprocal song in Guizhou, China, as a case study, using Ba theory to fill in the margins of agent distribution and analysing semiotic interaction in a semi-theatrical interaction. Through the analysis of Han’ge, this paper makes it clear that the same frame is repeated in the interaction of Han’ge. Additionally, introducing the concept of ba (individual actors and their surrounding environment as a whole) suggests that it manifests itself as an agent for the actors. Furthermore, the singers’ residential agency creates the ba that brings a different ontology from their casual world, and their representational agency becomes the main agency, which becomes the focal point of the creativity of the singers. Finally, as the ba theory suggests, this paper indicates that the Asian perspective can bring further granularity to the universal semiotic framework.