Volume 2013, Issue 197

Ubiquitous software such as PowerPoint has contributed to making layout an important semiotic resource in everyday professional communication. Drawing on developments in the visual arts, graphic design, and social semiotics, this paper presents two central and complementary principles for layout design and analysis: the grid and composition. These principles are then applied in a conceptualization of the template as an interface between the grid and composition, which provides a basis for comparing default layout templates in PowerPoint for Windows 2003 and 2007. The comparison reveals that options in PowerPoint 2007 are less explicit from the perspectives of both grid-based design and composition, and considerably limit users' freedom in layout design. We then consider the implications of the limited guidance that PowerPoint, through its default layout options and help menu, offers its users on how to use layout effectively with reference to a survey of twenty-seven slideshow presentations from corporate and higher education settings and three case studies selected from this data. The survey and case studies suggest that PowerPoint users can benefit from explicit advice about both grid-based design and composition as well as a stronger awareness of the limitations and advantages of using templates.

Speech balloons and thought bubbles are among the most recognizable visual signs of the visual language used in comics. These enclosed graphic containers provide a way in which text and image can interface with each other. However, their stereotypical meanings as representing speech or thought betray much deeper semantic richness. This paper uses these graphic signs as a platform for examining the multimodal interfaces between text and image, and details four types of interfaces that characterize the connections between modalities: Inherent, Emergent, Adjoined, and Independent relationships. Each interface facilitates different levels of multimodal integration, tempered by principles of Gestalt grouping and underlying semantic features. This process allows the possibility of creating singular cohesive units of text and image that is on par with other multimodal interfaces, such as between speech and gesture.

In highly evolved culture, discourse is made up of complexes of implicit and explicit inter-textual relations, which form the meanings for new signifiers. Meanings for common abstract nouns are derived from the modeling of typical situations in everyday narratives. However at a further level of abstraction, models of discourses, which themselves contain abstract concepts, provide meanings for what are called “hyper-abstract” nominals. Here a certain limit is reached, and it is argued that this diachronic, onomasiological process provides a constraint on the notion of “unlimited semiosis.” This constraint has both natural and ethical aspects.

This study provides a semiotic theorization of how emotion is represented in film to complement the cognitive approach, which focuses on how film elicits emotion from viewers. Drawing upon social semiotic theories and cognitive theories of emotion, we develop a multimodal framework in which filmic representation of emotion is seen as combinations of semiotic choices derived from cognitive components of emotion. The semiotic model is employed to investigate how emotive meaning is realized through verbal and nonverbal resources. At the discursive level of film, the choices available in the shot organization of eliciting condition and expression are examined. The paper demonstrates how the social semiotic approach, combined with cognitive theory of emotion structure, is able to provide a comprehensive theoretical account of how various film techniques represent emotion. It is also significant for the study of viewer emotion, which to a large degree stems from character emotion.

Though there has been some interest in the semiotics of Japanese gardens (Casalis 1983; van Tonder and Lyons 2005) as pure visual articulations of landscape elements, attention to what Schafer (1977) and Truax (2001) identify as a garden's soundscape has been lacking. This paper investigates the gardening technique of shakkei (borrowed scenery) in the Tokyo garden Kyu Furukawa Teien. Utilizing the terminology of Schafer and Truax, I construct a Greimas square to interrogate the semiotic function of the shakkei in light of traditional Japanese uses of Chinese geomancy, and to further investigate the garden's synthesis of landscape and soundscape elements.

There have been attempts to describe rhythm in technical and musicological terms, yet it has remained one of the most elusive aspects of music for theorists as it is comprised of a range of interacting sounds. This article explores the contribution that could be made by a social semiotic approach to rhythm in popular music. The paper provides an inventory of sound qualities that can be seen as a set of meaning potentials for the creation of certain kinds of “groove” or “movement” in music, since these have different kinds of associations in terms of ideas, moods, and attitudes.

This paper reviews the development of Chinese cultural semiotics from the early age of reception to the present day. The return of Cultural Awareness in the late 1970s in China paved the way for the entry of diverse Western thought and led to the so-called “fever of cultural studies” since the 1980s. The dynamic nature of Chinese culture calls for equally dynamic theories and this has provided a perfect opportunity for combining the various newly introduced Western semiotic models and the contemporary studies of Chinese culture. A genuinely fascinating situation, which I name “a carnival pilgrimage,” of cultural semiotics in China, is that each of the diversified semiotic theories has enjoyed a uniquely prestigious status and a fair share of practitioners. Nevertheless, there are four major Western models that are most influential in Chinese cultural semiotics: Saussurean structuralism, the Peircean model, the Russian School, and the Cassirer-Langer model. The seeming confusion of this carnival pilgrimage is actually a reflection of the dynamism and pluralism of global semiotics and is especially advocated and practiced by Chinese semioticians, who have already managed to explore the rich ancient legacies left by early Chinese thinkers of the sign and to establish semiotic centers and publications nationwide.

