Social Semiotic Perspective Research Articles

Decoding the Implicit Meanings: Analyzing Alan Walker’s ‘The Drum’ from a Social Semiotic Perspective

This research explores the application of social semiotics in analyzing the lyrics of Alan Walker's song "The Drum." Social semiotics examines how signs and symbols construct meaning within a social context. The research employs a qualitative approach, focusing on thematic analysis of the lyrics. The findings reveal that the song incorporates various social semiotic elements, including symbolism related to life's struggles, success, and the significance of guidance. The analysis suggests that "The Drum" can be interpreted as a motivational message about overcoming challenges and pursuing dreams. To realize the results and analysis of the songs, "The Drum" by Alan Walker's social semiotics into practice in the classroom, it needs to be done using various methods in various co-curricular activities (especially those integrating life skills) or through the habit of reading and singing or listening to beautiful songs of art, especially the works of young people who always have a very creative and constructive spirit.

The social semiotics of Mambwe clan names and praises

ABSTRACT The study explores the clan names and praises of the Mambwe-speaking people of Northern Zambia from a social semiotics perspective. Specifically drawing on the concept of semiotic assemblages, it considers the names and praises as more than just linguistic resources but as meaning-making collections that contribute to the collective self-representation of the Mambwe people. The assembled expressions reflect their worldviews, sociocultural narratives, and identities. The study shows the interconnectedness of gender roles, bioenvironmental factors, community activities, folklore, ethnicity, and self-asserting narratives within the contexts of clan names and praises. Furthermore, it demonstrates the multi-layered meanings resulting from the emotional forces of the interactions among individuals, living and non-living objects, events and bioenvironmental factors in time-spaces. It concludes that clan names and praises are narratives of expressions that represent the psycho-social and historical paths of the Mambwe people, and they play a crucial role in the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture.

Hair Discipline in Singapore: Aesthetics, Morality, and Gender

ABSTRACT In the 1970s and 1980s, several Asian governments, including those of Hong Kong, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan, enacted varying measures to proscribe long hair on men. Singapore’s government was no exception in this regard, barring even longhaired global male celebrities from entry. Adopting a social semiotic perspective, this article traces the vicissitudes of the male hairscape in Singapore from the colonial period to contemporary times, with a view to uncovering its differential indexical meanings. It argues that the stigmatization of long hair was part of a moral-aesthetic regimen of hair hygiene that fashioned shorthaired men as poster boys of a young, disciplined, and aspirational nation, while longhaired men were discursively constructed as a bad influence and the archnemesis of a desired work culture and social life. Men’s hair, then, was not an innocuous sign with an organic meaning, but a loaded signifier for a cultural ethos tied to shifting social imperatives.

Human social responsibility from challenges to achievements: discursive empowerment of women innovators across organizational borders

PurposeThe paper explains how challenges and achievements of human social responsibility (HSR) are addressed by women innovators across the organizational borders of various industries. More precisely, this qualitative study’s goal is to clarify the empowering roles of discursive strategies employed by Women in Innovation (WIN) organization when communicating about women innovators’ demanding realities and about their collaborative initiatives meant to generate changes related to gender, diversity and intersectionality. The WIN members include women leaders in the innovation space with extensive professional, advisory and international experience.Design/methodology/approachThe paper proposes an approach that brings together perspectives upon empowerment, perspectives on social, intellectual and symbolic capital and a social semiotic perspective on discourse. The WIN blogs are investigated to facilitate: first, an understanding of how discursive strategies recontextualize the women innovators’ identities and actions and second, an understanding of how these discursive strategies contribute to sustaining and legitimizing dynamic social capital while building new intellectual capital and symbolic capital across organizational borders.FindingsThe WIN discourses both disclose contemporary gender, diversity and intersectionality challenges across organizational borders as well as promote ways of breaking the barriers that prevent women innovators from thriving. The discursive strategies recontextualize women innovators as resourceful social actors with multiple identities. Their social actions are discursively recontextualized as collaborative challenge-solving enterprises. These recurrent discursive strategies accomplish empowering functions at individual, relational and collective well-being levels through materializing new intellectual and symbolic capital when revealing the manifestations of bridging and bonding social capital.Originality/valueThis paper provides a novel integrative approach to explaining in detail the complexity of empowering discourses at several levels of analytical delicacy. It responds to the needs of HSR research and practice for gaining more insights into the challenges of communicating effectively about how to create a more socially responsible world.

