Gunther Kress
A brief history.My account here is a personal one. As a theoretically and academically distinct enterprise in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Social Semiotics begins with the publication of the book with that title (1988), which Bob Hodge and I borrowed from Halliday’sLanguage as social semiotic (1978), acknowledging the foundational role of his thinking for our enterprise. Despite the relatively brief period since,there are several distinct approaches using that label. For Bob Hodge and myself, the book Social Semiotics expanded the work done for our Language as Ideology (1979).
That is the frame in which I outline my sense of what was - and continues to be - the distinctive influence of the work of Michael Halliday on Social Semiotics.
An overview.For this, I will use the work done by Theo van Leeuwen and myself in Reading Images The grammar of graphic design(1996, 2006, 2019) – supplemented by a few recent examples to provide both illustration and application of Social Semiotics. Reading Images was an attempt to show the principles of Social Semiotics applied to a semiotic resource other than that of “language”, that of image: a resource both materially different to that of “language”, yet shaped by the same social conditions. Importantly, Reading Images deliberately built on the frame of thinking of Halliday’s the semiotician rather than of Halliday the linguist.
Contemporary issues and prospects. The currently dominant approach - largely (but not solely) developed within Social Semiotics and its principles - is that of “Multimodality”. In the broad areas of the Humanities and Social Sciencethe term was introduced in the first edition of Reading Images(1996). It was elaborated in Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication(Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). The term has caught on rapidly. It is used by academics / researchersfrom a range of disciplinary backgrounds and applied in a wide range of research, often beyond useof Social Semiotic theory nor reference to any other.
The approach to Social Semiotics outlined here crucially centres on several terms: dominantly the two notionsof affordance, and of signas the motivated relation of (material) formand meaning. Supporting all, are Halliday’s assumptions about the interconnection/relation of “the social” and “the semiotic”.
For me, two issues dominate: one is the development of full accounts of the entities of and relations within each of the modes; the other, entirely linked to that, arethe theoretical and descriptive resources enabling the transposition / reconstitutionof meaning across all modes.
This (entirely Hallidayan) conception of Social Semiotics takes as given that there is one – complex, rich, fully adequate, dynamic – semioticresource for any onesocial group (society/community). There is no justification for distinct semiotic approaches: there isone semiotic theory and one semiotic resource for all meaning in any one social group. That is, there is no Semiotics of X, or of Y, or of Z.
That is the frame in which I outline my sense of what was - and continues to be - the distinctive influence of the work of Michael Halliday on Social Semiotics.
An overview.For this, I will use the work done by Theo van Leeuwen and myself in Reading Images The grammar of graphic design(1996, 2006, 2019) – supplemented by a few recent examples to provide both illustration and application of Social Semiotics. Reading Images was an attempt to show the principles of Social Semiotics applied to a semiotic resource other than that of “language”, that of image: a resource both materially different to that of “language”, yet shaped by the same social conditions. Importantly, Reading Images deliberately built on the frame of thinking of Halliday’s the semiotician rather than of Halliday the linguist.
Contemporary issues and prospects. The currently dominant approach - largely (but not solely) developed within Social Semiotics and its principles - is that of “Multimodality”. In the broad areas of the Humanities and Social Sciencethe term was introduced in the first edition of Reading Images(1996). It was elaborated in Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication(Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). The term has caught on rapidly. It is used by academics / researchersfrom a range of disciplinary backgrounds and applied in a wide range of research, often beyond useof Social Semiotic theory nor reference to any other.
The approach to Social Semiotics outlined here crucially centres on several terms: dominantly the two notionsof affordance, and of signas the motivated relation of (material) formand meaning. Supporting all, are Halliday’s assumptions about the interconnection/relation of “the social” and “the semiotic”.
For me, two issues dominate: one is the development of full accounts of the entities of and relations within each of the modes; the other, entirely linked to that, arethe theoretical and descriptive resources enabling the transposition / reconstitutionof meaning across all modes.
This (entirely Hallidayan) conception of Social Semiotics takes as given that there is one – complex, rich, fully adequate, dynamic – semioticresource for any onesocial group (society/community). There is no justification for distinct semiotic approaches: there isone semiotic theory and one semiotic resource for all meaning in any one social group. That is, there is no Semiotics of X, or of Y, or of Z.
Gunther Kress,
professor at University College London, Institute of Education, author of Language as Ideology (1979), Social Semiotics (1988), Multimodality, Learning and Communication (2015), Literacy in the New Media Age (2003), Multimodality (2010) and many other works on semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis, communication and identity studies.
professor at University College London, Institute of Education, author of Language as Ideology (1979), Social Semiotics (1988), Multimodality, Learning and Communication (2015), Literacy in the New Media Age (2003), Multimodality (2010) and many other works on semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis, communication and identity studies.
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