Analysing Structure and Codes

(the Summary of Chandler’s “Semiotics: the Basic”)

-Semiotics- Ni Wayan Swardhani W.

2013

Semiotics

An approach to textual analysis

Structural analysis

Focuses on the structural relations which are functional in the signifying system at a particular moment of history

Involves identifying constituent units in a semiotics system (text or socio-cultural practice), the structural relationship between them (the

opposition, correlation, and logical relations) and the relation of the parts to the whole

(Chandler p. 83)

Horizontal and Vertical

Axes

• Syntagmatic positioning

• Paradigmatic substitution associative relations (Saussure)

The young lady calls her parents

friend his

girl

man old punches

kisses boyfriend

Syntactic axis

Para

dig

matic

axis

The weather looks stormy

seems

shows sky sunny

raining

cloudy

Syntactic axis

Para

dig

matic

axis

Father writes letters

book

newspaper reads

Syntactic axis

Para

dig

matic

axis

Mother

buys

Source: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

• Semiotics can be applied to:

• anything which can be seen as signifying something

• to everything which has meaning within a culture.

• media texts (including television and radio programmes, films, cartoons, newspaper and magazine articles, posters and other ads)

• the practices involved in producing and interpreting such texts.

• The task of the semiotician (Saussurean tradition)

• to look beyond the specific texts or practices to the systems of functional distinctions operating within them.

• to establish the underlying conventions, identifying significant differences and oppositions in an attempt to model the system of categories, relations (syntagmatic and paradigmatic), connotations, distinctions and rules of combination employed.

Conducting Semiotic Analysis Identifying the text

• Include a copy of the text with your analysis of it (if possible), noting any significant shortcomings of the copy. Or provide a clear description which would allow someone to recognize the text easily if they encountered it themselves.

• Briefly describe the medium used

• the genre to which the text belongs

• the context in which it was found.

Consider your purposes in analysing the text.

• Why did you choose this text?

• Your purposes may reflect your values: how does the text relate to your own values?

How does the sign vehicle you are examining relate to the type-token distinction?

• Is it one among many copies (e.g. a poster) or virtually unique (e.g. an actual painting)?

• How does this influence your interpretation?

Eco lists three kinds of sign vehicles, and it is notable that the distinction relates in part at least to material form:

• signs in which there may be any number of tokens (replicas) of the same type (e.g. a printed word, or exactly the same model of car in the same colour);

• 'signs whose tokens, even though produced according to a type, possess a certain quality of material uniqueness' (e.g. a word which someone speaks or which is handwritten);

• 'signs whose token is their type, or signs in which type and token are identical' (e.g. a unique original oil-painting or Princess Diana's wedding dress).

What are the important signifiers and what do they signify?

• What is the system within which these signs make sense?

Modality

• What reality claims are made by the text?

• Does it allude to being fact or fiction?

• What references are made to an everyday experiential world?

• What modality markers are present?

• How do you make use of such markers to make judgments about the relationship between the text and the world?

• Does the text operate within a realist representational code?

• To whom might it appear realistic?

Paradigmatic analysis

• To which class of paradigms (medium; genre; theme) does the whole text belong?

• How might a change of medium affect the meanings generated?

• What might the text have been like if it had formed part of a different genre?

• What paradigm sets do each of the signifiers used belong to?

• Why do you think each signifier was chosen from the possible alternatives within the same paradigm set? What values does the choice of each particular signifier connote?

• What signifiers from the same paradigm set are noticeably absent?

• What contrasted pairs seem to be involved (e.g. nature/culture)?

• Which of those in each pairing seems to be the 'marked' category?

• Is there a central opposition in the text?

• Apply the commutation test in order to identify distinctive signifiers and to define their significance. This involves an imagined substitution of one signifier for another of your own, and assessing the effect.

What is the syntagmatic structure of the text?

• Identify and describe syntagmatic structures in the text which take forms such as narrative, argument or montage.

• How does one signifier relate to the others used (do some carry more weight than others)?

• How does the sequential or spatial arrangement of the elements influence meaning?

• Are there formulaic features that have shaped the text?

• If you are comparing several texts within a genre look for a shared syntagm.

• How far does identifying the paradigms and syntagms help you to understand the text?

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Rhetorical tropes

• What tropes (e.g. metaphors and metonyms) are involved?

• How are they used to influence the preferred reading?

Intertextuality

• Does it allude to other genres?

• Does it allude to or compare with other texts within the genre?

• How does it compare with treatments of similar themes within other genres?

• Does one code within the text (such as a linguistic caption to an advertisement or news photograph) serve to 'anchor' another (such as an image)? If so, how?

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem09.html

What semiotic codes are used?

• Do the codes have double, single or no articulation?

