The joke within the text, " SAVE A TREE, EAT BEAVER" involves an absence, the absence being the meaning. The joke itself, and the referential system it uses to humour etc., implies what is missing, the meaning.

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Leigh-Anne Galloway          Student no. 10357626

  1. Choose an advert/short film/video clip and analyse how it conveys meaning. Apply semiotic codes and place the image in their chosen contexts describing how the production of meaning is facilitated.

Newcastle Brown Beer

Initially I will analytically identify the signs within the text, as well as the codes within these signs, which have meaning, for example social or textual codes. Paradigm sets within these codes will have to be identified, structural relationships between the various signifiers, or syntagms, discuss the ideological ideas of he signs in the text, and of the text as a whole. I conclusion I will examine how successful the techniques employed have been.

Semiology

Semiotics began to become a major approach to cultural studies in the late 1960s, partly as a result of the work of Roland Barthes. The translation into English of his popular essays in a collection entitled Mythologies (Barthes 1957), followed in the 1970s and 1980s by many of his other writings, greatly increased awareness of this approach. Semiotics is not widely institutionalized as an academic discipline. It is a field of study involving many different theoretical stances and methodological tools. Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as 'signs' in everyday speech, but also of anything, which 'stands for' something else.

Analysis

The piece was found in “Loaded”, a typical male magazine. The context is predominantly masculinity, the qualities conventionally associated with the specimen of manhood, physical strength, courage, competition, physique etc. The given piece of discourse exemplifies several genres at once. There is ‘joke’, discourse, and ‘magazine’ represented at once, none are mutually exclusive. But it also is the promotion of the product for sale through impersonal media. The ad is not limited to its definition by what its sells, but it is also amusing and misinforming.

I chose the advert because possibly its purposes reflect my values, through humour and group or identity association, I felt I could buy into the product as I felt individualised as a consumer. A technique often associated with adverts where they force individualism on the consumer, but you are not in fact free to individualise, for example here, your humour.

Join now!

Firstly I shall discuss the sign vehicles with the advert. The sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified (Saussure: 1983, 67)

  • Signifier- the word SAVE
  • Signified concept- that you the consumer are saving a tree, which can easily extended and associated with saving many trees, saving the environment. ‘Doing your bit’ for the global catastrophe that is the destruction of the environment.
  • Signifier- the words A TREE, or the literal sense of a physical tree.
  • Signified concept- that you are saving a tree.
  • Signifier- the word EAT, or the ...

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