The story is established in a language that could change the way of our thinking. Whether learning a new language could change our thinking is the main concern of this thesis. By the way, the thesis explores whether the methods in Arrival can be our references if aliens arrive on the Earth someday. In the last part, it comes to the conclusion on the relationship between language and thoughts. A tentative analysis on the successful communication of language in the film Arrival will go on, and the elements of semiotics bridging from language to thoughts will be discussed.

Beyond doubt, Arrival is relative to Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that one language can build one’s thinking mode and cognitive mode, which is also called linguistic relativism.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is proposed by linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf, which is a psychology and linguistic hypothesis. The doctrine holds that human modes of thinking are influenced by the language in which they are used and may therefore have different opinions on the same subject, but this doctrine has caused some controversy and some criticisms. (Penny, 1996: 25)

There are some parts of the invention of artificial language nowadays, such as lojban and toki pona. Lojban is a logically engineered language for various usages created by Logical Language Group in 1987. And Toki pona is a minimal language designed by translator and linguist Sonja Lang (formerly Sonja Elen Kisa) of Toronto to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity, which is used to test principles of minimalism, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and pidgins.

Arrival has attracted lots of modern semiologists all over the world. Stephen Wolfram wrote an article entitled Arrival, Logograms and the Wolfram Language discuss how to analyze and translate an alien language. He created a mode called Mathematica years ago and it could help learn and translate unknown languages.

Another American linguist Ben Zimmer, a language columnist for The Wall Street Journal, formerly language columnist for The Boston Globe and The New York Times Magazine, wrote his review on The Wall Street Journal “On Film Arrival: The Linguists are heroes”. He thought Arrival make linguist great to the public, which is not normal in Hollywood. And he believed how linguists work even how a linguist’s home looks like is reasonable in the film. 

Is the language’s non-linear and multi-dimensional features are the only characteristics of alien languages? Syntactic linguist David Adger raised the objection in his article “How ‘Alien’ can the language be”. Arguer first clarified the concept of “language” to the reader. As to what is language, he pointed out that there are two major points of view in the linguistics academia filed, which always compete with each other. One view holds that language is the result of the expansion and improvement of basic communicative systems. Language is the product of man-made social communication, cultural evolution, and the object of culture. Another view is that language does not happen until human minds go through some experience that can be interpreted as linguistics. The human mind can only create a universal system that connects phonetics or signs and meanings. Language is the object of cognition. In his opinion, the position of linguistics in Arrival is in a rather awkward position between the two poles: “language is the object of culture” and “language is the object of cognition”. (Umberto, 1976: 103)

In China, Sichuan university holds an academic seminar to discuss the semiology elements in the film Arrival. It is the first academic discussion in China of the film Arrival as we know.

2 Brief Review of Theory of Semiotics

Semioticians hold different opinions of semiotics, such as C. S. Peirce, Umberto Eco, Wei Shilin, and Zhao Yiheng. They contribute their opinions to the definition and category of semiotics. Though a variety of opinions have been proposed, it is possible to combine the ideas to analyze the film Arrival.