Social Semiotics for a Complex World

Analysing Language and Social Meaning

Bob Hodge

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745696218, 9780745696201
• eBook ISBN: 9780745696249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Social semiotics reveals language?s social meaning – its structures, processes, conditions and effects – in all social contexts, across all media and modes of discourse. This important new book uses social semiotics as a one-stop shop to analyse language and social meaning, enhancing linguistics with a sociological imagination.

Social Semiotics for a Complex World develops ideas, frameworks and strategies for better understanding key problems and issues involving language and social action in today?s hyper-complex world driven by globalization and new media. Its semiotic basis incorporates insights from various schools of linguistics (such as cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistics) as well as from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and literary studies. It employs a multi-modal perspective to follow meaning across all modes of language and media, and a multi-scalar approach that ranges between databases and one-word slogans, the local and global, with examples from English, Chinese and Spanish.

Social semiotics analyses twists and turns of meanings big and small in complex contexts. This book uses semiotic principles to build a powerful, flexible analytic toolkit which will be invaluable for students across the humanities and social sciences.

PART I
Principles and Practices

1
Key Concepts

This chapter outlines some basic principles of social semiotics in a complexity framework. A complexity framework is essential for social semiotics. Complexity is built into the foundations of social semiotics and has always been there. Each key term – language, meaning and society – refers to a complex system already studied by one or more disciplines. I add to the complexity by presenting language, meaning and society as an even more complex system formed from intersections and relationships between these three systems.

Complexity is often seen as a newfangled (‘postmodern’) idea, yet it has deep roots. At its heart is a powerful idea that goes back to Aristotle’s Metaphysics: ‘The whole is other than its parts’ (1935: 1045a.8-10). I analyse this phrase at greater length in chapter 5. Here I note only how deceptively simple it is, yet how far it resonates. Aristotle’s beautiful idea links science and linguistics, semiotics and sociology, ancient and modern theories. In the chapter that follows I try to write as simply and clearly as Aristotle did about complex ideas.

Key terms

The social semiotic imagination

The term ‘social semiotic imagination’, adapted from the influential book by the sociologist C. Wright Mills, is not a technical term, but it captures the essence of the practices I describe in this book. Mills (1959) challenged his readers by connecting imagination with ‘sociology’ (understood as science with therefore no connection to ‘imagination’). For him, ‘imagination’ was a basic capacity for seeing, interpreting and changing complex social relationships as meanings. He wanted to cultivate ‘the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society’ (1959: 8). In my adaptation of his concept, those relationships are understood as countless multiscalar networks, starting from details of everyday life and ultimately connecting with invisible social forces and movements such as capitalism, racism and injustice. Mills’s sociological imagination made sense of these details as signs. That is basically what social semiotics does, too.

I illustrate this social semiotic imagination with a news story that unfolded as I began writing this chapter. In Oslo, Norway, on Friday 22 July 2011, Anders Breivik set off a car bomb, killing eight people. He then travelled to Utøya, an offshore island, and killed sixty-eight others. I was in Australia at the time. I saw the news on TV, read it in print, and followed it up on the net.

I have never been to Norway, but I am a global citizen for whom terrorism matters. In this context I asked: What is the meaning of this senseless act? What meanings drove Breivik to do such a thing? To answer these questions I looked at the smaller component meanings, made up of everyday words and sentences. Minute analysis of everyday acts of meaning is indispensable to address big questions about big meanings, and vice versa.

I knew about this event only through the media. This adds a second object for my semiotic imagination. They are my sole sources for what went on – ‘ideational meanings’, as Halliday (1985) calls them. The social role of media, what Halliday calls their ‘interpersonal function’, complicates the uncovering of this deep meaning of the globalized world I live in.

The headline of the first article I read on the theme came from the front page of The Australian, a paper in the right-wing Newscorp group:

1.1 Toll to rise as Norway faces the twisted logic of a mind intent on killing (The Australian, 25 July 2011)

The headline was accompanied by an image of the explosion which killed eight people. In this multimodal newspaper text, key information carried by the visual channel was omitted in the verbal. I used semiotic imagination to wonder why.

In this case I saw a larger pattern. The phrase ‘toll to rise’ is a transformation of ‘the toll (numbers) of dead will rise’. Transformations, a term associated with Chomsky (1957), are rich sources of semiotic questions. Do they think that more people will die, or have they not counted them all yet? Why not mention ‘dead’? One effect of this is to shift attention from the large numbers of dead to the ‘mind’ of the murderer, from social issues to individual psychology.

