Sports utility semiotics: A semantic differential study of symbolic potential in automobile design
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Andrew Wilson
Abstract
The article aims to illuminate the issue of symbolic potential in postmodern society through a semiotic study of car design. In Baudrillard’s terminology, we explore the experience and sociological and psychological materiality of objects that, being above objects’ perceptible materiality, constantly modify the integrity of technological systems (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]: 6). The target concepts are analyzed through Baudrillard’s lens of symbolic capital and his technological system of objects, coupled with the method of semantic differential (SD; e.g., Osgood 1979, 1981) against the insights of Tartu semiotics. Such a complex framework helps to establish affective attitudes of the subjects towards scales selected for their perceptual saliency. The analysis is based on the responses of students in a Polish university who were administered an instrument comprising 14 concepts and 37 scales. The results of statistical analysis yield a semantic space with two factors: potency and activity/dynamism, which we shall call social prestige. At this stage of the analysis we could not determine the evaluation factor. The scales that loaded significantly showed that there is indeed an increment of perceptual saliency in both extracted factors in the case of target stimuli (pickups and SUVs).
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©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Sports utility semiotics: A semantic differential study of symbolic potential in automobile design
- Making meaning in women’s spiritual autobiography: Language, materiality, and agency in colonial New Granada
- What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? VII: Sleight of hand
- Towards a semiotics of multilingualism
- In the arena: Communication between animals and Christians in damnatio ad bestias
- Dire l’indicible et décrire l’indescriptible: Ressources imagières et linguistiques des poilus
- Mathematics and Peirce’s semiotic
- Icarus ignored: Riffaterre and Eagleton on Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts
- The “monster” of Seymour Avenue: Internet crime news and Gothic reportage in the case of Ariel Castro
- Kenneth L. Pike and science fiction
- Environmental communications: The reader’s perspective
- A Peircean typology of cultural prime symbols: Culture as category
- The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry: Navajo poetry, phonological iconicity, and linguistic relativity
- The language of fashion in postmodern society: A social semiotic perspective
- From Saussure to sociology and back to linguistics: Niklas Luhmann’s reception of signifiant/signifié and langue/parole as the basis for a model of language change
- The machine or the garden: Semiotics and the American yard
- Photogénie as “the Other” of the semiotics of cinema: On Yuri Lotman’s concept of “the mythological”
- Who said it? Voices in news translation, from a semiotic perspective
- Why semiotics, why poetry?
- How brands (don’t) do things: Corporate branding as practices of imagining “commens”
- Film space as mental space
- Netizen communicology: China daily and the Internet construction of group culture
- Questions toward a Peircean phenomenological description of association
- Colonial bodies: Slavery, wage-slavery, and the representation of race
- Discourse analysis with Peirce? Making sense of discursive regularities: The case of online university prospectuses
- Heidegger and the signs of history
- To be continued: meaning-making in serialized manga as functional-multimodal narrative
- Empiricism within the limits of postmodernism alone: On the emergence of the logically real within the multi-perspectival field
- Propaganda mala fide: Towards a comparative semiotics of violent religious persuasion
- Review article
- Peircean visual semiotics: Potentials to be explored
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Sports utility semiotics: A semantic differential study of symbolic potential in automobile design
- Making meaning in women’s spiritual autobiography: Language, materiality, and agency in colonial New Granada
- What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? VII: Sleight of hand
- Towards a semiotics of multilingualism
- In the arena: Communication between animals and Christians in damnatio ad bestias
- Dire l’indicible et décrire l’indescriptible: Ressources imagières et linguistiques des poilus
- Mathematics and Peirce’s semiotic
- Icarus ignored: Riffaterre and Eagleton on Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts
- The “monster” of Seymour Avenue: Internet crime news and Gothic reportage in the case of Ariel Castro
- Kenneth L. Pike and science fiction
- Environmental communications: The reader’s perspective
- A Peircean typology of cultural prime symbols: Culture as category
- The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry: Navajo poetry, phonological iconicity, and linguistic relativity
- The language of fashion in postmodern society: A social semiotic perspective
- From Saussure to sociology and back to linguistics: Niklas Luhmann’s reception of signifiant/signifié and langue/parole as the basis for a model of language change
- The machine or the garden: Semiotics and the American yard
- Photogénie as “the Other” of the semiotics of cinema: On Yuri Lotman’s concept of “the mythological”
- Who said it? Voices in news translation, from a semiotic perspective
- Why semiotics, why poetry?
- How brands (don’t) do things: Corporate branding as practices of imagining “commens”
- Film space as mental space
- Netizen communicology: China daily and the Internet construction of group culture
- Questions toward a Peircean phenomenological description of association
- Colonial bodies: Slavery, wage-slavery, and the representation of race
- Discourse analysis with Peirce? Making sense of discursive regularities: The case of online university prospectuses
- Heidegger and the signs of history
- To be continued: meaning-making in serialized manga as functional-multimodal narrative
- Empiricism within the limits of postmodernism alone: On the emergence of the logically real within the multi-perspectival field
- Propaganda mala fide: Towards a comparative semiotics of violent religious persuasion
- Review article
- Peircean visual semiotics: Potentials to be explored
