Exploring digital economy: a sociosemiotic perspective

Abstract Digital technologies have transformed our lives with unimaginable speed and scale, delivering immense opportunities and daunting challenges and leading to the birth of the digital economy. China and the United States (US) are two leading countries in the digital economy in both size and growth rate. This study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the similarities and differences between the US and Chinese legislation from a sociosemiotic perspective. By comparing the high frequency words in the two purpose-built corpora, it can be noted that as digital economy, a social sign, has the characteristics of spatiality and temporality. The US federal legislation related to digital economy focuses more on security and protection and has more specific regulations in individual industries, while Chinese legislation is more concerned with the strategy and guideline of development of industries and technologies in digital economy. In the meantime, information infrastructure and information and communication technologies are identified as the foundation and core elements shared in the two countries’ digital economies. Such a corpus-based sociosemiotic exploration of digital economy can shed light on relevant studies in the discourse analysis of legal texts.