Social Semiotic Approach Research Articles

#BimboTok: a critical discourse analysis of hyper-feminine bimbo identities on TikTok

This study adopts a multimodal approach to critical discourse analysis to unpack the discourses embedded in the performance of hyper-feminine bimbo identities on TikTok. Guided by a social semiotic approach to language, this study analyses a corpus of 16 short-form videos published by self-proclaimed ‘bimbos’ on TikTok, focusing on the lexical and iconographical choices of these texts and how they function contextually to signal broader discourses. This analysis reveals that TikTok influencers frequently reinforce hegemonic norms of gender by incorporating bodily signifiers of patriarchal Eurocentric ideals of femininity and linking signifiers of overconsumption and hyper-femininity in their performance of a bimbo identity. Simultaneously, they contest these hegemonic norms by juxtaposing hyper-feminine images with critiques of patriarchal, Eurocentric, and capitalist structures of inequality. Ultimately, the subversive potential of these representations is ambivalent; there is a marked tension between their stated aims of inclusion and empowerment and the intersection of hyper-femininity with privilege.

The many socials: how a social enterprise uses social media to communicate social capital-based social value. A case study

Purpose This study responds to the need in social entrepreneurship research for more empirical studies to clarify the meaning of social value. Specially, it aims to explore the meaning of social value communicated on social media (SoMe) within the local context of a social enterprise (SE). Design/methodology/approach A multimodal social semiotic approach was applied to several hundred Facebook posts of a Finnish SE providing elderly care solutions, complemented by secondary data from high-quality press sources. Findings Building on Young’s (2006) dimensions of social value and Hidalgo et al.’s (2021) theorisation of social capital in social entrepreneurship, the authors find that an SE draws on multiple levels of social capital on SoMe to express the meaning of the social value it creates. Research limitations/implications Although limited to one case, this study provides a deep contextual understanding of how SEs can give meaning to social value and leverage social capital on SoMe to do so. Practical implications The authors offer a contextually embedded framework for SEs to communicate social value through media. This approach enables SEs to engage stakeholders more effectively and improve the quality of support for local initiatives. Social implications Improvements in SEs’ ability to communicate social value will increase their legitimacy, thus enhancing their prospects to survive and create sustained social value. Originality/value The authors strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of social value by being among the first to empirically describe its connection to social capital in an SE, thereby deepening previous studies on subjective social value. Methodologically, this study is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to apply social semiotics to research on SEs.

Preparing learners for digitally mediated academic communication: Digital multimodal practice in students’ knowledge dissemination videos

The advancement of digital technologies requires English for Academic Purposes (EAP) education to incorporate digital-multimodal approaches in curriculum development to prepare learners for academic communication in this digital era. One such effort is the integration of digital multimodal composition (DMC). While the existing studies have investigated pedagogical practice involving DMC, there is still a lack of a systematic identification of the multi-semiotic communicative patterns in students' DMC performance. Using a systemic functional approach to multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) and social semiotics approach to multimodality, the study aims to explore the patterns and characteristics of student-generated knowledge dissemination videos, a kind of DMC specifically pertaining to disciplinary communication targeting non-specialists. The analysis displays students' discursive patterns in the creation of interpersonal, ideational, and textual meanings. It is found that students excel in creating interpersonal meaning through configuring embodied and filmic modes and using popular visuals. However, their performance in conveying ideational and textual meaning needs improvement. Some students rely on technical language with unclear visuals, while others use a limited range of semiotics. Textual meaning created in the videos shows intermodal and intramodal incoherence. These findings can inform EAP course development and enhance students’ digital multimodal proficiency in academic communication.