• Are the codes analogue or digital?

• Which conventions of its genre are most obvious in the text?

• Which codes are specific to the medium?

• Which codes are shared with other media?

• How do the codes involved relate to each other (e.g. words and images)?

• Are the codes broadcast or narrowcast?

• Which codes are notable by their absence?

• What relationships does the text seek to establish with its readers?

• How direct is the mode of address and what is the significance of this?

• How else would you describe the mode of address?

• What cultural assumptions are called upon?

• To whom would these codes be most familiar?

• What seems to be the preferred reading?

• How far does this reflect or depart from dominant cultural values?

• How 'open' to interpretation does the sign seem to be?

Social semiotics

• What does a purely structural analysis of the text downplay or ignore?

• Who created the sign? Try to consider all of those involved in the process.

• Whose realities does it represent and whose does it exclude?

• For whom was it intended? Look carefully at the clues and try to be as detailed as you can.

• How do people differ in their interpretation of the sign? Clearly this needs direct investigation.

• On what do their interpretations seem to depend?

• Illustrate, where possible, dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings.

• How might a change of context influence interpretation?

Benefits of semiotic analysis

• What other contributions have semioticians made that can be applied productively to the text?

• What insights has a semiotic analysis of this text offered?

• What other strategies might you need to employ to balance any shortcomings of your analysis?

• Syntagm and paradigm

provide a structural context within which signs make sense

does not only in sentence any kind of signs

• “Garment system” of paradigmatic and syntactic of Barthes (p. 86)

Syntagmatic Paradigmatic

the combination of 'this-and-this-and-this'

the selection of 'this-or-this-or-this‘

refer to intratextually to other signifiers co-present within the text

refer to intertextuality to signifiers which are absent from the text

possibilities of combination functional contrasts - they involve differentiation.

an orderly combination of interacting signifiers which forms a meaningful whole (sequential)

media or genre

Syntagmatic

Syntagmatic forms:

• sequential (and causal) relationships before and after

in film and television narrative sequences

plotting, literary genre the pattern, how it is compossed

Level Syntagmatic Relation

Signified conceptual

Signifiers sequential spatial

• spatial relationships montage in posters and photographs, which works through juxtaposition “spatial” (space, dimention)

above/below, in front/behind, close/distant, left/right, north/south/east/west, and inside/outside (or centre/periphery)

• conceptual relationships in exposition or argument (text)

introduction, body, conclusion.

Many texts contain more than one type of syntagmatic structure,

though one may be dominant.

Paradigmatic

• seeks to identify the various paradigms (or pre-existing sets of signifiers) which underlie the manifest content of texts.

• involves comparing and contrasting each of the signifiers present in the text with absent signifiers which in similar circumstances might have been chosen, and considering the significance of the choices made.

• It can be applied at any semiotic level, from the choice of a particular word, image or sound to the level of the choice of style, genre or medium.

• The analysis of paradigmatic relations helps to define the 'value' of specific items in a text.

Denotation, Connotation, and Myth • Denotation

literal, obvious, commonsense meaning (word)

what all viewers from any culture and at any time would recognize the image as depicting (Panofsky) (visual image)

socio-cultural and 'personal' associations (ideological, emotional etc.) of the sign

primarily representational and relatively self-contained

The denotational meaning of a sign would be broadly agreed upon by members of the same culture, whereas 'nobody is ever taken to task because their connotations are incorrect', so no inventory of the connotational meanings generated by any sign could ever be complete (Barnard 1996, 83)

• Connotation

Connotations are not purely 'personal' meanings - they are determined by the codes to which the interpreter has access. Cultural codes provide a connotational framework since they are 'organized around key oppositions and equations', each term being 'aligned with a cluster of symbolic attributes' (Silverman 1983, 36)

the 'expressive' values which are attached to a sign

• Myth

mythological or ideological extended metaphor

function: to naturalize the cultural - in other words, to make dominant cultural and historical values, attitudes and beliefs seem entirely 'natural', 'normal', self-evident, timeless, obvious 'common-sense' - and thus objective and 'true' reflections of 'the way things are'.

order of signification the sign reflects major culturally-variable concepts underpinning a particular worldview - such as masculinity, femininity, freedom, individualism, objectivism, Englishness and so on

Denotative level : (what are we looking at)

This is a photograph of the movie star Marilyn Monroe.

Connotative level : (what it implies)

We associate this photograph with Marilyn Monroe's star qualities of glamour, sexuality, beauty - if this is an early photograph - but also with her depression, drug-taking and untimely death if it is one of her last photographs.

Mythic level: (the world view)

We understand this sign as activating the myth of Hollywood: the dream factory that produces glamour in the form of the stars it constructs, but also the dream machine that can crush them - all with a view to profit and expediency. (Hayward 1996, 310)

Codes

The concept of the 'code' is fundamental in semiotics.

