The interpretation of verbo-pictorial images in billboards and store banners in Jordanian society: An experimental study
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Kawakib Momani
Abstract
The production of meaning from visual messages has been largely uninvestigated in the Arab world, particularly in such visually intensive areas as advertising, even though the question is of tremendous importance to designers of advertising messages. The reason could be the difficulty of capturing visual meaning and the lack of structured research approaches to code and categorize information related to advertising.
This article investigates the practices used in billboards and store banners, and how the meanings of the images and texts in these advertisements are interpreted by university students in Jordan. A population of one-hundred senior English major students at university level were involved in this study. The data for this study consists of a representative sample of three billboards and store banners out of a population of twenty advertisements collected from major cities in Jordan. Each of these represents one or more discursive practices. The analysis consists of three stages: description, interpretation, and explanation. Three main practices have been identified: metaphoric representation, code- mixing, and defamiliarization.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Looking behind the symbol: Mythic algebra, numbers, and the illusion of linear sequence
- Role conflict as an interactional resource in the multimodal emergence of expert identity
- Symbols in dialogical structure of semiotics
- The interpretation of verbo-pictorial images in billboards and store banners in Jordanian society: An experimental study
- Identity, freedom, and answerability in the global world: A semiotic approach
- Signification and alterity in Emmanuel Lévinas
- Semiosis in cognitive systems
- A view on denotation in photography
- Xenology as phenomenological semiotics
- Fashion as communication: A semiotic analysis of fashion on ‘Sex and the City’
- Memes versus signs: On the use of meaning concepts about nature and culture
- Media literacy and semiotics: Toward a future taxonomy of meaning
- Multiscale textual semiotic analysis
- Deconstructing Grimm's laws reveals the unrecognized foot and leg symbolism in Indo-European lexicons
- A semiotic approach to the pathology of literary Décadence
- Complex systems in Renaissance and Postmodern texts: Aesthetic and epistemological consequences
- ‘To give an imagination to the listeners’: The neglected poetics of Navajo ideophony
- Hjelmslev's semiotic model of language: An exegesis
- Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the land of the Cartesians: From comparative reception to cultural comparison
- Quelques parcours artistiques contemporains comme illustration du mouvement de la semiosis : Compte rendu d'Interpréter l'art contemporain de Nicole Everaert-Desmedt