Dreamers and caminantes

Migration remains a recurring yet controversial subject in today’s society. Previous research on press discourse has predominantly focused on migration metaphors from their verbal construction (Santa Ana, 1999; O’Brien, 2003) and the interplay with the visual mode in articles (Catalano & Waugh, 2013; Catalano & Mitchell-McCollough, 2019) or political cartoons (El Refaie, 2003). This genre frequently reflects an unfavorable and discriminatory representation of migrants through the lens of the host country. However, children’s picture books addressing this sensitive issue have received little attention despite their pedagogical value for promoting intercultural, positive attitudes at an early age in an increasingly multicultural and multilingual world. Our study aims to examine the metaphorical construction of migration in Yuyi Morales’ picture book Dreamers, combining the cognitive and social semiotic approaches (Forceville, 2016; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006; Painter et al., 2013) to shed light on how both frameworks can complement each other in Critical Discourse Analysis and to demonstrate how children’s picture books can constructively contribute to social change by providing a counterbalancing voice to the dominant narrative on migration.

The Grammar of Imagined Futures: A Social Semiotic Approach to Multimodal Representation

The Grammar of Imagined Futures: A Social Semiotic Approach to Multimodal Representation

A visual social semiotic investigation into the popularity of Ronaldo and Messi’s chess photo on Instagram: Implications for new media and audience engagement

This qualitative study adopts a visual social semiotic approach to examine the multifaceted engagement incited by Annie Leibovitz’s photograph portraying Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi in a contemplative game of chess, ensconced amidst an array of Louis Vuitton merchandise. Through semiotics, mise en scène, and sociolinguistics, we unravel the photograph’s layered significances, employing studium and punctum to dissect viewer engagement. Cognitive linguistics reveals the interplay of myths, metaphors, and metonymy, crafting a narrative that intertwines football, chess, and luxury into potent cultural symbols. The mise en scène theory illuminates the nuanced balance between authenticity and artifice, while sociolinguistic insights bridge visual and linguistic communications for a diverse audience. The photograph, as a convergence of composition, culture, and technology, exemplifies how visual narratives blend these elements to forge connections and evoke responses. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of digital visual storytelling’s power in shaping cultural dialogues and perceptions, showcasing the role of iconic imagery in the tapestry of social media discourse.

Teaching multimodality in the museum through embodied experiences

This reflection focuses on the integration of a museum visit into a higher education course for the purpose of teaching multimodality in an embodied way. Informed by the social semiotic approach to multimodality, the course aims to help students critically interact with multimodal texts using multimodal concepts. In this pedagogical process, exhibitions as multimodal texts gain a special place. This reflection highlights four activities which were designed to support the embodied learning of multimodality during a visit to a youth gallery with a group of university students. These activities included two types of explorations, responding to guiding questions, group discussions and map drawing. This reflection concludes with some thoughts on the benefits of the embodied teaching of multimodality through museum visits in higher education.

Demystifying the cultural representations in international high school English textbooks: a social-semiotic approach and teachers’ views

ABSTRACT Albeit cultural content in English textbooks have been much reported, little empirical evidence addresses global or international-distributed English textbooks. To fill this void, the present qualitative content analysis study aims to explore the representation of cultural content in international English textbooks used for Indonesian senior high school students. For another contribution, we also attempt to gain English teachers’ perceptions of cultural content in the textbooks examined through written interviews. Grounded in a social semiotic approach, the findings showcased that the textbooks’ content represents inner-circle countries in the aspect of perspectives, products, persons, and practices. Further, the imbalance in the cultural representation of the outer circle and expanding circle countries indicated that the authors do not sufficiently increase the global cultural awareness of English language learners because other cultural perspectives on varieties of English are not included. The interviews analysis revealed that the cultural contents were short and required improvement.

A SOCIAL SEMIOTIC STUDY OF IMAGES IN FOOTBALL GAMES

This study delvesinto the realm of funny posters and images displayed by fans during the World Cup and Gulf Cup games, employing a social semiotic approach to interpret and understand their content, imagery, and cultural significance. The investigation focuses on how these images function as communicative tools that not only entertain but also convey deeper social and cultural messages to a global audience.The findings underscore the significance of visual literacy in contemporary media and offer a new perspective on the social dynamics of major sporting events. This research contributes to the fields of visual communication, cultural studies, and sports sociology by highlighting how seemingly trivial elements like fan posters can have profound social implications.

