scholarly journals Social semiotic genre: exploring the interplay of words and images in advertising

2022 ◽  
pp. 29-51
Author(s):  
Taofeek Olaiwola Dalamu
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
Semiotic Perspective

This study examined the interplay of pictorial and written modes that position advertising as a multimodal genre, explainable through a social semiotic perspective. Eight advertisements of the financial, telecommunications, and beverage products functioned as devices of analysis. Nevertheless, multimodal communicative acts served as the processing tool, elucidating the meaning potentials of the advertising configurations. Having deployed a system of multimodal interacts, tables and graphs assisted in accounting for the frequency of the semiotic resources of the written modes. The analysis indicated large and highlighted fonts (Celebrating the world’s no. 1 fixer), repetitions (Guinness, Maltina, real deal), and deviant constructs (EazyLoans, GTWorld) as elements of propagating intended messages. The deployment of codes (*966*11#, 737) and fragmented clauses (Over N100 million worth of airtime) played some roles in the meaning-making operations. Of significance is the Guinness’ conceptual “digits” of 17:59, contextualising the year, time, and channel of promotional benefits. Though questions (Have you called mum today?), offer (It can be), and minor clauses (Welcome to Guinness time) were parts of the communicative systems, statements (Terms and condition apply) and commands (Enjoy the complete richness of Maltina) dominated the entire dialogues. One might suggest that communicators should endeavour to deploy apt constructions and create eye-lines between participants as means of sensitising readers into consumption.

scholarly journals Analysing Multimodal Texts in Science—a Social Semiotic Perspective

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Wanselin ◽  
Kristina Danielsson ◽  
Susanne Wikman
Keyword(s):  
Content Knowledge ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
Teaching Resources ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
Analytical Tools

AbstractTeaching and learning in science disciplines are dependent on multimodal communication. Earlier research implies that students may be challenged when trying to interpret and use different semiotic resources. There have been calls for extensive frameworks that enable analysis of multimodal texts in science education. In this study, we combine analytical tools deriving from social semiotics, including systemic functional linguistics (SFL), where the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions are central. In regard to other modes than writing—and to analyse how textual resources are combined—we build on aspects highlighted in research on multimodality. The aim of this study is to uncover how such a framework can provide researchers and teachers with insights into the ways in which various aspects of the content in multimodal texts are communicated through different semiotic resources. Furthermore, we aim to explore how different text resources interact and, finally, how the students, or authors of teaching resources, position themselves in relation to the subject. Data consist of one student text and one teaching resource text, both comprising drawn and written elements in combination with symbols. Our analyses of the student text suggest that the proposed framework can provide insights into students’ content knowledge and, hence, how construction of multimodal texts may be a useful tool for formative assessment. When it comes to teaching resources, the framework may be a useful tool for teachers when choosing resources, particularly in relation to students’ possibilities of meaning making when engaging with such texts, but also, as a basis for classroom discussions.

Exploring Intercultural Interaction: The Use of Semiotic Resources in Meaning-Making Processes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nur Nabilah Abdullah ◽  
◽  
Rafidah Sahar ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Eye Gaze ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Nonverbal Cues ◽  
Context Word ◽  
Intercultural Interaction ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Word Search ◽  
Cultural Origins

Intercultural communication refers to interaction between speakers of different backgrounds, such as different linguistic and cultural origins (Kim 2001). Interaction in face-to face situations has demonstrated that spoken language involves both verbal and semiotic resources for social action. Semiotic resources that include use of talk, gestures, eye gaze and other nonverbal cues can convey semantic content and can become a crucial point in conversation (Hazel et al. 2014). Drawing on a Aonversation Analysis (CA) approach, we explore how participants employed semiotic resources in word searches activities in an intercultural context. Word searches are moments in interaction when a speaker’s turn is temporarily ceased as the speaker displays difficulty in searching for appropriate linguistic items so as to formulate the talk (Schegloff et al. 1977; Kurhila 2006). In this study, naturally occurring interactions in a multilingual setting were video recorded. The participants were Asian university students with different language backgrounds. The findings suggest that multilingual participants mutually collaborate by utilizing verbal affordances, gaze, gesture and other nonverbal cues as useful semiotic resources in the meaning-making process, and thus resolving word search impediments to facilitate intercultural interaction.

scholarly journals How Children Decode Visual Narrative in Gaiman’s and McKean’s The Wolves in the Walls

2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Visual Narrative ◽  
Unique Combination ◽  
Hermeneutic Circle ◽  
Complicated Process ◽  
Words And Images