A Systematic Review of the Role of Multimodal Resources for Inclusive STEM Engagement in Early-Childhood Education

This paper presents the findings from a systematic review of 29 websites and 13 frameworks that provide STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) educational resources for parents, educators, and children (birth–8 years of age). Our theoretical approach is rooted within a social semiotic perspective that has indicated that multimodality enables children to use different types of expression to communicate a message or share an idea. Using the PRISMA methodology and the narrative document analysis approach, the themes that emerged included how the content and resources available on the websites addressed whether multimodality supported STEM engagement in an inclusive manner. The findings revealed that there were scarce multimodal resources that engaged children with fun, interactive, and meaningful opportunities to be autonomous learners (e.g., children had agency) (n = 11 out of 29), moving between the digital and hands-on physical spaces (n = 8 out of 29), employing gamification for deep learning (n = 4 out of 29), and piquing children’s imagination, inquiry, and creativity, and links to everyday STEM scenarios were hardly present (n = 10 out of 29). The implications lie in addressing early STEM engagement by considering children’s learning abilities and agency, bearing in mind parents/educators’ sociocultural backgrounds, confidence in STEM awareness, and multimodal avenues for communicating STEM learning and inquiry.

Intersemiotic emergence in sketchbook-mediated design learning

This article presents the concept of intersemiotic emergence as a didactic strategy for design learning, discussed from the perspective of social semiotics and communication studies. With this strategy, students orchestrate autotelic relationships using modes and personalized semiotic resources. The primary value of intersemiotic emergence lies in its efficiency in making sense of the lecturer’s concepts during the design process. The selected sample of design materials was created in the context of two degree programmes – industrial design and graphic design – at two prominent Colombian universities. The methodological design uses an interpretive hermeneutical approach to identify this didactic strategy by analysing a cognitive artifact typical of design learning, the student’s sketchbook. This artifact shows students’ externalization processes, mental model transformations and meaning construction as a form of evolution. The review of iterated samples of the same exercise over a period allowed identifying and characterizing the intersemiotic emergence. In the sketchbooks, the authors found that a student’s mental model evolves due to the interaction between the semiotic resources of the conceptual models used, the mental models of the field in their training process and their experience in the field. This evolution causes the student to mature and produce their own autonomous and personalized externalization whose value resides in its production. The externalization enables students to construct meaning their way, integrating and defining coding and interpretation levels from their understandings of the symbolic field in which they are studying. This process results in the so-called intersemiotic emergence.

Combining enactivism and systemic functional linguistics: a methodology for examining (mathematics teacher educator) language

AbstractAs mathematics teacher educators (MTEs), we are motivated by the lack of research concerning the language that MTEs use in initial teacher education settings. In this paper, we turn our attention towards developing a methodological approach to studying the language-in-use during teacher education situations, with a specific focus on the language of the MTE in the form of a monologue. The methodological approach that we present draws upon two theoretical perspectives, specifically, the situated cognition theory of enactivism and the social semiotic perspective of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). To develop this methodology, we explore both of these theoretical perspectives, focussing on their respective conceptualisations of language, from which we derive a set of methodological principles and practices. A significant feature of the methodology presented in this paper, is that it takes into account the researchers’ relationships with the subject of research. Thus we propose this methodology as being of particular significance to practitioner–researchers studying the language of other practitioners within the same field (e.g. MTEs studying the language of other MTEs), as well as to the study of one’s own use of language in mathematics education settings. From our methodological perspective we explore the meaning of quality research, proposing relevant criteria. We exemplify the methodological principles and practices by analysing a transcript of a mathematics teacher education lecture for prospective primary teachers in Sweden.

Narrative Worlds and the Textures of Time: A Social-Semiotic Perspective, written by Rosemary Huisman

Narrative Worlds and the Textures of Time: A Social-Semiotic Perspective, written by Rosemary Huisman

Cueing Scientific Explanations: A Social Semiotic Perspective on Framing during Science Instruction in the Elementary School Classroom

Reforms within science education strive to shift early science instruction (K − 2) so students have ample sense-making opportunities to construct scientific explanations. Classroom discussions play a key role in supporting these endeavors. This requires that classroom discussions are shaped in ways that foster scientific instruction and learning. In this study, we take a social semiotic perspective on Goffman’s notions of frames and participation framework to explore how a first-grade teacher accessed and supported his students’ scientific explanation construction within whole-class discussions. Our research questions ask how scientific explanations are framed during science discussions and how this framing influences student scientific explanations and participation in science talk. Evidence suggests that the teacher’s framing resulted in miscues regarding the frame and participation framework necessary to participate in the discussion. When students encountered these miscues, their participation was thwarted and opportunities for articulating scientific sense-making were lost. Implications for this study identify the importance of semiotic resources for framing science instruction during classroom discussions and the architecture of interactional spaces.

