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

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.

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

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.

MEANING-MAKING OF INTERNET MEMES TO CREATE HUMOROUS SENSE: FUNCTIONS AS SPEECH ACTS

This research explored how the memes were created with multimodal elements that could make meaning to create a humorous sense and function as speech acts. With the complexity of meaning-making, nowadays, it had become a trend that people could communicate online through Memes. Semiotics provides how the combination of modes, media, and potential meanings, that were applied to make meaning in memes. At the same time, pragmatics proposes details on how memes can function as speech acts. This research adopted a qualitative method using multimodal analysis by Leeuwen (2005) and speech acts theory by Bach and Harnish (1980) that were employed as the theoretical framework. A total of 16 memes were retrieved and captured as JPG files from social media and other internet websites; therefore, documentation was the only technique used in this research. The results of the study showed that (1) the integration of semiotic resources such as mode, media, and meaning potentials in memes aided the readers to understand the background knowledge of memes (2) two types of communicative illocutionary acts were found in the memes: constative and directive illocutionary acts which function to express the emotion or opinions and question something (3) the effects of using internet memes could be seen through verbal and non-verbal perlocutionary acts which showed an agreement and had the same feeling as in the memes. Finally, the memes containing multimodal components composed of semiotic resources interacted creatively to make humorous sense, and it could aid the readers to communicate online.

Teaching for Emergent Disciplinary Drawing in Science? Comparing Teachers’ and Children’s Ways of Representing Science Content in Early Childhood Classrooms

This classroom-based study aims to contribute knowledge about children’s opportunities to make use of drawing to make meaning in science. Employing a social semiotic approach to drawing, we examine what ways of representing science content that are (1) made available by the teacher and (2) adopted in children’s drawings. We analysed observation data from 11 science lessons in early childhood classrooms (children aged 3 to 8 years), including the drawings that children made during those lessons (129 drawings in total). Our findings suggest that the semiotic resources that teachers provide have a large impact on how children represent science content in their drawings. Moreover, we interpret that teachers strive to support children’s ‘emergent disciplinary drawing’ in science, since they predominantly provided semiotic resources where the science content was generalised and decontextualised. Finally, we propose that ‘emergent disciplinary drawing’ is incorporated as an element of science pedagogy in ECE practice and ECE teacher education.

A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis of English Micro-lectures

Lim (2019) states that one challenge for the researchers in multimodal discourse analysis is to describe and discuss the interplay across various semiotic resources. English micro-lectures, as a kind of popular and widespread teaching materials in the information age, are typical multimodal discourses involving multi-semiotic resources. This article adopts the systemic-functional synthetic framework for multimodal discourse analysis from Zhang Delu (2018) to explore the relationship of various modes involved in excellent English micro-lectures and further examine how the semiotic resources cooperate and interact to construct communicative meaning. By analyzing and interpreting the context of culture, the meaning, the lexico-grammar, the media and the substance systems of involved modes in micro-lectures, it proves that English micro-lectures demonstrate complicated intersemiosis and various modes cooperate in a perfect way in meaning construction. This comprehensive investigation of semiotic systems sheds light on teachers’ mode choice and teaching design in producing micro-lectures and students’ learning strategies of micro-lectures in the mobile-assisted learning environment.

Semiotic Analysis of Dove’s Femvertising

This qualitative study aimed to know in what ways the verbal (oral mode) and non-verbal (visual mode and gestural mode) semiotic resources help Dove meet the criteria of femvertising. The study used the Multimodal approach to help analyze the data. The writer collected and analyzed the data from Dove’s My Beauty My Say video. The findings showed that the verbal semiotic resources help Dove meet the criteria of femvertising by orally informing the audiences about the problems and arguments that are faced by the women in the video and how they responded to the problems in order to empower all the women. Meanwhile, the non-verbal semiotic resources help Dove meet the criteria of femvertising by revealing women in the authentic form and outside of traditional gender stereotypes so that they can deliver predominantly pro-female messages that can empower themselves and other women who are facing the similar problems as they do. The non-verbal semiotic resources are delivered by using the gestures (e.g. facial expression and body language) and objects (e.g. outfits, dominated background color, focus of the camera) in the video. In conclusion, I observe these semiotic resources are important to help Dove meet the criteria of femvertising. Keywords: Femvertising, Multimodal, Verbal semiotic resources, Non-verbal semiotic resources

Analysing Multimodal Texts in Science—a Social Semiotic Perspective

Teaching 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 game grammars: a sociosemiotic account of young people’s game-making practices

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.

Selling “Healthy” Radium Products With Science: A Multimodal Analysis of Marketing in Sweden, 1910–1940

We study the marketing of radioactive products in Sweden from 1910 to 1940, using a dataset of newspaper and magazine advertisements. We use multimodal critical discourse analysis to show how marketers harnessed the meaning potentials of language and semiotic resources to embed radium in discourses of science and technological development, and thus convince consumers of its health benefits. We find that canny marketers continuously colonized, shaped, and remarketed radioactive products in response to greater scientific knowledge and growing safety concerns. These techniques highlight the challenges of distinguishing legitimate/illegitimate applications of discoveries when science and entrepreneurialism move at the same pace.

Rescaling the global borderlands: Transperipheral projections from ‘the heart of the Amazon’

This article examines semiotic resignifications undertaken in ‘peripheral’ cultural production through an ethnographic analysis of the trajectory of the Amazonian artist, Jaloo. Jaloo occupies multiple positions of marginality in Brazilian society and artistic scenes, which he connects to other global peripheries in his performances, aesthetics, and self-narratives. Building on anthropological and sociolinguistic scholarship, we show how ‘peripheral’ status is managed by Jaloo in the context of a growing and politicised audience for outsider and alternative cultural production. We theorise Jaloo's negotiation of his relationship with audiences and the media as rescaling. Further, we argue that this rescaling entails the ordering of semiotic resources into a social imaginary that reconfigures peripheral territories and identities, which we consider in terms of a transperipheral chronotope. (Inequality, chronotopes, indexicality, race, coloniality, scales, periphery)