Towards An Analysis of the Visual Images of the Drawings of the Child Survivors of War: A Semiotic Study

In this research, children used poster narratives to communicate their perspectives of the Marawi Siege. A social semiotic approach was utilized to understand their visualizations. This study aimed to look into the aspect of understanding the narratives of the child victims of the Marawi Siege through their drawings, referred to poster narratives in this study, by extracting the visual images present. The collection of data was limited to the two temporary shelters in Marawi: Boganga and Rorogagus. The researcher collected 40 poster narratives from the different temporary shelters in Marawi City, and the recurrent visual images were those of Social Actors, Shattered Place, Battle Aircraft and Weapons. The child-respondents included significant minute details in illustrating the social actors such as tears, sad and scared expressions, color and position, and at times, supported these emotions with texts which served as anchorage. From these findings, it could be drawn that a careful study of the shapes, strokes, colors, position, number and size of the images was of paramount significance to better understand the data output of the children-respondents. The posters are not meaningless forms or shapes. They convey materials or images from the deeper recesses of the minds or psyches of the respondents.

Tattoos as multimodal semiotic assemblages

Abstract Drawing on interviews with, and images from, a selection of female participants, we develop the notion of semiotic assemblages to examine tattoos as mobile semiotic material for embodied meaning-making, with multi-located trajectories linking the tattooed bodies to different spatial networks. In turn, we draw on the social semiotic approach to multimodality by looking at assemblages of tattoos as vibrant material, pregnant with thing-power which, while re-making the bodies of individual tattoo owners, simultaneously shapes and semiotically remediates physical and affective (e.g. emotional and memorial) objects and feelings. We illustrate how corporeal materials and activities, and the incorporeal conceptual, perceptual and affective senses and feelings are remediated across boundaries of language, geography, semiotic modes, media, and chains of mediation to make meaning. We end with a suggestion that multimodal analysis of semiotic assemblages needs to take a multiscalar approach to account for mobilities, movements and flow, and the continuities and disconnections in forms and meanings the dynamics of the connectedness produce across different scales.

MULTIMODAL CONTENT ANALYSIS OF 21ST CENTURY SKILLS IN AN ENGLISH TEXTBOOK

English textbooks are a valuable tool for promoting the development of 21st century skills. Meanwhile, multimodal texts in textbooks are employed by authors to convey meaning through verbal and visual modes, thus necessitating the adoption of multimodal analysis as the most efficacious method for its elucidation. Regrettably, there exists a dearth of literature concerning the application of this approach for analyzing textbooks. To fill this gap, the study examined 21st century skills in an English textbook. This study used content analysis with multimodal social semiotic approach. The subject of the study was an English textbook “English for Nusantara” for the seventh-grade students. The result shown that critical thinking and problem-solving skill was the most frequent type. However, the study did not find any mention of media literacy, and there were only a few instances of economic literacy and global awareness. It is suggested that future revisions should include them. Moreover, English teachers are urged to actively participate in the process of textbook selection and augment the instructional materials with supplementary resources to mitigate any inadequacies of the textbook.

The Kinetic-Vectorial Design of Internet-Mediated L2 Teaching Practices: The Case of BBC Learning English Website

This study offers new insights into the educational-linguistic visual semiotics of online teaching as a digital practice with kinetic-vectorial design. Towards this end, a twofold social semiotic approach is utilized as a synthetic methodology. First, Van Leeuwen’s (2016) kinetic design model is employed with a view to revealing the movement types of Internet-mediated L2 teaching practices. Second, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2021) model of ideational vector analysis is used in a way that uncovers the subtle pedagogical practices of the same type of teaching as directional and transactional acts addressed to educational-website networked L2 learners worldwide. The data sets targeted for analysis comprise screenshot-styled images from the BBC Learning English Website available for public purposes of L2 teaching. A total number of functionally related five images have been selected with an eye to the BBC’s pedagogic content online on the techno-semiotic levels of design kinetics and vectoriality. The current study has reached three findings (with emerging relevant implications). First, the synthetic kinetic-vectorial method of analysis has proved to be empirically effective in investigating the visual semiotics of design mediated by educational websites such as the BBC Website. Second, there emerged kinetically motivated ‘pedagogic’ and ‘digital’ vectors, respectively controlled by the BBC instructors and the design features of the website itself. Third, and last, the kinetic-vectorial analysis of the BBC Website revealed a sort of spatiotemporal compression of pedagogic content; further, the visual aspects of spatial and temporal movements (mobility and movability) appeared to have occurred across different semiotic modes, verbal and visual.

