Academic literature on the topic 'Interpersonal meaning, multimodal discourse analysis, social semiotics'

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to investigate and explore the interpersonal meaning of YOU C1000 on Indonesian television advertisements. This study was conducted qualitatively using case study to check how different semiotic and modes such as music, sound, speech, color, action, and image work together to build the interpersonal meaning. This study discusses the interpersonal meaning in speech and music, interpersonal meaning in movement and interpersonal meaning in image and color. The study aimed to give some contributions to social semiotics studies, television, or video advertisement. YOU C1000 advertisement is successful to attract audiences’ attention. The election of Miss Universe advertisement star, Bali as the shooting location, English as the language function and wedding ceremony as the activity are the significant factors to introduce the product to the market. In addition, its tagline is a successor factor as well. If people hear Healthy Inside and Fresh Outside, they will remember YOU C1000. ABSTRAKArtikel ini bertujuan untuk menginvestigasi and menyelidiki makna interpersonal dari produk ‘YOU C1000’ pada iklan televisi Indonesia. Penelitian ini dilakukan secara kualitatif dengan menggunakan pendekatan studi kasus untuk mengetahui bagaimana semiotik dan moda yang berbeda seperti musik, suara, ucapan, warna, tindakan, dan gambar, dapat berjalan bersama-sama dalam membentuk makna interpersonal. Penelitian ini mengulas makna interpersonal dalam ucapan dan musik, makna interpersonal dalam gerakan, dan makna interpersonal dalam gambar dan warna. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk memberikan kontribusi pada studi semiotika sosial, televisi, atau iklan video. Iklan YOU C1000 berhasil menarik perhatian penonton. Pemilihan bintang iklan Miss Universe, Bali sebagai lokasi syuting, bahasa Inggris sebagai fungsi bahasa dan upacara pernikahan sebagai aktivitasnya adalah faktor-faktor yang signifikan untuk memperkenalkan produk tersebut ke pasar. Selain itu, ‘tagline’-nya juga merupakan faktor penting lainnya. Jika orang-orang mendengar ‘Healthy Inside and Fresh Outside’, mereka akan mengingat YOU C1000. How to Cite: Hidayat, D. N.., Abrizal., Alek. (2018). A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Interpersonal Meaning of a Television Advertisement in Indonesia. IJEE (Indonesian Journal of English Education), 5(2), 119-126. doi:10.15408/ijee.v5i2.11188

The current paper presents an overview of interpersonal conflicts in discourse area of character in modern English fiction discourse from the standpoint of multimodality theory, pragmalinguistics, and semiotics. In this respect semiosis is defined as the action of a sign, a dynamic process of meaning-making and meaning-interpretation realized through multimodal semiotic modes which collectively construct the meaning, communicated in these situations. This constructing is proceeded with the help of conflictives as emergent discursive constructs, the result of interactive constructing by means of verbal, nonverbal and graphic semiotic resources functioning in different stages of conflict communicative process. The linguosemiotic space of their realization is in the plane of disharmony of interpersonal relations of characters and its semiosis is built on cognitive, semiotic, communicative, and pragmatic specifics of conflictives as operational units of conflict discourse. Moreover, the appropriate inferences require understanding of cognitive, psychological, social, and cultural aspects accompanying narration.The aim of the study is also to establish a link between different approaches to the interpretation of conflict communication development and methods of their research in modern scientific studies. Multimodal nature of conflictives comprises several modes of multimodality for the analysis of conflict semiosis in fiction discourse: verbal, nonverbal, visual, auditory, kinetic etc. These patterns of meaning combination or meaning multiplication through different semiotic modes together construct the meaning, communicated and interpreted in the situations of interpersonal conflicts in discourse area of character in modern English fiction discourse. To achieve the objectives of research, a semiotic approach to the paradigm of conflict discourse approaches is applied, together with the elements of conversational analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, pragmatic analysis. The obtained results show the capacity of the semiotic approach to the conflict studies to enhance the effectiveness of linguistic research in the field of conflict studies.

