d (i) Toolkits: Essential
Anchorage: directing receivers towards one particular meaning from a range of
possible meanings. A caption can anchor the meaning of a photograph.
Barrier: anything which interferes with the processes of communication.
Channel: a communication route or connection.
Connotation: the meanings in a text that are revealed through the receiver’s own personal and cultural experience.
Convention: a rule of artistic practice.
Decode: to convert an encoded message into a form that can be understood.
Denotation: the specific, direct or obvious meaning of a sign rather than its associated meanings: those things directly referenced by a sign.
Encode: to convert a message into a means capable of being transmitted.
Form and Content: these describe the essential relationship between the ‘shape’ of a text (how it’s been made) and ‘what’s in it/what it’s about’.
Function: what a text, group of texts, or indeed communication itself, ‘does’ (inform, persuade, entertain, socialise etc).
Gatekeeper: someone who controls the selection of information to be offered to a given channel. Thus, for example, newspaper editors are significant gatekeepers, but we are all gatekeepers in an interpersonal sense, deciding as we do what we communicate and what we omit or hold back.
Genre: this term describes the subdivisions of the output of a given medium (e.g. television, film, magazine publishing). A genre is a type, a particular version of a communication medium. For example, soap opera is a television genre, for it represents a particular approach to theme, style and form.
Icon: a sign that works by its similarity to the thing it represents.
Index: a type of sign (in C.S. Peirce’s categorisation) that has a direct or causal relationship with its signified. The sign points (like an index finger) to its signified. Smoke is an index of fire.
Medium (and media): the method(s) we use to communicate.
Message: the meaning carried by an act of communication or text.
Model: a graphic or verbal representation of communication processes or aspects of them: a diagrammatic representation of a communication issue.
Noise source: the origin of any barrier to communication.
Open and closed texts: Eco talked about two tendencies of texts: the tendency to be ‘open’ and allow/invite/encourage a wide range of different interpretations: the opposite tendency presents ‘closed’ text which can only be read in a limited number of ways, sometimes only one way.
Process School: a school of thought in which communication is conceived as a process whereby information is transmitted.
Reader: the active interpreter of a message.
Reading: Hall et al. conceive of three distinct ‘varieties’: a) Dominant-hegemonic: the ‘intended’ meaning or ‘preferred’ reading b) Negotiated: an interpretation of a text that identifies the dominant reading but also seeks to mediate this c) Oppositional: any reading that rejects or significantly ‘quarrels’ with the dominant reading and/or presents different/contrary meanings.
Receiver: someone to whom a message is directed.
Register: a form of linguistic performance which is responsive to the situation in which communication is taking place.
Semiotics: the study of signs and how they communicate.
Sender: the originator of communication.
Sign: That which stands for or represents an object, idea or mental concept.
Symbol: an arbitrary sign that works by the agreement among people as to what it represents.
Text: this term is used to refer to anything which can be 'read' for meaning. In this sense, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a bowler hat, a television advertisement and Buckingham Palace are all texts.
d (ii) Toolkits: Useful
Aberrant decoding: ‘reading’ a text in any way other than as it is intended, usually because the receiver does not share a knowledge and understanding of the code or codes used by the sender.
Discourse: a system of representation based on the reality of communication in specific contexts (practice rather than theory). .
Entropy: a communication that is high on new information and that is highly unpredictable is said to be entropic.
Hegemony: the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci explained why the majority of people in a culture do not adopt the values and beliefs of their own class. He argued that the dominant minority within cultures present the values and beliefs of their own class as somehow ‘natural’ and thus universal. In this way people end up promoting the values and beliefs of the dominant or ruling class rather than of their own class.
Ideology: a system of representation which reveals (and conceals) social values and the values of those who have most influence in society.
Intention (purpose): what the sender wants an act of communication to ‘do’.
Mode of address: this term describes the way in which a text ‘speaks’ to its audience. The text incorporates assumptions about its audience. If you can answer the question ‘Who does this text think I am?’ you are on the way to identifying its mode of address.
Motivation: in addition to the everyday meaning of ‘a force that drives us’, motivation is a term used in semiotics to refer to the relationship between the physical form of a sign and the thing or idea it represents. A photograph of a cat is a highly motivated (or iconic sign) whilst the word ‘cat’ has low motivation (it is an arbitrary sign).
Myth: ‘a culture’s way of conceptualising an abstract topic’: a collection of concepts bound together by general acceptance and significant in our understanding of particular kinds of experience: a collective connotation.
Narrative: the way in which a text reveals information to the audience in order to create a ‘story’.
Paradigm: a set of signs from which one might be chosen to contribute to a syntagm. Paradigms define their individual members with reference to all others in the set. To select from a paradigm is at that moment to reject all other signs in that set, just as by selecting something (or nothing) to cover your feet today, you have rejected all other possibilities; this choice from a paradigm of ‘foot coverings’ has contributed to the syntagms which constitute the things you are wearing today. When Peugeot’s ‘lion’ went ‘from strength to strength’, it got its strength partly from the paradigm of ‘elite animals’ from which it was chosen and partly because that paradigm does not include ‘weasel’, ‘frog’ and ‘sloth’.
Polysemy/Polysemic: refers to the capacity of a text or part of a text to be read in several different ways. For example, a red rose might communicate love, a fondness for horticulture, a political allegiance or Lancashire.
Redundancy: a communication that is low on new information and which is highly predictable is said to be redundant.
Relay: Barthes used the term relay to describe text/image relationships which were 'complementary'.
Signifier/signified: according to Saussure, the basic unit of communication is the sign. The sign is composed of two elements – the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the physical form of the sign; for example, a written or spoken word or a photograph. The signified is the mental concept triggered by the signifier. When you see the signifier HORSE you think of a horse (the signified). Of course, neither one of these is a real horse. The first is a carefully designed but miniscule quantity of ink on the page; the second is an abstract idea. The signifier and the signified unite to form the sign, but the relationship between the two elements is an arbitrary one, that is, there is no logical or necessary relationship between them. That’s why it’s possible to change which signifier relates to which signified; there are no absolute rules connecting the signifier and the signified. If you had no knowledge of English or you could not read, then the signifier HORSE would not attach itself to a signified in your mind. If you speak French, you will recognise the signifier CHEVAL.
Signification: what signs do: the process of signifying.
Syntagm: a chain of signs, a unique combination of sign choices. Units may be visual, verbal or musical. The scale of the units and syntagms may range from the very large (the nine planned episodes of the Star Wars triple trilogy might constitute a syntagm) to the very small (as in the syntagm ‘I like noodles’ which consists of the signs ‘I’, ‘like’ and ‘noodles’). The important point is that syntagms invite negotiation as a whole; they are bigger units of potential meaning. The signs which comprise a syntagm are organised in accordance with the ‘rules’ or conventions of the relevant code.
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