Infusing patriotism in popular culture: the multimodal construction of patriotic values in a Chinese main melody film

ABSTRACT The porous boundary between popular culture and politics has often led to the political appropriation of popular cultural venues for promoting official ideologies and fostering patriotic consciousness. To understand how patriotic values are infused into popular culture, this study analyzes a 2019 Chinese “main melody” film, My People, My Country, from a social semiotic perspective. To examine the interplay between power, narrative, and patriotism, a framework is developed to analyze the patriotic values and how they are constructed through linguistic and visual resources. Analysis shows that patriotism represented in the film incorporates four types of values, namely, national shame and pride, self-sacrifice, kindness, and diligence. These values are realized through the multimodal design of characters’ actions and historical events. The findings shed new light on evolving Chinese patriotism and the unique cultural governance in China shaped by the entangled forces of neoliberalism and Chinese culture.

Traditional Values in Contemporary Indian Advertising Commercial: A Social Semiotic Perspective

Traditional Values in Contemporary Indian Advertising Commercial: A Social Semiotic Perspective

Analysis of Light-Related Visual Images Presented in Elementary School Science Textbooks in Korea, the United States, and Japan

Abstract Visual images are widely used in science textbooks to facilitate the understanding of abstract concept of light. This study aims to compare and analyze elementary school textbooks from Korea, the United States, and Japan, focusing on how visual images are utilized to effectively convey light-related content. The findings reveal that all three countries’ textbooks predominantly employ photographs as visual representations, primarily serving the purpose of providing data. Through a social semiotic perspective analysis, it was observed that science textbooks commonly utilize realistic images with metaphorical functions, presented at eye level angles, with intermediate distances, and frontal angles. Furthermore, the visual images employed various colors and background expressions to create a sense of familiarity for students. These findings suggest that the composition of visual images in science textbooks was designed to facilitate an easy understanding of light-related concepts.

Digital högläsning för flerspråkande i förskolan

This study examined the potential for children’s multilingual development supported by a digital e-book application (Polyglutt) used in Swedish preschools. The analysis focused on the app’s software design and the reflections of 17 preschool teachers in a large Swedish city, many of whom work with multilingual groups of children. A social semiotic perspective of multimodality was utilized to evaluate the app’s potential and a qualitative content analysis was employed to analyse the interviews. Findings indicated that the app was popular among the teachers and was considered an efficient tool for read-aloud activities, although the potential for multilingual purposes was rarely realized. The analysis shows that the app has potential for multilingual interaction, yet the design does not always make this clearly visible. Didactic implications of the use of the application are critically discussed.

Multimodal rhythm in TikTok videos: Exploring a recontextualization of the Gillard ‘misogyny speech’

This article presents a multimodal rhythmic analysis of a TikTok video, adopting a social semiotic perspective on embodied meaning-making. We highlight the importance of rhythm in coordinating and intertwining semiotic modes to produce meaning. The study develops a method for undertaking an integrated multimodal analysis of rhythm across speech, bodily action, gesture and music, and develops a transcription convention for representing this rhythmic unfolding. The data considered is a TikTok ‘glambot/boss challenge’ video featuring a lip sync to audio sampled from former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s 2012 culturally iconic ‘Misogyny Speech’ condemning misogynist and sexist men, particularly those in positions of power. This speech achieved viral prominence internationally and continues to be a key feminist text in Australian political history. The paper demonstrates how end-accented rhythmic groups create anticipation and lead to the main event in both the speech and glambot sections of the video. Alongside the rhythmic analysis, the article examines the intertextual meanings established with other TikTok videos that iterate the glambot meme and glambot challenge.

A Case Study of the Subtitle of Yao-Chinese Folktales: From the Perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

With the rapid development of information today, people's way of communication has undergone tremendous changes. Language is no longer the only way for people to communicate. From the perspective of social semiotics, language symbols in the process of meaning construction no longer occupy an absolute dominant position. Images, sounds, gestures, animation, color, and other non-verbal social symbols in the ideogram process play an important role. Thus, the isolated study of a sign mode can not explain the full meaning of the discourse. It is in this context that multimodal discourse analysis emerged. Film or television works are not only pure texts but also contain color, music, performance, etc., which make the multimodal characteristics more obvious and constitute the multimodal discourse of subtitle translation. Therefore, studying subtitle translation from the perspective of multimodality could evaluate the quality of translation in a more comprehensive way. Starting from this perspective, this paper applies Zhang Delus theoretical framework of multimodal discourse analysis to analyze the subtitle translation of Yao-Chinese Folktales from four dimensions: culture, context, content, and expression, to understand the influence of multimodal on subtitle translation.