This article offers a multimodal discourse analysis of the picturebook Daddy, Papa, and Me (2009), in which there is a two-father family with a child. The aim of this article is to analyse how the written text and the visual create meaning and to observe if the child has a symmetrical relationship with both fathers. We will follow the method of Visual Social Semiotics developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, in order to explore the representational, interpersonal and compositional meanings. The analysis will show that the child and his fathers are dynamic, as the actions represented in the visuals and the use of materials makes clear. However, the multimodal analysis does not encourage interaction with the readers, because most of the visuals are offers and the predominance of oblique angles. Images and written text are intergrated in the layout, but visuals are salient so that children can understand the meaning of the picturebook just looking at the images. The writer and the illustrator collaborate to tell the story in a simple way, with the aim of making the plot accessible to children and to invite them to identify with the actions being narrated.

One of the most significant shifts in Iraq's political regime was the parliamentary elections in 2021 with the election of a new prime minister. Massive demonstrations over government corruption and political parties' failure to enact measures to rein such corruption through legislative elections. It was possible that a new poll law might help the independent candidates in their efforts to secure a seat in the parliament. To explore this issue, the current study has employed two models: visual social semiotics of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) and Bednarek (2006) to analyze the visuals of Election Day and the evaluations of news values. The visuals convey representational, interpersonal, and compositional meanings, while the verbal texts are analyzed according to their evaluation characteristics. To demonstrate the different facets of election day that can be captured in the images chosen for the study on the BBC, the vocal text strives to explain how it relates to the visual style. Attempts have also been made to determine how the election day would be portrayed in the writer's news report for BBC. The results have demonstrated that the most significant aspects of election day could be reflected in the visual and spoken modes of BBC's less upbeat portrayal of Iraqi conditions which has been clear from this report.

With the advent of the information age, language is no longer the only way to construct meaning. Besides language, a variety of social symbols, such as gestures, images, music, three-dimensional animation, and so on, are more and more involved in the social practice of meaning construction. Traditional single-modal sentiment analysis methods have a single expression form and cannot fully utilize multiple modal information, resulting in low sentiment classification accuracy. Deep learning technology can automatically mine emotional states in images, texts, and videos and can effectively combine multiple modal information. In the book Image Reading, the first systematic and comprehensive visual grammatical analysis framework is proposed and the expression of image meaning is discussed from the perspectives of representational meaning, interactive meaning, and composition meaning, compared with the three pure theoretical functions in Halliday’s systemic functional grammar. In the past, people often discussed films from the macro perspectives of literary criticism, film criticism, psychology, aesthetics, and so on, and multimodal analysis theory provides film researchers with a set of methods to analyze images, music, and words at the same time. In view of the above considerations, Mu Wen adopts the perspective of social semiotics, based on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and Gan He’s “visual grammar,” and builds a multimodal interaction model as a tool to analyze film discourse by referring to evaluation theory.

This article presents a critical multimodal discourse analysis of how people make meaning through the semiotic practice of shooting digital self-portraits (selfies), adding captions and then sharing these texts on the social network site Instagram. Combining theories from social semiotics, critical discourse analysis and multimodal discourse analysis, the analysis focuses on the embedded ideological meaning in such digital communication. The analysis explores a data corpus of 100 selfies shared on Instagram. Despite the fact that digital texts shared on social media are generally regarded as personal communication, selfie makers seem to reproduce features of a commercial and global discourse. The typical way of representing oneself on Instagram appears to be surprisingly similar to visual representations in advertisements and image banks. The linguistic resources in use also appear globalized through a mix of languages combined with slang and abbreviations.

Movie Posters are visual media used to transmit cultural and commercial information through social semiotics such as image, text, font and color. One of the important techniques of poster design is to convey movie topics or focused information. Movie poster design has gone through two major periods in China. Between 1980s and 1990s, posters were apparently designed simple and color-vivid; entering the 21st century, with computer technology, Chinese movie posters have shown diversified expressions and propagandas, which seem more fresh and unique in artistic charm. Multimodality usually expresses meanings through the combination of text and other elements, and movie poster is one of the multimodal means. This paper discusses the findings of multimodal discourse analysis by Kress &Van Leeuwen carried out on a movie poster Little Big Soldier, of which the aims are, among others, to reveal how verbal and visual signs work together as social signs to interpret the representational, interactional and compositional meanings, thus viewers better understand how the movie poster realizes meaning co-construction and how it conveys the movie information. The main goal of poster message is to play a propaganda role and attract more audience to the movie.