ABSTRAK Bagaimana Anak Mengkode-ulang Narasi Visual dalam The Wolves in the Walls karya Gaiman dan McKean. Buku cerita bergambar sebagai teks untuk anak-anak merupakan kombinasi unik dari kata-kata dan gambar. Dua elemen yang saling terkait sama lain menciptakan inter-animasi bersama dalam membangun makna. Para ahli telah lama mempercayai bahwa proses membaca buku cerita bergambar melibatkan proses yang rumit dalam lingkaran hermeneutik. Namun, karena buku cerita bergambar terutama ditujukan untuk anak-anak, maka proses tersebut terjadi dalam pikiran sadar mereka. Oleh karena itu, penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengungkapkan proses pembuatan makna anak dalam narasi visual buku cerita bergambar yang mana dalam penelitian ini menggunakan karya Gaiman, The Wolves in the Walls. Setelah melalui serangkaian penelitian kualitatif dengan lima anak di Inggris, aspek yang diteliti dalam penelitian ini adalah gaya bercerita, penggambaran pengalaman, dan tempat. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa anak-anak membaca buku cerita bergambar dengan cara yang berbeda dari orang dewasa, terutama dalam strategi yang digunakan untuk membaca teks yang panjang dan rumit. Kata kunci: cerita bergambar, gaya bercerita, penggambaran pengalaman, tempat, lingkaran hermeneutik  ABSTRACT Picturebook as a text for children is a unique combination of words and images. Those two elements are interrelated into one another, creating a mutual interanimation in constructing the meaning. Experts have long believed that the process of reading picturebook involves a complicated process of hermeneutic circle. However, since picturebook is mainly aimed for children, the process happens subconsciously within their mind. Therefore, this research aims to reveal children’s meaning making process in visual narrative of picturebook, in this research is Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls. After a series of qualitative research with fi ve children in UK, the aspects to research are style, projection of experience, and setting. The result shows that children read the picturebook in a different way than adult, alongside their strategy to cope with long and complicated text. Keywords: picturebook, style, projection of experience, setting, hermeneutic circle

scholarly journals Visual elements in children’s concrete poems: A multimodal analysis of Rain and Ice Cubes

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-85
Author(s):  
Thusha Devi Rajendra ◽  
Surinderpal Kaur
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Multimodal Analysis ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Dominant Theme ◽  
Words And Images

This study is based on the multimodal analysis of two children’s concrete poems from the poetry book, Splish Splash (1994) by Joan Bransfield Graham. It employs Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Grammar as the analytical tool to analyse the visuals in terms of compositional meaning. It investigates how visual elements (words and images) are represented in the poems. In addition, it focuses on the features of the images and how they cohere on a page. The findings suggest that the representations of images in the poems reproduce the dominant theme of water and its forms. Furthermore, the interrelated-systems of salience and framing are used extensively and they contribute to meaning-making. Words and images support each other and coexist to provide meanings in the poems. Therefore, the combination of words and images creates a meaningful whole and offers readers greater opportunities to create meanings.

The heroes of the pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 07 (01) ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Sebastian Moreno Barreneche
Keyword(s):  
Health Economics ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Construction Process ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
Economics And Politics

Besides its impact on health, economics, and politics, the COVID-19 pandemic was the source of phenomena of a discursive nature, specifically regarding the solutions found by societies to make sense of the crisis caused by the uncontrolled spread of the virus. This article analyzes from a socio-semiotic perspective the construction process of the collective identity of “the healthcare workers” during the pandemic. After generally introducing semiotics as the discipline interested in meaning-making and signification, the article studies four semiotic mechanisms present in the discursive construction of any collective identity. It then moves on to its main goal: the analysis of the functioning of those four mechanisms in the specific case of “the healthcare workers,” a collective identity that, since the beginning of 2020, has been central in the narratives that emerged around the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, it should render visible the semiotic mechanisms of segmentation, actorialization, generalization, and axiologization.

scholarly journals Using systemic functional linguistics to explore digital technologies in educational contexts

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (4-5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Coffin
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Online Discussion ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Discussion Forums ◽  
Functional Linguistics ◽  
Online Discussion Forums ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Educational Argumentation

