Social semiotics is concerned with meaning makers and meaning making. It studies the media of dissemination and the modes of communication that people use and develop to represent their understanding of the world and to shape power relations with others. It draws on qualitative, fine-grained analysis of records of meaning making, such as ‘artifacts’, ‘texts’, and ‘transcripts’, to examine the production and dissemination of discourse across the variety of social and cultural contexts within which meaning is made. Different ‘versions’ of social semiotics have emerged since the publication of Michael Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic in 1978. The account we offer in this paper is focused on the version proposed by Gunther Kress, Robert Hodge, Theo van Leeuwen, and others. Following a historical overview we discuss its connections with pragmatics and other approaches; key concepts; analytical focus; and fields of application.
References
Fairclough, N.
2003Analysing Discourse. Textual analysis for social research. Routledge.
Gumperz, J. J.
1999On interactional sociolinguistic method. In S. Saranghi & C. Roberts (eds.) Talk, work and institutional order. Discourse in medical, mediation and management settings: 453–471. Mouton de Gruyter.
(ed)2009The Routledge Handbook for Multimodal Analysis. Routledge.
Kress, G.
1993Against Arbitrariness: the social production of the sign as a foundational issue in critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Society 4(2): 169–193.
Kress, G.
forthcoming). Multimodality. Routledge.
Kress, G. & R. Hodge
1979Language as Ideology. Routledge.
Kress, G. & T. Van Leeuwen
1996Reading Images: The Grammar Of Visual Design. Routledge.
Kress, G. & T. Van Leeuwen
2001Multimodal Discourse. The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Edward Arnold.
Lemke, J.
2002Travels in Hypermodality. Visual Communication 1(3): 299–325.
New London Group
1996A pedagogy of multiliteracies. Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66: 60–92.
O'toole, M.
1994The Language of Displayed Art. Leicester University Press.