This research is concerned with the compositional pattern of meaning in selected Nigerian military and paramilitary logos, how the logos presented their identity, and the appropriateness of visual and verbal elements. This paper is concerned with the analysis of patterns of meaning in visual and verbal components of selected Nigerian military and paramilitary logos. For visual analysis, ten logos were selected, and the texts (agency's name and motto), which accompanied the images , were grouped via 'below the clause.' Both visual and verbal components of the logos were analysed based on Kress and Van Leeuwen's social semiotics, and Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (henceforth, SFL). Our findings showed that the logo designers made use of animal (eagles, bat, horses, elephant and human eye) and object (flag, anchor, shovel, axe, flower, wheat leaves, passport, colours) participants. Analysis 'below the clause' presented Nominal Group (NG) with highest percentage which showed that the major focus of the communicators (military and paramilitary) is to persuade viewers. The verbal components of the logos were appropriately used to accompany the logos for easy understanding. Also, the selected colours are peculiar to Nigeria environment. Therefore viewers had no difficulty in getting the intended messages.

In the Philippines, “sex-sell” advertisements (ads), particularly the 2011 billboard by Bench featuring the Volcano Philippine Rugby Team, have been controversial. Community leaders view the ads as being offensive to the socio-cultural values of the community in which the ad is distributed. In response, producers of the ads contend that their works are merely creative options within the frames of the law. This paper approaches the arguments by investigating the linguistic functions of sex-sell ads through the grammatical analysis of its visual syntax. Using the framework of multimodal discourse analysis in visual semiotics, the paper demonstrates how grammar in visual language is compatible with the systemic functional language of Halliday (1985) as applied in the visual design theories of Kress (2006) and van Leeuwen (2005). The multimodal approach to the analysis of the linguistic functions of sexually implicit billboard ads seek to demonstrate the social semiotic perspective in the construction of meaning in print ads, how ambiguous visual lexicon can occur, and how a dissonant visual assemblage invites resistant reading. Through this discursive analysis, the paper hopes to promote a critical awareness among the passive interpreters of texts (i.e. general public information consumers) and the institutions (e.g. education, creative industry) that actively participate in the discourse, design, production, and distribution of meaning in advertising texts and images.

A good number of studies in the past have examined the language of sexism from the feminist perspectives, gender segregation and degradation, among others, using semiotics resources, discourse analysis, multimodal discourse, among other theories. This study looks at the linguistic and non-linguistic language features of sexist language as choices available to language users on the Facebook social media platform. Using the multimodal theory as the framework, the study examines 10 randomly selected Facebook posts with texted pictures and comments posted by Nigerians with elements of sexism. The study also engaged the descriptive research design to examine the ‘textedpictures’ used as sampled data. These sampled data were given in-depth analysis to reveal their usually hidden and laughed-about sexist messages. The analysis of data was considered by determining the existence of sexist communication on Facebook platform, examining the meaning making elements in sexist languages posts. This is precipitated on the discovery that less attention is paid on the signification of the communicative elements deployed to convey sexism on the Facebook platform. From the analysis, the study finds out that Facebook users engage linguistic and non-linguistic elements symbolising sexist language on Facebook postings; that the posts on Facebook rely predominantly on both written texts and pictures, combined to make the tagging or stereotyping concrete; that the sexist posts on Facebook platforms rely heavily on hasty or intentional generalisation in order to demean the sex they chose to target through texts, pictures and the combination of texts and pictures.