Commodifying the self: a multimodal analysis of college YouTubers’ first day videos

ABSTRACT YouTubers focusing on college-related content have gained traction in recent years. This study explores the ways College YouTubers establish their personal branding online using a social semiotic perspective. Focusing on how two YouTubers of different cultural backgrounds, from the United States and Singapore, document their first day of college amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a multimodal discourse analysis is carried out on the two videos to identify the prominent modes utilised to make meaning. We analyse the multimodal discourse of the videos of the College YouTubers and discuss the impression management strategies the online content creators adopted from the dramaturgical perspective. Our study seeks to contribute towards understanding how online content creators engage in digital labour and present themselves successfully in self-commodification through personal branding.

A functional view on language: a methodology for mathematics education to study shifts in prospective teachers’ discursive patterns

This paper set out to contribute to mathematics education research by elaborating on a methodology developed during a study, trying to understand, view and follow shifts in prospective teachers' discursive patterns. The methodology aims to illustrate and describe how prospective teachers adapt to the context of teaching through a flexible process. This flexible process is then described in the result as a narrative. It is argued that the methodology can be used in relation to different theoretical directions, such as research about beliefs, knowledge, or identity. Another contribution is that the methodology presented gives insights into bridging the gap between different analytical levels, micro and macro. With a theoretical foundation in ‘Cultural Worlds’ [Holland, D., Skinner, D., Lachicotte, W., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press.] the Social Semiotic approach of Systemic Functional Linguistics, SFL [Halliday, M., & Hasan, R. (1989). Language, context, and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press] is used as a methodological tool. SFL offers a toolkit that allows the analysis of meaning at the clause level to uncover how and why a speaker produces a particular wording rather than any other in a specific social practice. The paper aims to illustrate and describe how to go beyond findings in the micro-analysis and then present the result as a narrative case.

Visual representation of ASUU strikes in Nigeria: a semiotic analysis of cartoons in selected Nigerian newspapers

Abstract Until recently, the study of language and meaning of cartoons, the media discourses they generate, and their analysis as a creative means of exploring meaning-making processes as semiotic resources have not received much scholarly attention in Nigeria. Although cartoons that involve the use of satire and humour as visual representations of reality have gained prominence across many media platforms in Nigeria, only a few scholars have examined this from a social semiotics perspective. This has created a gap in the literature, thus creating room for a paradigm shift in the field of social semiotics. This study explores the semiotics of cartoons in selected Nigerian newspapers to examine the meaning-making resources employed in the visual representation of ASUU strikes in Nigeria. The study, therefore, examines how cartoonists manipulate symbols, signs, and other semiotic resources to convey specific meanings through visual and textual representations. The study adopts a qualitative research design; data comprising cartoons sourced from selected Vanguard Newspapers and websites are analyzed using Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual semiotics and interpreted from the standpoints of Halliday’s Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach and O’Halloran’s position on metaphorical constructions of meaning. Here, metaphorical manipulation and representation of visual elements in the selected cartoons are interrogated. Findings from the study show the use of semiotic resources in the portrayer of reality in the context of the seemingly intractable ASUU strikes and their consequences on academic activities in Nigeria. This scholarly intervention deserves attention as it significantly contributes to the field of social semiotics through its visual representation in portraying challenges faced by the educational systems in Nigeria vis-à-vis poor government funding.

The Importance of Dialogue for Justice and Learning: A Commentary on “Midadolescents’ Language Learning at School: Toward More Just and Scientifically Rigorous Practices in Research and Education”

The Importance of Dialogue for Justice and Learning: A Commentary on “Midadolescents’ Language Learning at School: Toward More Just and Scientifically Rigorous Practices in Research and Education”

Music and discourse: A systemic-functional approach for music analysis in multimodal contexts

Meaning in music constitutes an issue that have risen (and still rises) a strong debate. Although it has been approached from different perspectives there seems to be no consensus for its theorization. From a Social Semiotic perspective, music can be analysed as a part of a bigger construction, sharing the task of making meaning with other modes (verbal, visual, etc.). This paper aims to make a contribution to multimodal studies proposing a way to include music analysis in Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. We adopt as framework Halliday’s theory (1978 ; 1994) , although we start from Kress and van Leeuwen (2020) adaptations and include McKerrell (2015) and van Leeuwen (1999). Our working hypothesis is that, in multimodal contexts, music contributes with the construction of meaning, particularly ideational meaning, establishing a relation with other modes.