Resources

Chapter overview

Learning objectives

This study unit will help you to:

• Engage critically with a social semiotic approach to multimodality
• Familiarize yourself with the key principles and concepts of social semiotics
• Try out some basic social semiotic analytical methods

Overview of Chapter 4

Topics

• The origins and early development of social semiotics and how it has been developed to account for multimodality
• Key social semiotic principles and concepts
• Methods and analysis
• Fields of application, limitations, potentialities and challenges

Summary

In Chapter 4 we discussed the origins of social semiotics in three main strands of influence: systemic functional linguistics, semiotics, and critical discourse analysis (CDA).

We showed how these three strands came together through the work of the Newtown Semiotic Circle, and the collaborations of Kress with Hodge and then van Leeuwen. In the 1980s, the focus was on the visual; in the late 1990s attention was broadened to include a range of modes, and the notion of multimodality was introduced.

We showed how a social semiotic approach highlights the social dimensions of meaning, its production, interpretation and circulation, and its implications. It sets out to reveal how processes of meaning-making (i.e. signification and interpretation or what is called semiosis) shape individuals and societies. The focus of social semiotics is on understanding the affordances of modes, the semiotic choices available to a person in a specific context, how people choose from these to make meaning and what motivates their choices, as well as the social effects of these choices. We also noted the interest of social semiotics in how modes change over time. We introduced the following social semiotic concepts:

• Semiotic resource refers to the meaning potential of material resources, which developed and accumulated over time through their use in a particular community and in response to certain social requirements of that community.
• Mode refers to a socially organized set of semiotic resources for making meaning. Examples of modes include image, writing, layout, and speech among others. For something to count as a mode it needs have a set of semiotic resources and organizing principles that are recognized within a community as realizing meaning.
• Modal affordance refers to the idea that different modes offer different potentials for making meaning. Modal affordances affect the kinds of semiotic work a mode can be used for, the ease with which it can be done, and the different ways in which modes can be used to achieve broadly similar semiotic work. Modal affordances are connected both to a mode’s material and social histories, that is, the social purposes that it has been used for in a specific context.
• Motivated sign is a term used to reference that meaning (‘signified’) and form (‘signifier’) are brought together in a relation motivated by the aptness of fit between the interest of the sign maker and the affordances of a semiotic resource.
• Interest is a term used to refer to a momentary condensation of all the social experiences that have shaped an individual’s subjectivity – a condensation prompted by the social environment (of which the available modes are a significant element) that a sign is made within. A person’s interest connects their choice of one resource over another with the social context of sign production.
• Design is used to refer to the situated process in which a sign maker chooses and arranges semiotic resources to realize a particular social function or purpose. Design is conceived of as a starting point for making meaning and both the original producer of a sign and its interpreter are understood as making meaning. It is always socially located and regulated, for example by the types of resources that are made available and to whom, as well as the regimes that regulate and shape how these resources are used to create various norms and expectations.

The chapter then described the methodology of a social semiotic approach, its focus on the motivated character of sign making and how it is highly responsive to and shaped by the artefacts and interaction that it works with. We showed how in a social semiotic approach the analyst shifts between processes of deduction and induction. We showed how observational methods are used to recognize and theorize the social meaning and effect of signs. We also outlined the typical research questions and applications that social semiotics is used to address, and discussed the limitations of the approach.