There is increasing awareness among linguists that discourse analysis inevitably involves analyses of meanings arising from the combination of multiple modes of communication. The evolving multimodal pedagogic environment for teaching English as a foreign language (henceforth EFL), among other communicative contexts, calls for a social, semiotic, and linguistic explanation. Situated within the theoretical landscape of social semiotics and in the pedagogic context of EFL education, the present study aims to elucidate how linguistic and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe interpersonal meaning in multimodal textbooks. The data drawn upon are eighteen EFL textbooks for primary and secondary schooling, published by People’s Education Press between 2002 and 2006. The research design consists of three complementary sub-studies. First, it investigates the ways in which the semantic regions of ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION can be modelled in multimodal texts, with special reference to the interplay of voices in textbook discourse. The second sub-study analyzes how verbal and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe the ‘emotion and attitude’ goal highlighted in curriculum standards, with a particular focus on verbiage-image relations. Third, it extends the linguistic concept ‘modality’ to multimodal discourse, exploring coding orientation in texts for different educational contexts and between different constituent genres. The main findings of this thesis are as follows: (1) A range of multimodal resources (i.e. labelling, dialogue balloon, jointly-constructed text, illustration and highlighting) are identified as enabling editor voice to negotiate meanings with reader voice and character voice. It is found that the way in which an ENGAGEMENT value can be scaled is strongly associated with the intrinsic property of the given multimodal resource. The interaction between multiple voices is closely related to contact, social distance, and point of view. (2) It is shown that images play an essential role in realizing attitudinal meanings. Together with verbal APPRAISAL resources, visual semiotic features work to position the readers in ways that align them to set pedagogic goals, guiding them in completing jointly-constructed texts. Moreover, an attitudinal shift from an emotional release to a more institutionalized type of evaluation can be identified as students advance through the school years. (3) It is argued that what counts as real in multimodal texts is socially defined and specific to a given communicative context. The nature of pedagogic discourse should be taken into account when visual displays are produced for pedagogic materials. The implications of this study include both theoretical and pedagogic aspects。Theoretically it adapts and extends APPRAISAL analysis to multimodal discourse, exploring the intersemiotic complementarity and co-instantiation in construing global evaluative stance. This semiotic exploration, in return, suggests ways in which discourse analysis may help textbook users better understand and interpret the multimodal features. With the affordances as well as limitations of semiotic resources made explicit, we may have one step further towards a comprehensive and critical understanding of multimodal construal of interpersonal meaning in pedagogic materials.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD)
There is increasing awareness among linguists that discourse analysis inevitably involves analyses of meanings arising from the combination of multiple modes of communication. The evolving multimodal pedagogic environment for teaching English as a foreign language (henceforth EFL), among other communicative contexts, calls for a social, semiotic, and linguistic explanation. Situated within the theoretical landscape of social semiotics and in the pedagogic context of EFL education, the present study aims to elucidate how linguistic and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe interpersonal meaning in multimodal textbooks. The data drawn upon are eighteen EFL textbooks for primary and secondary schooling, published by People’s Education Press between 2002 and 2006. The research design consists of three complementary sub-studies. First, it investigates the ways in which the semantic regions of ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION can be modelled in multimodal texts, with special reference to the interplay of voices in textbook discourse. The second sub-study analyzes how verbal and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe the ‘emotion and attitude’ goal highlighted in curriculum standards, with a particular focus on verbiage-image relations. Third, it extends the linguistic concept ‘modality’ to multimodal discourse, exploring coding orientation in texts for different educational contexts and between different constituent genres. The main findings of this thesis are as follows: (1) A range of multimodal resources (i.e. labelling, dialogue balloon, jointly-constructed text, illustration and highlighting) are identified as enabling editor voice to negotiate meanings with reader voice and character voice. It is found that the way in which an ENGAGEMENT value can be scaled is strongly associated with the intrinsic property of the given multimodal resource. The interaction between multiple voices is closely related to contact, social distance, and point of view. (2) It is shown that images play an essential role in realizing attitudinal meanings. Together with verbal APPRAISAL resources, visual semiotic features work to position the readers in ways that align them to set pedagogic goals, guiding them in completing jointly-constructed texts. Moreover, an attitudinal shift from an emotional release to a more institutionalized type of evaluation can be identified as students advance through the school years. (3) It is argued that what counts as real in multimodal texts is socially defined and specific to a given communicative context. The nature of pedagogic discourse should be taken into account when visual displays are produced for pedagogic materials. The implications of this study include both theoretical and pedagogic aspects。Theoretically it adapts and extends APPRAISAL analysis to multimodal discourse, exploring the intersemiotic complementarity and co-instantiation in construing global evaluative stance. This semiotic exploration, in return, suggests ways in which discourse analysis may help textbook users better understand and interpret the multimodal features. With the affordances as well as limitations of semiotic resources made explicit, we may have one step further towards a comprehensive and critical understanding of multimodal construal of interpersonal meaning in pedagogic materials.