From lived experience to lived expertise: How donor-conceived witnesses claim and sustain epistemic authority

Scholars in pragmatics have long been interested in how knowledge is construed, contested and legitimised. Much recent work in pragmatics has focused on developing more detailed theoretical understandings of epistemic positioning and epistemic authority, including in institutional contexts which are typically characterised by knowledge asymmetries and power inequalities. Yet the relational consequences of epistemic positioning have received little attention, therefore, this article aimed to investigate how authority and community are simultaneously negotiated in interaction, turn by turn. Taking a social semiotic approach, combining analysis using exchange structure, evidence and epistemic stance frameworks, this article examines a public hearing of the 2010 Senate Committee Inquiry into Donor Conception in Australia. Findings reveal four cumulative discursive patterns: donor-conceived witnesses positioned their lived experience as non-negotiable, cast doubt on fertility practitioners' expertise, layered opinions upon experience and employed recognised knowledges to bolster authority. This article introduces the concept of ‘lived expertise’; that is, authority grounded in experience and sustained through awareness of additional forms of experiential and institutional knowledges. Empirically, this study sheds light on how donor-conceived people – as people with lived experience – expand the subject positions afforded to them in institutional contexts, inviting legitimacy and belonging.

Collecting traces of the outside world: an alternative collective memory of the lockdown

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 lockdown, cultural heritage institutions responded promptly to this difficult time by launching a series of digital collections of traces of this historical moment. Due to the limitations of the lockdown, such collections have generally focused on the intimate dimension of the pandemic, representing represented the outside world (streets, shops, cultural venues, etc.) as a site of emptiness. This paper examines the ‘Windows in lockdown’ initiative, which aimed to collect photographs of the messages displayed in physical locations during the lockdown period. The collection was carried out through an action research approach based on a participatory platform and social media. A collection of 1,224 photos taken in France between March and May 2020 was built. This paper analyses this collection through a social semiotics approach. The analysis highlights the role played by the outside world as a generator of an alternative collective memory during COVID-19.

PROMOTING ECOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN METAL GEAR SOLID V: SOCIAL SEMIOTIC APPROACH

Video game is a new media of telling stories to young people and adults and it is no longer seen as gameplay only but gameplay with story. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain took Cold War as the main story background tells the story differently. The game system of this video game offers freedom to players to interact with anything during the gameplay, but this freedom has consequences. Applying social semiotic approach, this paper aims to identify how appraisal theory and narrative representation can be used to promote ecological awareness. After observing, collecting and viewing, transcribing and analyzing multimodal data, the researchers find that killing non-playable characters in form of human and animals and even enemy will reduce the score which is important in developing the playable characters’ weapons and equipment. Adopting the theory from Martin White in appraisal theory and Kress and van Leewuen, Caple in narrative representation, this paper also finds that appraisal theory is used to guide the players to play in ethical way such as using non-lethal weaponry, capturing wild animals to protect them from war, and collecting medical plants as needed only, besides, the enemy soldiers can be hired and give beneficial results to the players when they are used to play. In narrative representation, the freedom of choices is designed to make ethical play more plausible.

