Demystifying semiotics: some key questions answered

Rachel Lawes

The paper explores the nature, language, methods and applications of semiotics. It is necessary to understand, for example, a piece of advertising in terms of its visual signs, linguistic signs, aural signs, the implied communication situation, structure, genre, etc.
  

Demystifying Semiotics: Some Key Questions Answered

Rachel Lawes

Winner of the Chairman's award, MRS Conference, 2002

Introduction

This paper is entitled 'demystifying semiotics', so let me begin by talking briefly about why semiotics needs demystifying and explaining why I would want to try to do that.

On the one hand, semiotics seems to be everywhere one looks. It has been around for a long time, it gets at least a cursory mention in the standard textbooks on researching consumer behaviour and there probably isn't a single market research supplier or client who doesn't know of its existence. On...

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