Social Semiotics

Hi everyone! 

Happy December!

This week's topic focuses on the idea of Social Semiotics. According to Jeff Bezemer of the University College London, "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." To translate that into something much easier to understand, social semiotics is the study of the multiple ways people can communicate in social settings. The specific term was first coined by Michael Halliday in 1978, though the field of semiotics had existed long before then. The rules associated with the methodology, as summarized by Victoria University, are:

1. ‘Language is a social fact’ (1978:1) i.e., social relationships constitute language. This is the case with all semiotic codes.

2. ‘We shall not come to understand the nature of language if we pursue only the kinds of question about language that are formulated by linguists’ (1978:3) That is, autonomous linguistics and semiotics alike are incapable of understanding the nature of their object in disciplinary isolation.

3. ‘Language is as it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve in people’s lives’ (1978:4). That is, a functional perspective is a key to the inseparable relationship between semiotics and society, structure and function.

4. There are three functions, or ‘metafunctions’, of language (1978:112): ideational (‘about something’); interpersonal (’doing something’) and textual (‘the speaker’s text-forming potential’). The semiotic interpersonal and textual functions are more obviously social, but are inseparable in semiotic practice from the interpersonal.

5. Language is constituted as ‘a discrete network of options’ (1978:113). The idea of systems and networks (systems organised as networks) proposed by Halliday before the ‘Network Society’ has applications to all aspects of Social Semiotics that are yet to be fully explored.

   Here are some examples:

   

   In this image, the signifier is the car key. It is shaped like a gun, which can be lethal, while car keys alone are not. This is meant to signify the dangers of driving. 

   

   In this image, the signifiers are the hands the woman is holding. They are meant to represent the unsanitary consequences of touching public spaces.

   
   

   
   

   Sources: 

   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286459229_Social_Semiotics

   https://semioticon.com/seo/S/social_semiotics.html#