Metalanguaging Matters

In this article, the authors build on empirical data from the ongoing longitudinal research project Signs of language (2008 – 2018) to examine how multilingual children in a primary school setting use metalinguistic resources linked to several written languages. Grounded in social semiotics and drawing on newer social perspectives on metalanguage, the authors focus on a researcher-generated activity designed to invite the children to reflect on language and literacy. In two particular interactions, they explore how the children “engage with the meta” by navigating between different languages and sign systems, and how their use of metalinguistic resources in a referential sense is inextricably linked to a dialogically formed and performative negotiation of social identity and social relations. Thus, adopting a metalanguaging perspective, this article demonstrates how metalinguistic statements about language are closely interwoven with an ongoing production and negotiation of the communicative situation.

Conceptual art in design

The purpose of the article is to consider the concept and determine its components, in the development and analysis of conceptual art in modern design. Methodology. The following methods are used: analysis, synthesis, as well as semiotic, hermeneutic, psychoanalytic. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the study of conceptual art on the examples of hairstyle design, hairdressing collections, and an attempt to comprehend the underlying contexts and meanings in the process of interpretation. Conclusions. Given the fact that modern design as a polymorphic entity with a dominant innovative component actualizes the activities of the new generation and acquires the features of intellectual comprehension of visual information, it can be argued that conceptual art is a priority in this direction. The concept as the initial concept of the conceptual is defined as a multilevel formation of content, the semantic meaning of the sign, which requires a process of interpretation. Through J. Dili's study of the theory of sign systems, the interpretation of the concept in the system of traditions, rituals, customs, which is perceived differently by different people due to belonging to different cultures, societies, etc., becomes clear. It is proved that the creation of the concept is based on processes based on individual practice, personal associations, and the main types of metaphorical and allegorical thinking that arise from the experience of not only cognitive but also substantive activity. The study of conceptual art on examples of hairstyle design, hairdressing collections shows the peculiarity of such works of art: they are not always functional and are not always defined as a utilitarian object, but the use of unusual color, shape, progression, silhouette lines, the fullness of space and volume with signs and symbols, require a multilevel semantic definition in the process of interpretation through intellectual comprehension of the inherent contexts and meanings. Keywords: conceptual art, concept, design, hairstyle.

Analysis of Genres of the BBC One TV Programs

The relevance of the study is based on the fact that the BBC One channel is interesting as an example of a public service broadcaster which retains its image and competitiveness on the global media market. The goal of the research is to analyze the BBC One programming with regard to its forms of journalists and cameramens work. The semiotic methodology is chosen for interpreting sign systems, i. e. journalists texts or TV frames, as interconnected phenomena of culture. As a result, important sociocultural and philosophical elements integrated into the BBC One programming and determining its genre profile have been revealed. The social mission of the public broadcasting, combination of regional and metropolitan grounds, the prevalence of serious news genres are among them. Moreover, the programs are open for entertaining content including a foreign-made one. There is also a visual and aesthetic adaptation of pre-TV cultural forms of theater and the tabloid press, etc. Therefore, we can speak of a rather flexible programming policy of the BBC One, which can be a good model to develop strategies for public service broadcasters in other countries.

Visual Literacy in the Context of Digital Education Transformation

The evolution of digital technologies and the use of visual media in our everyday life highlights the necessity to educate visually literate individuals. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2018) has launched the Future of Education and Skills 2030 that emphasizes that due to the digitalization into all areas of life, digital and data literacy are considered to be core foundations and being literate in this context requires the ability to comprehend, interpret, use and create textual and visual information in various formats, contexts and for diverse purposes (making meaning based on encoding and decoding signs/sign systems). The concept of visual literacy has been studied for several decades, however, it is a relatively new study area within a digital environment in Latvian media and education context. By bringing attention to the practice and reporting students comprehension and competency within the domain of digital visual literacy, the author reports the findings of a study that examined the competence of the sub-domain of visual literacy, applying Inquiry Graphic (IG) as a framework for the analysis. The purpose of this paper is to contribute quantitative and qualitative data to the domain of visual literacy amongst the Riga Art and Media school final year students and conceptualize visual literacy in the process of digital education transformation, proposing further research on academic practice and pedagogical tools to improve a person’s visual literacy and visual media competence in a digital environment.

The end of Sebeok’s century meets twenty-first century pandemic: modeling through and beyond Sebeok’s systems, semiotics, science

Thomas A. Sebeok’s name became all but synonymous with semiotics during the last half of the twentieth century. Sebeok located neglected semioticians in antiquity, and convinced many contemporary scholars that they were semioticians. One of his most fruitful encounters was with Juri Lotman of the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics, who had published in 1967 an ambitious model of human sign systems in which language would constitute a primary modeling system, and cultural phenomena a secondary modeling system. We inspect how Sebeok amended Lotman’s system, inserting another primary modeling system before language. This brings biological precursors to human language as a syntactic and learned faculty that builds on many nonsyntactic and sometimes nonconscious senses, including emotion, affect, and memory. We note how, in Sebeok’s final book in 2000 on modeling systems theory, co-authored with Marcel Danesi, there is a suggestion that the three layers of modeling systems may be colored by Peircean notions of firstness, secondness, and thirdness; we clarify how these layers are analogue. Finally, the fundamentals of the primary modeling system leak into languaging, as better understood through post-Sebeok cognitive and neurological sciences, and rendering less mysterious some of the strange effects of the COVID-19 pandemic’s proxemics crisis.

