Radan Martinec
Nascent and mature uses of a semiotic system: the case of image–text relations
This article first develops the system of image–text relations introduced in Martinec and Salway’s (2005) article – ‘A system for image–text relations in new (and old) media’) – mainly by focusing on the motivated quality of the relationship between the system’s meanings and realizations. This motivatedness points to the system’s being mature rather than nascent. The article then focuses on nascent uses of the image–text relations system, i.e. uses that have not yet stabilized and that could benefit from a semiotician’s intervention. The nascent uses in question regard the amount of inferencing that is required to identify equal-status image–text relations. Inferencing of equal-status image–text relations is first analyzed in old media and the effort invested in it is found to be quite adequate, which suggests a mature use of the relations. Examples of equal-status image–text relations from new media are then analyzed and it is argued that at times they require too much and at other times too little inferencing.Their use has thus not achieved an optimal state and has not yet stabilized. It is demonstrated that a semiotician’s intervention can lead to a more optimal amount of inferencing and thus drive the use of equal-status image–text relations in new media in the direction of mature uses.
Kenneth CC Kong
A corpus-based study in comparing the multimodality of Chinese- and English- language newspapers
This cross-cultural study involves a comparison of 55 pairs of global news items in Chinese- and English-language tabloid newspapers collected during a two-month period in 2009. Drawing on Bateman’s Multimodality and Genre (2008), the news articles were analyzed in terms of their base unit realizations, which can be sub-divided into three categories: text-typographic, photo-pictorial and diagram-representational units. The results show that Chinese news tends to employ more photo-pictorial elements, such as photos, icons and arrows, exemplifying the atomization or compartmentalization approach in layout design. Icons and arrows are also argued to have the interpersonal function of building rapport with the audience and the organizational function of helping readers to navigate. English news tends to adopt larger pictures as background, on which other elements are embedded in a more complex manner, exemplifying the graphic composite approach in visual layout. English news also features more text-typographic units because of embedded typographic units, such as capitalized and bold-face fonts, that substitute for the stress patterns in spoken English. Diagrams (such as tables and lists), which serve the function of providing additional information, are more common in Chinese news. It is argued that, although Chinese newspapers exhibit a globalized ‘inverted pyramid’ structure in their written forms, a more fragmented approach of atomization is still preferred in the overall layout of Chinese newspapers. This research highlights the importance of studying the ‘local’ experience of globalization
Howard Riley
Visual art and social structure: the social semiotics of relational art
This article elaborates the dialectical relationship between visual art forms and the social structures in which they are produced, by extending Robert Witkin’s taxonomy first presented in his 1995 book Art and Social Structure. Witkin tracked the history of visual art from pre-modern times, for which he invented the label invocational art, to the advent of Modernism, described in terms of evocational and then provocational art. The article then extrapolates from Witkin’s model to include post-Modernism, for which the author’s term revocational art has been coined, and goes on to discuss Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of Altermodernism, his term for describing the relationship between contemporary art practices and the social conditions of today, for which the author suggests an alternative – convocational art – a synonym for Bourriaud’s term relational art. The article concludes with a demonstration that social semiotic theory can be a powerful tool for the analysis of relational art.