book review: chapter 1

semiotic landscape: review and discussion

Ironically, the examples provided in this chapter have helped me to better understand what the authors are saying. Much like the authors speak of children and their ability associate with visual grammar, I too found that I relied upon the aid of the visual and verbal representations (in the form of examples) to grasp the author's point of view, with out it, I'd be lost.

The authors indicates a disagreement with Roland Barthes argument that images and there meanings (and other semiotic codes like dress, food, etc.) is always related to and, in a sense dependent on, verbal text. Images by themselves are too ‘polysemous’ and too open to a variety of meanings. Language must come to the rescue. Also interesting, the authors credit the book’s existence to the the achievements of linguist yet do not see their approach as a linguistic one

An interesting and in-depth comparison is made of two children's books (Bruna and Ladybird) that demonstrate "semiotic shifts". The shift stems from 'un-coded' naturalistic representation (image of a bathtub accompanied by text) to stylized, conceptual images (bird in a tree) and prompts the below question:

Questions:
1) Does anybody in the class agree with Barthes argument?

2) Is the move from verbal to visual a loss or gain and what would be an example of each?

3) The book expresses a concern about the "new semiotic order" and addresses the concern of how we handle it and ultimately poses the question, How will the introduction of new mediums affect the shape and context of our preexisting semiotic landscape?