I compared this text with a template I carry in my mind about this theme, in which two terms are structural: ‘massacre’ and ‘terrorist’. I restore these two problematic terms and ask: Why did this newspaper, known for its links with conservative politics, avoid these potent terms here? This was clearly a ‘massacre’, and ‘terrorist’ has been applied to many incidents with far fewer deaths. Was it because Breivik was right wing, and not Muslim? At this time I chose not to follow this line into the ‘twisted mind’ of the right-wing media. The question of Breivik’s ‘twisted mind’ interested me more, part of larger questions about terrorism. What did he mean by this act? To begin to answer this question I took one sentence from his 1500-page manifesto, published online just before the event:

1.2 Once you decide to strike it is better to kill too many than not enough, or you risk reducing the desired ideological impact of the strike. (Breivik, 23 March 2011)

Reading this sentence semiotically, I noted the social meanings. The phrase ‘desired ideological impact’ creates a complex relationship with ‘you’. From Breivik’s manifesto I constructed this reader as a ‘Knight Templar’, as Breivik called his followers in his crusade. I went outside his text to check if these followers really existed. They probably did not. This input from reality then became part of the meaning I gave this text. Breivik’s followers existed only in his fantasies. The social meaning was a conversation with himself, in which he split into two, leader and follower.

This meaning is only an inference, my guess. But meanings in social use are typically contested, not fixed and certain, and guessing is normal in semiotics. The immediate context of my interpretation contains two competing sets of meaning, mine and Breivik’s – or, more precisely, my guess at what Breivik meant and my guess about the deeper sense of his statement.

The word ‘desired’ illustrates the role of transformations in semiotic analysis. I interpret it as a transformation of an underlying fuller sentence, ‘you and I desire . . .’. In this implied fuller form, ‘you’ (his imagined Knight Templar reader) and ‘I’ (Breivik) unite in their/our common desire to kill large numbers of people. This is only what Breivik’s twisted mind ‘desired’. He co-opts his reader into an imaginary position, as someone outside himself who wants his advice. In my analysis at this point I hold at least two versions of ‘meaning’ in tension. I am interested in what he ‘means’, but I am also interested in what his words mean to me in my diagnosis of his ‘twisted mind’.

This discussion shows three features of the social imagination:

1. Big meanings about the state of the world are used to identify signs and instances in the environment.
2. Single small concrete instances allow analysis to relate elements to each other and to hypothesized deeper meanings.
3. Analysis identifies many questions to investigate further, and to weigh against each other in a complex provisional judgement.

Language, meaning, society

Language, meaning and society are key terms for social semiotics, but they also have meaning in everyday English and in linguistics. In this section I show how social semiotic understandings of them can come from and co-exist with their meanings in other contexts.

1 Language ‘Language’ is one of the top 1000 words in everyday use according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). OED defines language as ‘The system of spoken or written communication commonly used by a particular country, people, community, etc.’ ‘System’ is part of the definition. So is connection with society, though not with ‘meaning’. The OED adds four more strands of meaning. One is modern – computer languages. The other three go back to the seventeenth century – ‘languages’ of animals, non-verbal communication, and other human signifying systems.

Mainstream linguistics as represented by the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar (ODEG; Chalker and Weiner 1998) defines language as ‘The method of human communication, consisting of words, either spoken or written’. This monomodal theory does not include the idea of ‘system’, unless ‘method’ implies it, and it does not refer to society or to social uses of language. Everyday English has a more semiotic understanding of language than mainstream linguistics.

‘Discourse’ is an alternative word for forms of language, the defining term in ‘critical discourse analysis’. It does not make the OED top 1000 words, but it captures language in action better than ‘language’ does.

‘Discourse’ has other advantages over ‘language’. The American linguist Zellig Harris (1950), Chomsky’s teacher, used ‘discourse’ to include large stretches of text above the level of the sentence, something mainstream linguistics needed. Halliday used ‘discourse’ and ‘text’ for a similar purpose. Michel Foucault (1971) connected it to bodies of knowledge associated with language, thus opening up the term to a role in analysing the sociology of knowledge. I see no compelling reason why mainstream linguistics should not embrace ‘discourse’.

2 Meaning To my surprise, ‘meaning’ is not in the OED’s top 1000. OED lists two main meanings for ‘meaning’. One is broad, dealing with big meanings: ‘The significance, purpose, underlying truth etc. of something’. This strand includes ‘Something which gives one a sense of purpose, value, especially of a metaphysical or spiritual kind.’ The second strand is more restricted: ‘The sense or signification of a word, sentence, etc., of language, a sentence, word, text, etc.: signification, sense’.

OED reflects a split in the field of meanings of ‘meaning’. Differences of scale construct a gulf between disciplines of ‘big meanings’, such as philosophy or religion, and small meanings of linguistics. Everyday English includes both kinds of meaning while still registering the gap.

The linguistic ODEG has a surprisingly limited concept of meaning: ‘What is meant by a word, phrase, clause, or larger text’. But what is meant by ‘meant’? The definition includes different scales of linguistic form, the scale studied by linguistics plus the scale studied by other disciplines, but not the idea that meanings, whatever they are, may be bigger or smaller.

But, as we saw in the Br...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• PART I Principles and Practices
• PART II From Linguistics to Semiotics
• PART III Meaning and Society
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement