Towards a semiotics of typography
This article outlines a social semiotic approach to analysing the ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning potentials of letter forms, drawing on Jakobson’s distinctive feature analysis and Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of experiential metaphor. Distinctive features are recognized and applied to the analysis of examples: weight, expansion, slope, curvature, connectivity, orientation and regularity.
Keywords: document design, ideational meaning, textual meaning, connotation, semiotics, interpersonal meaning, medium, distinctive features, typography, mode
Published online: 07 July 2006
https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.14.2.06lee
https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.14.2.06lee
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