Multilingualism in Australia: A Case Study of the Linguistic Landscape of Springvale, Melbourne

In this study, the linguistic landscape of Springvale was analyzed according to Ben-Rafael's (2009) principles. Quantitative and social semiotic approaches were used to examine how the local Asian speech communities were reflected in the area's linguistic landscape. A commercial street was sampled, and 143 signs were examined, with 107 being multilingual and displaying up to eight different languages on a single sign. The remaining 36 signs were monolingual and displayed only three languages. The signs were categorized by business domain, and the results showed that the type of business influenced the language choice of signs. The signwriters presented unique and authentic identities to the public through their signing, constructing various distinctive identities and revealing certain ideologies to potential customers through different modalities and language choices on signs. This study sheds light on the sociolinguistic situation of Springvale, demonstrating the impact of power across ethnicities, how identities are claimed through commercial signage, and how different groups settle in new places through the linguistic landscape. It is an important contribution to the linguistic landscape and multilingualism studies.

Towards a corpus-based approach to graphic elements in creative subtitling

Abstract This article explores how a corpus-based approach allows us to describe and analyze the multimodal complexity of graphic elements in creative subtitling. To this end, the article focuses on a YouTube channel, Apenjie with Dawang, featuring a dog and its owner. This channel’s subtitling strategies were experimental with multiple graphic elements (colors, positions, font sizes, and emojis). Informed by a social semiotic approach to multimodality, a corpus of 1,155 coupled pairs of Chinese-English subtitles was annotated for modal shifts and metafunctional shifts. Some major findings include: (a) emojis were much more likely to be added to the target subtitles for the animals than for the humans; (b) speaker-identifying graphic elements (color and position) were lost in the target subtitles, but emojis were systematically added to mark animals as the speakers; (c) the addition of emojis evoked complementary-interpersonal meanings, suggesting that the subtitlers might have prioritized audience engagement over textual fidelity; (d) although the target subtitles used fewer graphic elements, the semiotic meanings could be similar or complementary to those of the source subtitles. Based on these findings, the article also discusses the opportunities and challenges of a corpus-based approach to graphic elements in creative subtitling.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION ON CHILDREN BOOK BY ROALD DAHL’S CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY: SOCIAL SEMIOTIC STUDY

Visual image in the book is an important part of making a literary work especially in children picture book and the visual image were studied in social semiotic. This research aims to find the visual representation in children book Charlie and The Chocolate Factory written by Roald Dahl in 1964, as well as to identify the meaning by explaining social semiotic through visual representation in representational meaning, character manifestation, appearance and inter-circumstance by Painter. This study classified into qualitative research and types of data in this research classified into document of analyzing. While the steps collecting and analyzing data the researcher using social semiotic approach through multimodality by Bezemer and Jewitt: collecting and logging, viewing, sampling and transcribing the data. Then, for analyzed the data using visual representation (narrative representation, conceptual representation, and embedding) by Kress and Leeuwen also character manifestation, appearance, and inter-circumstance by Painter. This research used qualitative descriptive method in reporting the result of analysis in which description took the most important role in displaying the data analysis. The researcher found 43 of illustration images in the context of children book Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. The researchers found narrative representation (40), conceptual representation (3), embedding (images that contain narrative and conceptual representation) (4). Then, the researcher found appear (12), reappear (28), and 3 images are not counted because there is no character in the structure of character appearance. All of data or 43 images classified complete feature in the structure of character manifestation, and all of data classified into sustain degree in the structure of inter-circumstance. The result of this research is be able to explain the visual representation meaning, character manifestation, appearance, and inter-circumstance which found in children book Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.

Semiotic landscape in a green capital

Abstract In the wake of the ‘climate apocalypse’ global discourse, the environmental agenda of the European Green Deal and the overarching objective for the European Union are to deliver a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. European cities are under pressure to reinvent urban environments and develop resilience to environmental risks. This paper looks at semiotic material appearing in Essen, a city in Germany awarded the European Green Capital title. Grounded in the multimodal social semiotic approach and ecolinguistics, the paper investigates strategically emplaced ‘green’ semiotic material which shape environmental values and privilege. The paper illustrates the political economy of city clean-ups which every so often result in questionable environmental choices and fail to alleviate social inequalities. The analysis ultimately shows how semiotic forms of sustainability are evidently implicated in the creation of urban eco-arenas accentuating the socioeconomic stratification and privileges of valorized places.