Multimodal Discourse Analysis in Anglophone Settings – lezione del 13/03/2024
Social semiotics.
We can talk about settings in different fields and most of the discourse also happens in English, not
only countries that have English based language like USA and UK, but also United Nations.
Multimodal discourse analysis is a type of analysis that is included in social semiotics; we must be
aware of the general tendence of the theory and here it comes the perspective of social semiotics.
We need social semiotics because we all are meaning makers and we are communicating to a large
group of people, our purpose is to communicate with many people, we must reflect on our role in
communicating and in our practice. Social semiotics is useful because it gives separate accounts of
the semiotic field, it puts together the different modes to understand the type of communication is
being made. We also need it because we are going to look at how people produce meaning and
regulate their use of semiotic resources in the context of social practices and institutions. We
deconstruct in order to reconstruct. By looking at artifacts (texts), we must understand how they are
made to make a better communication and make choices that are thought of. We learn how to create
messages in our mother tongue in the early-stage development, but it is only through school that we
learn how the messages are made in the grammar of the language we refer to (e.g. To make past
tense we must do something grammarly) but also can be creative (ex. “ petaloso” that meant
something that has many petals) and this only happens if someone is aware of the rules of their
language and this empowers the person to be creative with the elements of the language.
It's also important to know that we can open our sensitivity in the many ways in which we can make
meaning and to be better communicators, we are going to become creators of the language and
social semioticians.
We have to use a sense of the effects of images, but we are not as empowered with the language
mode, we can break some rules. We are born in a language, and we try to understand ow things
work (e.g. we learn that some colours don’t go together, even though we don’t know the reasons
why, but we are deeply aware of that).
When we do an analysis, we must always ask some questions like:
What meaning is being made?
How is meaning being made?
With what resource? (e.g. a posture)
In which social environment? (e.g. we have to distinguish the social environment of the film
and the one of the artifacts, like the US society in that specific period – for example, John
Wayne showing people how a real man walks)
What are the meaning potentials of the semiotics resources used?
Whose interest and agency are at work in the making of meaning? (e.g. the history of how or
the tales of how John Wayne’s walk was created – he was very tall for that historical
moment, and he had been chosen for his face and for how he sounded, which is more like a
hero)
Based on the information given to the other questions, we might change the answer to the first
question and advance hypothesis. These are questions that are important to analyse an artifact.
In order to ask these questions, what we do as semioticians is to collect, document and
systematically catalogue semiotic resources (I need to know where it was positioned before I got it,
we have to catalogue the information like separate characters into good and bad, for example,
there’s a criteria). We also investigate the use of those resources in specific historical, cultural and
institutional contexts (we are describing the actual semiotic potential by looking at their use in the
past). We need to look at how people in the contexts plan, teach, justify or critique such uses (e.g.
