Social Semiotics for a Complex World : Analysing Language and Social Meaning /
Bob Hodge.
- 1 online resource (258 pages)
PART I Principles and Practices -- 1 Key Concepts -- Key terms -- Multidimensionality -- Complexity -- 2 Some Notes on Method -- The semiotic imagination -- Reframing linguistics -- Anomaly -- Big research -- PART II From Linguistics to Semiotics -- 3 Words -- Words as complex signs -- Words and meanings -- Below the word -- Analytic tools -- Beyond reason -- 4 Grammar -- Grammar and origins -- The Chomskyan paradigm -- The scope of grammar -- Transformations -- Grammar and cultural analysis -- The meaning of grammar -- 5 Reading and Meaning -- Reading as theory and practice -- Paradigmatic structures and reading meaning -- Social complexity, complex meanings -- Meaning in crisis -- PART III Meaning and Society -- 6 The Semiotics of Reality -- Reality as problem and solution -- Linguistic models and semiotic research -- Uses of unreality -- 7 Ideology and Social Meaning -- Ideology -- Models and processes -- Understanding multiculturalism -- Far-from-equilibrium conditions -- 8 Multiscalar Analysis -- Analysing scale -- Big meanings -- Models and contexts as meaning -- Power and solidarity -- 9 Conclusions -- Revolutions -- Grammar, biology and the scope of semiotics -- Social semiotics in a complexity framework -- References -- Index -- End User License Agreement.
Social semiotics reveals languages social meaning � its structures, processes, conditions and effects � in all social contexts, across all media and modes of discourse. This important new book uses social semiotics as a one-stop shop to analyse language and social meaning, enhancing linguistics with a sociological imagination. Social Semiotics for a Complex World develops ideas, frameworks and strategies for better understanding key problems and issues involving language and social action in todays hyper-complex world driven by globalization and new media. Its semiotic basis incorporates insights from various schools of linguistics (such as cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistics) as well as from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and literary studies. It employs a multi-modal perspective to follow meaning across all modes of language and media, and a multi-scalar approach that ranges between databases and one-word slogans, the local and global, with examples from English, Chinese and Spanish. Social semiotics analyses twists and turns of meanings big and small in complex contexts. This book uses semiotic principles to build a powerful, flexible analytic toolkit which will be invaluable for students across the humanities and social sciences.