scholarly journals A Socio Semiotic Approach to Multimodal Discourse of Selected Nollywood Film Advertisement Posters

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-45
Author(s):  
Monsurat Aramide Nurudeen ◽  
Ebenezer Oluseun Ogungbe ◽  
Moshood Zakariyah

Film posters are complex forms of visual communication basically employed to promote films so as to seek for patronage from prospective viewers. Nollywood film poster designers or marketers employ a complex system of modes of multimodal communication to achieve their intended objectives. This study therefore investigates how these semiotic resources reveal the intention of the film poster designers and how other contextual variables influence the ability of the viewers to comprehend the messages embedded in film posters. The objectives of the study are to uncover the visual and linguistic semiotic resources in the film advertisement posters and their interaction. The study adopts a qualitative approach to the analyses of six randomly selected Nollywood film advertisement posters of three genres, namely: drama, thriller and comedy. Yuen’s Generic Structure Potential and Royce’s Ideational Intersemiotic Complementarity serve as the basis for the analysis of the selected texts. The study reveals that visual modes are more salient and frequently employed in the advertisement posters than the linguistic modes. However, both the visual and the linguistic modes offer complementary relationship for effective meaning-making in the selected Nollywood advertisement posters. The meanings derived are often contextual which appeal to the audience reasoning and sustain their interests. The study concludes by emphasizing the importance of the synergy of both linguistic and visual multimodal resources or modes of signification in the successful meaning-making and meaning-comprehension in the study of visual communication.

Author(s):  
Ikenna Kamalu

Working within the framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) and critical metaphor analysis (CMA), this study examines the emblems and slogans of the four main political parties in Nigeria: the People's Democratic Party (PDP); the All Progressives Congress (APC); the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA); and the Labour Party (LP), which have become instruments of campaign and propaganda. While the emblems/logos are visual (iconic) representations of party ideology, the slogans are verbal rhetorical affirmations of what the emblems represent. Based on insights from the theory of multimodality, this study is an attempt to use a social semiotic approach in the interpretation of visual communication. Multimodality understands visual as representation and communication. The approach that this study adopts tries to interpret how the multiple modes in multimodal communication yield themselves to different levels of meaning realization.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (8) ◽  
pp. 1596
Author(s):  
Yang Yang

Using the school badge of Xi’an Jiaotong University as an example, this article aims to unravel that both literal expression and visual imagery have the ideographic function. The analysis in this article primarily utilizes the theoretical framework of the visual communication grammar, which is developed by Kress & Van Leeuwen from Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics. By analyzing the representational, interactive, and compositional meaning of the school badge, this article shows that school badges have rich connotations and the ability to interpret them should be attached importance. Furthermore, this article aims to make a little contribution to the interpretation of school badges.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Janina Wildfeuer

AbstractThis article is concerned with the analysis of multimodal filmic text from a formalfunctional perspective. It presents a new and integrative framework which has been developed on the basis of a formal description of coherence and structure in verbal discourse in order to be able to articulate in detail how inferential strategies and defeasible reasoning can be included as a foundation for making meaning in the analysis of multimodal discourse. The article will, on the one hand, present the mechanisms of this framework for examining the intersemiosis of the filmic resources and, on the other hand, demonstrate the adequacy of this analytical tool with the help of an example analysis of a sequence taken from the movie Vanilla Sky. It will thus outline how it is possible to organise filmic semiotic resources more systematically and to describe the entire meaning-making process on various levels of film interpretation.


Author(s):  
Kawa Abdul–Kareem Sherwani, Et. al.