Intertheoretical and metatheoretical models of cartographic semiotics

The aim of the study is to demonstrate the peculiarities of the cartosemiotic structures manifestation in the sign systems axiomatic intertheory in the view of the metatheoretic approach. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of data and knowledge is based on vector bundle procedures of areal and triangular types on manifolds. Taking into account the principles of General semiotics, the generalization of the research results on cartographic signs and sign systems by the method of vectorization enables defining the universe of sign systems as a unity of fibering (stratification) equivalent forms with the linearly ordered structure

Bühler’s organon model of communication: a semiotic analysis of advertising slogans

This article investigates the member units of sign systems used in contemporary Iranian advertising slogans according to the Organon Model introduced by Karl Bühler. In dealing with this subject, the writer introduces Bühler’s Organon Model and provides a short definition of the term advertising slogan. The next part of this article shows the three types of conative functions with regard to such slogans. The corpus of this study is the slogan of a hundred contemporary Iranian advertising messages used in Iranian markets which have not been studied from a semiotic perspective. The result of this research shows the tendencies of Iranian advertising messages to lean towards the descriptive type of conative function.

Social Stigma of COVID-19: A Semiotic Analysis of WHO Campaign Posters

COVID-19 has been reported to be risen in numbers of infected cases and deaths. The massive report by media and social network which focus on the spreading and infection may affect not only physical health but also individual’s and general population’s mental health, isolation and stigma. To eradicate COVID-19-related stigma and discrimination perpetuated by both individual and group of people, WHO exhibits some anti-stigma campaign posters. This study employs qualitative method to acquire deep investigation of meaning and to involve the social context. Thus, by using Roland Barthes’s semiotic approach, analyzing signifiers and signifieds, this study was aimed to unmask both denotative and connotative meanings of the stigma embed within the six health campaign posters of COVID-19 by Southeast Asia WHO. The analysis was focused not only on the verbal sign of posters (linguistic text), but also its relation to their visual sign (imagery messages). From the analysis of the two sign systems of posters, the result shows that the six posters connote acts of discriminatory behaviours, stigmatization, stereotype and blaming. Through the posters, WHO propagates people to work together to fight COVID-19 and to bring out the best humanity, to have better awareness and positive attitudes and appeals governments, citizens, media, key influencers of communities to have a role in preventing and to stop stigma surrounding in South-Asia and specifically in Indonesia which becomes the target of the poster viewers during the pandemic. Those messages are connoted through different font colors and sizes and the illustration on each poster.

PENGGUNAAN DATA CINEMETRIC SEBAGAI SATU PENEMUAN SIGNIFIKASI MAKNA SUBTEKS DALAM KAJIAN FILEM

Kajian ini memberi fokus kepada objek formal iaitu disebut sebagai sinematik dan sistem tanda. Filem Lelaki Harapan Dunia (LHD, 2014) merupakan material teks filem yang menyelusuri pengalaman subjektif manusia dan takrifan mereka terhadap dunia khususnya dalam dunia ruang komposisi filem (memahami cara, pandangan atau perspektif dunia melalui pandangan orang lain) menjadi asas utama kajian. Dalam konteks kajian ini, teori Miles dan Huberman, dan aplikasi perisian Cinemetrics digunakan dengan pendekatan data rubrik yang kemudiannya sebagai verifikasi data keseluruhannya untuk paparan data yang lebih tersusun. Teori Semiotik Roland Barthes digunakan terhadap teks filem dan penelitian akan bertumpu bagaimana pembinaan unsur sinematik menghasilkan makna subteks. Kajian ini melihat kepada aspek teknikal gerak kerja kamera sebagai penelitian utama dalam memahami sistem tanda dan makna menerusi perisian Cinemetrics. Subteks yang signifikan ini diperoleh daripada sistem tanda semiotik yang lebih spesifik iaitu denotasi, konotasi dan mitos. Fokus analisis adegan dan unsur sinematik yang benar-benar dominan sahaja dilakukan yang merangkumi perbincangan gerak kerja kamera adegan 16 dan 64. Hasil penelitian terhadap teks filem, ia berfungsi sebagai ideational yang menerangkan hubungan antara actants (pelakon) memainkan peranan mereka dalam filem, keduanya berfungsi sebagai interpersonal yang mengangkat pemikiran pengarah seperti yang disampaikan dan ketiga berfungsi sebagai textual yang membawa maksud mesej disampaikan secara tersirat. This study focuses on formal objects called cinematic and sign systems. Lelaki Harapan Dunia (LHD, 2014) is a text material that examines human subjective experience as well as their definition of the world especially in the film composition (understanding the way, view or perspective of the world through the eyes of others) becomes the main basis of the study. In the context of this study, Miles and Huberman theory as well as Cinemetrics software applications for a more structured show of data are used with a rubric data style that later as a verification of the overall data. Roland Barthes’s Semiotic theory is applied to the film and research will focus on how the construction of cinematic elements generates meaning through semiotic theory. Technical aspects such as camera movement is the key research insight the sign system and its meaning. This significance subtext is derived from a more specific system of semiotic signs, i.e., denotations, connotations and myths. The focus of the analysis will investigate scenes and cinematic elements that is dominant only in suggesting meaning. Discussion’s scenes 16 and 64 will firstly serves as an ideational that describes the relationship between actants (actors) playing their roles in the film, second, functioning as interpersonal that elevates the director’s thinking as presented and the third serves as textual that carries the meaning of the messageexpressed implicitly.