AbstractOver the last decade, technological innovation has led to new pedagogic sites, such as online discussion forums and virtual 3D worlds. In these sites students and teachers use language and other meaning-making resources to engage in educational argumentation. However, there have been few studies which have systematically explored the role of lexicogrammatical and other semiotic resources in the making of meaning in these contexts. This is because the main body of research underpinning claims around the affordances and limits of online argumentation is located within sociocognitive paradigms. By drawing on the tools of systemic functional linguistics and, where relevant, systemic functional-multimodal analysis, this article therefore offers a fresh perspective. I show how such tools can illuminate both the overarching textual shape and structure of online discussion forums and the ways in which meanings are made through language and other semiotic resources.

scholarly journals Exploring game grammars: a sociosemiotic account of young people’s game-making practices

2021 ◽  
pp. 147035722110272
Author(s):  
Bruno De Paula
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
The Relationship

This article investigates the relationship between young people’s game-making practices and meaning-making in videogames. By exploring two different games produced in a game-making club in London through a multimodal sociosemiotic approach, the author discusses how semiotic resources and modes were recruited by participants to realize different discourses. By employing concepts such as modality truth claims and grammar, he examines how these games help us reflect on the links between intertextuality, hegemonic gaming forms and sign-making through digital games. He also outlines how a broader approach to what has been recently defined as the ‘procedural’ mode by Hawreliak in Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames (2018) can be relevant for promoting different and more democratic forms of meaning-making through videogames.

scholarly journals Reconsidering the contents of interpreters’ notes: A human-centered approach to classification

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Anna Sasaki
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Note Taking ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
New Perspective

AbstractThis paper tackles the issue of the lack of a substantially new approach to classifying the interpreters’ notes. In my paper, I highlight the fact that the researchers in the field are yet to agree on the contents of interpreters’ notes, and that is, in my opinion, the problem that is numerously stumbled upon in consecutive interpretation research in general and note-taking research in particular. Not only do researchers invent new classifications within an excising paradigm, sometimes they contradict each other presenting different definitions for the same concepts. This paper attempts to solve the issue by introducing a new perspective on the contents of interpreters’ notes by adapting the human-centered approach and turning to the “writers” of the notes, the interpreters. The interpreter trainees who participated in this research were interviewed to obtain an in-depth understanding of what is included in interpreters’ notes. Under the semiotic perspective, which assumes both linguistic and non-linguistic notes as a system of signs, I classified the interpreters’ notes based on the subject’s comments to the notes they had written. This retrospective approach unveiled how interpreter trainees perceive their notes which prompt meaning-making and facilitate the memory when delivering interpretation.

scholarly journals Visual explicitation in intersemiotic translation

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Anne Ketola
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Meaning Construction ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Visual Form ◽  
Verbal Language ◽  
Image Translation ◽  
Words And Images

In Translation Studies, explicitation generally refers to an interlingual process where something that is implicit in the source text is made explicit in the target text. This article analyses the concept in an intersemiotic context, focusing on word-to-image translation, with the aim of determining whether word-to-image translation includes meaning construction that could be described as explicitation. The empirical data of the article is a comic contract, a verbal-only document that has been intersemiotically translated into a visual form, i.e. a comic. The analysis concluded that while some of the characteristics described for interlingual explicitation operate with verbal language-specific concepts and cannot be applied to word-to-image translation, other characteristics of explicitation – such as the specification of meaning in translation – seem well-suited for this type of intersemiotic analysis. The analysis also emphasized that distinguishing types of explicitation in word-to-image translation is complicated by the inherent differences of words and images as meaning making resources.

Brand Personification as Bonding

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-39
Author(s):  
Shukun Chen ◽  
Jing Lin
Keyword(s):  
Multimodal Communication ◽  
Marketing Literature ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
A Company ◽  
Semiotic Process

Abstract Brand personification has been well investigated in marketing literature. However, it is still rarely studied from the semiotic perspective, which offers a lens to research how the semiotic resources of products could be designed to personify the brand. Under the framework of systemic functional sociosemiotics, brand personification is theorized as a semiotic process of bonding, referring to the shared coupling of value and character. Two primary choices of bonding strategies are proposed: appreciation/judgment and affect. The source and target of appreciation/judgment are labeled as Appraiser and Appraised while those of affect are labeled as Emoter and Trigger. It leads to further considerations of how to construe the character as Appraiser, Appraised, Emoter, and/or Trigger. Then, the paper, drawing on visual and verbal grammars founded on systemic functional sociosemiotics, proceeds to illustrate how semiotic resources are co-deployed to realize these bonding strategies via a close analysis of three packaging cases of a company, Uni-President. This study provides theoretical backup for the brand personification in marketing and serves as a useful guideline for brand personification design, in particular, multimodal communication in packaging.

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