New technological developments have boosted the use of different modes or semiotic resources; social changes and developments, on the other hand, have changed the process of meaning making because discourse shapes and is shaped by social practices. Semiotic resources are used in communication (language, sound, gestures, facial expressions … etc) and this has impact and reflections on the methods of teaching. Literacy is not only about reading and writing, it rather means the ability to communicate through multiple modes. Hence, it is important to embed multimodality (the study of using multiple modes) in educational settings


Author(s):  
Carmen Daniela Maier

As more and more educators try to employ interactive texts in the educational process, investigation of how knowledge communication takes place in hypertext becomes increasingly signifi cant. Drawing on a multimodal theoretical framework, this paper explores knowledge communication in interactive texts from the Volcano World website (http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/Online/index.html). The analytical focus is first on how specialized knowledge is multimodally constructed inside the generic framework of traditional lessons through different types of interactive exchanges and across several semiotic modes. Second, the analysis discusses how the linear reading path imposed by the generic structure of traditional lessons is disrupted by hypertext’s meaning-making pathways. The paper concludes that the stable generic structure of lessons combined with the openness of hyperlinks can be and, to some extent, is being exploited in websites like Volcano World to enhance the process of progressively acquiring, producing and exchanging specialized knowledge across several semiotic modes. By detecting the kind of meaning-making structures that can be established when communicating specialized knowledge in a hypertext environment, educators can continuously adapt online interactive texts to accommodate students accustomed to complex interactive activities and eager to get to grips with them.


Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Cary Campbell ◽  
Nataša Lacković ◽  
Alin Olteanu

This article outlines a “strong” theoretical approach to sustainability literacy, building on an earlier definition of strong and weak environmental literacy (Stables and Bishop 2001). The argument builds upon a specific semiotic approach to educational philosophy (sometimes called edusemiotics), to which these authors have been contributing. Here, we highlight how a view of learning that centers on embodied and multimodal communication invites bridging biosemiotics with critical media literacy, in pursuit of a strong, integrated sustainability literacy. The need for such a construal of literacy can be observed in recent scholarship on embodied cognition, education, media and bio/eco-semiotics. By (1) construing the environment as semiosic (Umwelt), and (2) replacing the notion of text with model, we develop a theory of literacy that understands learning as embodied/environmental in/across any mediality. As such, digital and multimedia learning are deemed to rest on environmental and embodied affordances. The notions of semiotic resources and affordances are also defined from these perspectives. We propose that a biosemiotics-informed approach to literacy, connecting both eco- and critical-media literacy, accompanies a much broader scope of meaning-making than has been the case in literacy studies so far.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-411
Author(s):  
Antonio Nanni ◽  
Federico Bellentani

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110321
Author(s):  
Hesham Suleiman Alyousef

This qualitative study examined multimodal cohesive devices in English oral biology texts by eight high-achieving Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language students enrolled in a Bachelor of Science Dentistry program. A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the textual and logical cohesive devices in oral biology texts was conducted, employing Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion analysis scheme. The findings showed that students used varied cohesive devices: lexical cohesion, followed by reference and conjunctions. Although ellipsis was minimally employed in the oral biology texts, its discipline-specific uses emerged: the use of bullet points and numbered lists that facilitate recall. The SF-MDA of cohesion in multimodal semiotic resources highlighted the processes underlying construction of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of cohesive devices in oral biology texts. The results indicate that oral biology discourse is interdisciplinary, including a number of subfields in biology. The SF-MDA of pictorial oral biology representations indicates that they include instances of cohesive devices that illustrate and complement verbal texts. The results indicate that undergraduate students need to be provided with a variety of multimodal high-cohesion texts so that they can successfully extend underlying conceptual and logical meaning-making relations.


Author(s):  
Nur Nabilah Abdullah ◽  
◽  
Rafidah Sahar ◽  

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 1160
Author(s):  
Yong Hu ◽  
Qing Qiu

As a special type of multimodal text, picture books for children are highly valued in the creation of meaning by the integrative use of verbal and visual semiotic resources. Informed by Painter and Martin’s framework of visual narratives, this paper primarily deals with the interpersonal meanings encoded and expressed by the two semiotics (image and verbiage) within the Chinese picture books. It aims to analyse the visual and verbal choices available for writers to establish engagement between various participants. In the hope of investigating the collaboration and interplay of verbal and visual semiotics to construe interpersonal meanings, it examines the attitudinal meanings inscribed or invoked in picture books, exploring the ways in which visual and verbal resources are co-instantiated to encode attitudinal convergence and also divergence.


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