Social semiotics (also social semantics) is a branch of the field of
semiotics
Semiotics ( ) is the systematic study of sign processes and the communication of meaning. In semiotics, a sign is defined as anything that communicates intentional and unintentional meaning or feelings to the sign's interpreter.
Semiosis is a ...
which investigates human signifying practices in specific social and cultural circumstances, and which tries to explain
meaning-making
In psychology, meaning-making is the process of how people (and other living beings) Construals, construe, Understanding, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self.
The term is widely used in Constructivism (psychologi ...
as a social practice. Semiotics, as originally defined by
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (; ; 26 November 185722 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is wi ...
, is "the science of the life of signs in society". Social semiotics expands on Saussure's founding insights by exploring the implications of the fact that the "codes" of language and communication are formed by social processes. The crucial implication here is that meanings and semiotic systems are shaped by relations of power, and that as power shifts in society, our languages and other systems of socially accepted meanings can and do change.
Overview
Social semiotics is the study of the social dimensions of meaning, and of the power of human processes of signification and interpretation (known as
semiosis
Semiosis (, ), or sign process, is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. A sign is anything that communicates a meaning, that is not the sign itself, to the interpreter of the sig ...
) in shaping individuals and societies. Social semiotics focuses on
social meaning-making practices of all types, whether visual, verbal or aural in nature.
These different systems for meaning-making, or possible "channels" (e.g. speech, writing, images) are known as ''semiotic modes'' (or ''semiotic registers''). Semiotic modes can include visual, verbal, written, gestural and musical resources for communication. They also include various "multimodal" ensembles of any of these modes
Social semiotics can include the study of how people design and interpret meanings, the study of texts, and the study of how semiotic systems are shaped by social interests and ideologies, and how they are adapted as society changes (Hodge and Kress, 1988). Structuralist semiotics in the tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure focused primarily on theorising semiotic systems or structures (termed ''
langue
Langue is a municipality in the Valle Department, Honduras.
The town is located near the border of El Salvador and is a regional Hammock making center. Most of the town is made up of sharecroppers and day laborers. There are usually Mormon miss ...
'' by de Saussure, which change diachronically, i.e. over longer periods of time). In contrast, social semiotics tries to account for the variability of semiotic practices termed ''
parole
Parole, also known as provisional release, supervised release, or being on paper, is a form of early release of a prisoner, prison inmate where the prisoner agrees to abide by behavioral conditions, including checking-in with their designated ...
'' by Saussure. This altered focus shows how individual creativity, changing historical circumstances, and new social identities and projects can all change patterns of usage and design (Hodge and Kress, 1988). From a social semiotic perspective, rather than being fixed into unchanging "codes", signs are considered to be resources which people use and adapt (or "design") to make meaning. In these respects, social semiotics was influenced by, and shares many of the preoccupations of
pragmatics
In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how Context (linguistics), context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship ...
(
Charles W. Morris
Charles William Morris (May 23, 1901 – January 15, 1979) was an American philosopher and semiotician.
Early life and education
A son of Charles William and Laura (Campbell) Morris, Charles William Morris was born on May 23, 1901, in Denver, C ...
) and
sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies unde ...
and has much in common with
cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field that explores the dynamics of contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture) and its social and historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers investigate how cultural practices rel ...
and
critical discourse analysis.
The main task of social semiotics is to develop analytical and theoretical frameworks which can explain meaning-making in a social context.
Halliday and the social semiotic in language
Linguistic theorist,
Michael Halliday
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M. A. K. Halliday; 13 April 1925 – 15 April 2018) was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language. His grammatical descri ...
, introduced the term ‘social semiotics’ into linguistics, when he used the phrase in the title of his book, ''Language as Social Semiotic''. This work argues against the traditional separation between language and society, and exemplifies the start of a 'semiotic' approach, which broadens the narrow focus on written language in linguistics (1978).
For Halliday, languages evolve as systems of "meaning potential" (Halliday, 1978:39) or as sets of resources which influence what the speaker can do with language, in a particular social context. For example, for Halliday, the grammar of the English language is a system organised for the following three purposes (areas or "metafunctions"):
* Facilitating certain kinds of social and interpersonal interactions (interpersonal),
* Representing ideas about the world (ideational), and
* Connecting these ideas and interactions into meaningful texts and making them relevant to their context (textual) (1978:112).
Any sentence in English is composed like a musical composition, with one strand of its meaning coming from each of the three semiotic areas or metafunctions.
Bob Hodge generalises Halliday’s essays on social semiotics into five premises:
Social Semiotics
- Semiotics Encyclopedia Online, E.J. Pratt Library, Victoria University, Canada.
# ‘Language is a social fact’ (1978:1)
# ‘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)
#‘Language is as it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve in people’s lives’ (1978:4).
# Language has ‘metafunctions’, which in English are: ideational (‘about something’), interpersonal (’doing something’) and textual (‘the speaker’s text-forming potential’) (1978:112).
# Language is constituted as ‘a discrete network of options’ (1978:113)
Social semiotics and critical linguistics
Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress
Gunther Rolf Kress Order of the British Empire, MBE (26 November 1940 – 20 June 2019) was a linguist and semiotician. He is considered one of the leading theorists in critical discourse analysis, social semiotics and multimodality, particularly ...
's ''Social Semiotics'' (1988) focused on the uses of semiotic systems in social practice. They explain that the social power of texts in society depends on interpretation: "Each producer of a message relies on its recipients for it to function as intended." (1988:4) This process of interpretation (semiosis) situates individual texts within discourses, the exchanges of interpretative communities. The work of interpretation can contest the power of hegemonic discourses. Hodge and Kress give the example of feminist activists defacing a sexist advertising billboard, and spray-painting it with a new, feminist message.