Given the complex reality of media and mediation, it is reasonable to question the meaningfulness of treating photography as “one medium.” This article suggests that it is necessary to distinguish between a number of complementary media aspects. It takes an intermedial perspective, based on the belief that one cannot understand photography without thoroughly comparing it to how other media are construed. First of all, photography can be understood in terms of media of production, storage, and distribution. This paper focuses primarily on the aspect of distribution and the critical meeting of the material, the sensorial, and the cognitive. It supports the view that photography, like all other media, should be analyzed in terms of what are referred to here as the four modalities of media. Minute investigation of the material, the sensorial, the spatiotemporal, and the semiotic features of media products that are understood to be photographs makes it possible to discern essential relations to other media. Finally, photography is discussed as qualified media. Media products cannot be fully understood without considering the historical and social processes that form our understanding of how they communicate and produce aesthetic import. At least two different types of qualification dominate our present culture: photography as documentation and photography as art.

Despite efforts to deal with the underrepresentation of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff in higher education, progress to date has been limited. We investigate the role of possible implicit attitudes towards ethnic diversity among staff and students at a leading British university. Ninety-six participants (48 White and 48 non-White) were presented with matched C.V.s of White and non- White applicants and were instructed to rate the suitability of candidates against two pre-defined job descriptions for positions at the same university (Lectureship versus Administrative role). Participants were also asked to shortlist two applicants for a subsequent interview, before completing a new multi-ethnic IAT. The new IAT assesses implicit attitudes towards BME groups as a whole, rather than focusing exclusively on a single ethnic minority. Evidence of implicit bias was observed in the IAT scores and in the White participants showing an own-race bias in terms of the proportion of Whites that they selected for the academic post, but not the administrative position. Implicit measures were a better predictor than explicit measures of actual shortlisting decisions. Policy recommendations are discussed.

This paper shows that an analysis of gestures based on the four parameters hand shape, orientation, movement, and position in gesture space, introduced for the notation of sign language (Battison 1974; Stokoe 1960) can uncover recurrent patterns and structures in gestures. By presenting two studies we argue for a discovery procedure that rests upon a systematic description of gestures applying the four parameters and upon a clear discrimination between form and meaning in the analytical process. Using this methodological framework it is possible to uncover clusters of recurrent forms and a systematic variation of form and meaning in a recurrent gesture.

This paper presents an analysis of the multimodal construal of the semantic domain of culinary operations in Japanese and Chinese. The analysis uses the semantic domain framework developed by Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) and the system of logico-semantic relations between image and text developed by Martinec and Salway (2005). The data consist of multimodal recipes for Chinese dumplings in both Japanese and Chinese with occasional reference to a comparable English recipe. We first compare the linguistic construal of the culinary semantic domain for English developed by Halliday and Matthiessen with the Japanese and Chinese texts. We then analyze the multimodal construal of this experience and the image-text relations in each of the recipes. The paper enhances previous findings on recipes in Japanese and English by Martinec (2003) and makes an important contribution to cross-cultural issues in multimodal text analyses through highlighting some of the similarities and differences in the ways that Japanese and Chinese multimodal recipes integrate visual and verbal resources in construing a comparable semantic domain. The paper concludes with a brief interpretation of the findings against the texts' socio-cultural contexts.

This paper provides a semiotic perspective on cyberterrorism and its opportunity to cause maximal damage while using terrorist propaganda. By and large, cyberterrorism refers to the use of the Internet, technology, and computerbased networks against critical infrastructures. A major premise of this paper is that the Internet revolutionizes the way in which cyberterrorists communicate, recruit new members, and advertise propaganda for their cause. In an attempt to shed light on the transition from traditional to modern methods of attack, the authors apply the different levels of Stamper's Semiotic Ladder – morphological, empirical, syntactical, semantic, and pragmatic – to cyberterrorism.

This short essay seeks to identify and prevent a pitfall that attends less careful inquiries into “physiosemiosis.” It is emphasized that, in order to truly establish the presence of sign-action in the non-living world, all the components of a triadic sign – including the interpretant – would have to be abiotic (that is, not dependent on a living organism). Failure to heed this necessary condition can lead one to hastily confuse a natural sign (like smoke coming from fire) for an instance of abiotic semiosis. A more rigorous and reserved approach to the topic is called for.