From Semiotics to Three-Dimensional Multimodality

Abstract

Semiotics traces its roots to Ferdinand de Saussure’s classical book Course de Linguistique Generale in which it is defined as the study of signs, signifiers and the signified in order to relate with meaning. It is the study of “life of signs within society”. Later researchers applied semiotics as an interdisciplinary field. This article examines application of semiotics to study communication and linguistics based on exploration of semiotic and linguistic theories: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Most accounts of visual semiotics have concentrated on lexis; denotative and connotative, iconographical, and iconological signification of people, places and things depicted in images. However, multimodal discourse analysis in semiotics recognizes the relation between the signifier and the signified, and aspects of meaning including audio and visual elements. Multimodality provides the means to describe a practice or representation in all its semiotic complexity and richness. In multimedia, language is “displaced” by other modes of signification like sound and image and representation of meaning is shifting from language to alternative semiotics: image, colour, page layout, and document design for the realization of procedural meaning. Semiotics thus pervades all fields of language and communication and this forms the subject of this article.