Saussure the overall code of language signs are not meaningful in isolation, but only when they are interpreted in relation to each other.

Roman Jakobson the production and interpretation of texts depends upon the existence of codes or conventions for communication.

Meaning of a sign depends on the code within which it is situated perception

Lee Thayer 'what we learn is not the world, but particular codes into which it has been structured so that we may "share" our experiences of it'

Codes provide a framework within which signs make sense.

The status of a sign cannot be granted if it does not function within a code.

If the relationship between a signifier and its signified is relatively arbitrary, then it is clear that interpreting the conventional meaning of signs requires familiarity with appropriate sets of conventions.

The conventions of such forms need to be learned before we can make sense of them.

Perception Figure + Ground (Gestalt psychologists )

The Gestalt principles can be seen as reinforcing the notion that the world is not simply and objectively 'out there' but is constructed in the process of perception.

Bill Nichols “a useful habit formed by our brains must not be mistaken for an essential attribute of reality”.

A code is a set of practices familiar to users of the medium operating within a broad cultural framework. Society itself depends on the existence of such signifying systems.

Codes are not simply 'conventions' of communication but rather procedural systems of related conventions which operate in certain domains.

Codes organize signs into meaningful systems which correlate signifiers and signifieds.

Codes transcend single texts, linking them together in an interpretative framework.

Stephen Heath notes that 'while every code is a system, not every system is a code' (Heath 1981, 130). He adds that 'a code is distinguished by its coherence, its homogeneity, its systematicity, in the face of the heterogeneity of the message, articulated across several codes' (ibid., p.129).

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Codes are interpretive frameworks which are used by both producers and interpreters of texts.

In creating texts we select and combine signs in relation to the codes with which we are familiar 'in order to limit... the range of possible meanings they are likely to generate when read by others' (Turner 1992, 17).

Signs within texts can be seen as embodying cues to the codes which are appropriate for interpreting them. The medium employed clearly influences the choice of codes.

Pierre Guiraud notes that 'the frame of a painting or the cover of a book highlights the nature of the code; the title of a work of art refers to the code adopted much more often than to the content of the message' (Guiraud 1975, 9).

With familiar codes we are rarely conscious of our acts of interpretation, but occasionally a text requires us to work a little harder - for instance, by pinning down the most appropriate signified for a key signifier (as in jokes based on word play) - before we can identify the relevant codes for making sense of the text as a whole.

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Typologies of Codes

Social codes all semiotic codes

• verbal language (phonological, syntactical, lexical, prosodic and paralinguistic subcodes);

• bodily codes (bodily contact, proximity, physical orientation, appearance, facial expression, gaze, head nods, gestures and posture);

• commodity codes (fashions, clothing, cars);

• behavioural codes (protocols, rituals, role-playing, games).

Example of verbal codes:

Koyukon Indians of the subarctic forest snow 16

snow; deep snow; falling snow; blowing snow; snow on the ground; granular snow beneath the surface; hard drifted snow; snow thawed previously and then frozen; earliest crusted snow in spring; thinly crusted snow; snow drifted over a steep bank, making it steeper; snow cornice on a mountain; heavy drifting snow; slushy snow on the ground; snow caught on tree branches; fluffy or powder snow

A S C Ross introduced a distinction between so-called 'U and Non-U' uses of the English language (1954). He observed that members of the British upper class ('U') could be distinguished from other social classes ('Non-U') by their use of words

U Non - U

luncheon dinner

table-napkin serviette

vegetables greens

jam preserve

pudding sweet

sick ill

lavatory-paper toilet-paper

looking-glass mirror

writing-paper note-paper

wireless radio

Textual codes Representational codes

• scientific codes, including mathematics;

• aesthetic codes within the various expressive arts (poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, music, etc.) - including classicism, romanticism, realism;

• genre, rhetorical and stylistic codes: narrative (plot, character, action, dialogue, setting, etc.), exposition, argument and so on;

• mass media codes including photographic, televisual, filmic, radio, newspaper and magazine codes, both technical and conventional (including format).

Interpretative codes There is less agreement about these as semiotic codes

• perceptual codes: e.g. of visual perception (note that this code does not assume intentional communication);

• ideological codes: More broadly, these include codes for 'encoding' and 'decoding' texts - dominant (or 'hegemonic'), negotiated or oppositional. More specifically, we may list the 'isms', such as individualism, liberalism, feminism, racism, materialism, capitalism, progressivism, conservatism, socialism, objectivism, consumerism and populism; (note, however, that all codes can be seen as ideological).

Codes important in relation to gender differentiation

Codes are variable not only between different cultures and social groups but also historically