"Text is only a trace of discourses, frozen and preserved, more or less reliable or misleading. Yet discourse disappears too rapidly, surrounding a flow of texts." (1988:8)
Hodge and Kress built on a range of traditions from linguistics (including Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...
, Michael Halliday
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M. A. K. Halliday; 13 April 1925 – 15 April 2018) was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language. His grammatical descri ...
, Benjamin Lee Whorf
Benjamin Atwood Lee Whorf (; April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941) was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer best known for proposing the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He believed that the structures of different languages shape how the ...
and sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies unde ...
), but the major impetus for their work is the critical perspective on ideology and society that originates with Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
.
Hodge and Kress build a notion of semiosis as a dynamic process, where meaning is not determined by rigid structures, or predefined cultural codes. They argue that Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (; ; 26 November 185722 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is wi ...
's structuralist semiotics avoided addressing questions about creativity, movement, and change in language, possibly in reaction to the diachronic linguistic traditions of his time (the focus on the historical development from Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...
). This created a "problematic" legacy, with linguistic change relegated to the "contents of Saussure’s rubbish bin" (1988:16-17).
Instead, Hodge and Kress propose to account for change in semiosis through the work of Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss (philosopher), Paul ...
. Meaning is a process, in their interpretation of Peirce. They refer to Peirce's triadic model of semiosis, which depicts the "action" of a sign as a limitless process of infinite semiosis, where one "interpretant" (or idea linked to a sign) generates another. The flow of these infinite processes of interpretation are constrained in Peirce's model, they claim, by the material world (the "object"), and cultural rules of thought, or "habit". (1988:20)
Social semiotics revisits De Saussure's doctrine of the "arbitrariness of the linguistic sign
A sign is an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or me ...
". This notion rests on the argument that the signifier only has an arbitrary
Arbitrariness is the quality of being "determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle". It is also used to refer to a choice made without any specific criterion or restraint.
Arbitrary decisions are not necess ...
relationship to the signified) — in other words, that there is nothing about the sound or appearance of (verbal) signifiers (as, for example, the words "dog" or "chien") — to suggest what they signify. Hodge and Kress point out that questions of the referent
A referent ( ) is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence ''Mary saw me'', the referent of the word ''Mary'' is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken o ...
become more complicated when semiotics moves beyond verbal language. On the one hand, there is the need to account for the continuum of relationships between the referent
A referent ( ) is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence ''Mary saw me'', the referent of the word ''Mary'' is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken o ...
and the representation. Here, they draw on Pierce's differentiation between iconic signification (e.g. a colour photograph of smoke, where the signifier recreates the perceptual experience of the signified), indexical signification (e.g. a column of smoke, where there is a causal relationship between the physical signifier and the fire it might signify), and symbolic signification (e.g. the word "smoke", where the arbitrary link between signifier and signified is maintained by social convention
A convention influences a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, social norms, or other criteria, often taking the form of a custom.
In physical sciences, numerical values (such as constants, quantities, or scales of measure ...
).
Social semiotics also addresses the question of how societies and cultures maintain or shift these conventional bonds between signifier and signified. De Saussure was unwilling to answer this question, Hodge and Kress claim. This leaves the socially determinist
Social determinism is the theory that social interactions alone determine individual behavior (as opposed to biological or objective factors).
A social determinist would only consider social dynamics like customs, cultural expectations, educatio ...
implication that meanings and interpretations are dictated from above, by "the whims of an inscrutably powerful collective being, Society." For Hodge and Kress, social semiotics must respond to the question and explain how the social shaping of meanings works in practice (1988:22).
Social semiotics and multimodality
Social semiotics is currently extending this general framework beyond its linguistic origins to account for the growing importance of sound and visual images, and how modes of communication are combined in both traditional and digital media (semiotics of social networking
The semiotics of social networking discusses the images, symbols and signs used in systems that allow users to communicate and share experiences with each other. Examples of social networking systems include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Semi ...
) (see, for example, Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996), thus approaching semiotics of culture (Randviir 2004). Theorists such as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen have built on Halliday's framework by providing new "grammars" for other semiotic modes. Like language, these grammars are seen as socially formed and changeable sets of available "resources" for making meaning, which are also shaped by the semiotic metafunctions originally identified by Halliday. The visual and aural modes have received particular attention. Accounting for multimodality
Multimodality is the application of multiple literacies within one medium. Multiple literacies or "modes" contribute to an audience's understanding of a composition. Everything from the placement of images to the organization of the content to ...
(communication in and across a range of semiotic modes - verbal, visual, and aural) is considered a particularly important ongoing project, given the importance of the visual mode in contemporary communication.
In the field of graphic design, the multimodal and social semiotic viewpoint can be perceived as an illustration that connects our sensory abilities together opening up new opportunities for deeper visual interaction. Utilizing this design process, the graphic designers create content which helps improvise the act of meaningful visual communication between the content creators and their audiences.
References
{{reflist
Sources
* Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). ''Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning''. Maryland. University Park Press.
* Hodge, R. and G. Kress. (1988). ''Social Semiotics''. Cambridge: Polity
* Kress, G., and Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). ''Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design''. London: Routledge
Routledge ( ) is a British multinational corporation, multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, academic journals, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanit ...
.
* Randviir, A. (2004). ''Mapping the World: Towards a Sociosemiotic Approach to Culture''.
Dissertationes Semioticae Universitatis Tartuensis 6.
Tartu: Tartu University Press.
* Van Leeuwen, T. (2005). ''Introducing Social Semiotics''. New York: Routledge.
Semiotics