Professional writing students must analyze communications in multiple modalities, on page or screen. This project argues that student analysts benefit from using articulated heuristics, summaries of articles, books, or theories in chart form that remain in the visual field with the communication to be analyzed. Keeping the heuristic in view reduces students' cognitive load by narrowing the search for solution to the categories in the heuristic. These heuristics, often one page or one screen, contain key words, phrases, or questions that allow students to approach analysis from experts' points of view at more than one level of complexity. Students locate instantiations of the categories in the communication analyzed, incorporating the category/instantiation pairs into personal schemas for analysis. As students classify communications, relate parts together and to other communications, and perform operations on the content, they see how communication achieves its meaning and formulate appropriate responses. Rather than rely on one all-purpose heuristic, this dissertation presents a range of heuristics reflecting rhetorical, discourse, linguistic, usability, and visual strategies that enable students to critique both form and function in communication. The heuristics reflect a systematically ordered workplace context, articulate an appropriate and specific theory for the situation, interface with other heuristic systems for depth and efficacy, and instantiate the categories at some helpful secondary level of complexity. To theorize the visual nature of the heuristic chart displays, I employ the semiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce, working through the implications of chart construction as I diagram Peirce's theory of diagrammatic iconicity.

Title: The representation of gender: A semiotic study of Tom Ford's Gucci campaign 2003 and Frida Gianninis Gucci Campaign 2013. Number of pages: 73 (79 including enclosures) Author: Sara Andréasson Tutor: Anne-Marie Morhed Course: Media and Communication Studies D (2IV091) Period: VT 2013 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University. Purpose/ Aim: The aim of this study was to examine the representation of gender in advertising that has both men and women as the primary audience. The aim of the study was to investigate how Gucci has chosen to represent men and women in their advertising campaigns 2003 and 2013. Material/ Method: A semiotic analysis was performed by using three images from Gucci's spring/ summer campaign for Tom Ford in 2003, and three images from Gucci's spring/ summer campaign for Frida Giannini in 2013. Main result: The results showed that there was a clear difference between Ford and Gianninis ways of representing women and men in the two advertising campaigns. The women in Fords campaign 2003 are presented as sexual objects and represented by the male pornographic imagination and portrayed as sexual eye-catchers while the men are portrayed as addicted to sex. Frida Gianninis advertising images is a contrast of Ford pornographic portrayal of women. Giannini presents women as confident individuals while the man is represented as feminized and androgynous in his appearance.

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Abstract Affordance and choice: performing music in lower secondary school The purpose of this study is to elucidate affordances and meaning-making processes where students in Compulsory lower secondary education learn to play music together in music class. The data consists of a series of observed music lessons, performances and stimulated recall interviews in two 8th form classes, video recorded in the course of one term. The analysis focuses on students’ and their teacher’s musical interaction and sign making during music class. In order to explore multimodal aspects of sign making in teaching and learning, the study rests on a theoretical framework of social-semiotic multimodality and design theory of learning. Nine students, strategically selected, were observed more frequently than the rest. Excerpts of their singing and playing music on different occasions were transcribed into scores in which musical notation together with other graphic signs and written descriptions represent the events. The scores visualise mul- timodal aspects of musical interaction, which made a 'fine grained' analysis of meaning-making processes possible. Further, an analysis was made of how the students and their teacher expressed themselves about the playing and learning and how this related to their observed actions. The result reveals how the teacher’s physical and verbal communicative sign combinations and choice of repertoire conveyed several layers of mean- ing by means of instructions for playing and by references to different dis- courses and genres. During lessons the principle of recognition was present in all of the teacher's sign making but it might be expressed in different modes including expected actions that surprised, amused and helped students to link different musical parameters together. Through transmodal transla- tions of the teacher’s signs, students, linked short fragments of their parts together, and taking turns with the teacher, made longer musical lines. It was found that students’ activities and utterances indicated that a shared sense of meaning and acceptance took precedence over personal musical wishes and preferences. The study contributes to a close insight and understanding of how young people's meaning-making processes may be manifested in music 'teaching- and-learning' in heterogeneous classes, as well as of the significance of teachers’ sign-making in that process. The results of the study warrant a discussion of how musical learning is made possible and is restricted de- pending on how music teaching in schools is designed. Keywords: music teaching, musical interaction, meaning making, semiotic resources, re-design, transmodality, dialogue / <p>Disputationen äger rum på Kungl. Musikhögskolan i Stockholm men sker i samarbete med Lunds universitet.</p>

E-relevant web text sites (EWT sites) are a relatively new phenomenon featuring banal yet remarkable user-generated texts on dedicated websites. This thesis analyses the sociosemiotic dimension of EWT sites in enabling neo-phatic communication: communication based on the relatable nature of EWT content and user-friendly medium, affording communicative acts without the requirement for in-depth discussion. Rather than fostering serious exchange, neo-phatic communication aims to establish a form of contact less brief than a greeting but akin to its purport, developing from banal but shared experiences. Analysis of the signification process involved in EWT sites, through a sociosemiotic framework based on Peirce’s second trichotomy of signs (icon, index, symbol) and the frame analysis of Goffman, shows that the sites’ semiotic structure belongs to a neo-phatic kind of communication unique to computer-mediated communication. This study illustrates how content with minimal substance might be under-valued as a means of understanding modern communication behaviour.

The purpose of this paper has been to examine various ethnic stereotypes in two Swedish film adaptations of Astrid Lindgren’s character Pippi Longstocking. I have used a semiotic content analysis and postcolonial theory to investigate: 1) how the ethnic groups are represented in the different materials, 2) if there is a hegemonic relationship between the foreign group and one’s own group, 3) whether there has been a "decolonization" during the twenty years that separate the two films. This study has shown that, in the 1949 adaptation, primarily Africans were produced in a negative light and as biologically inferior in relation to the whites. Furthermore, other ethnic groups, such as Indians, Egyptians, Brazilians, and Danes, were portrayed as scared, alien or different. However, the TV series of 1969 permeates with a greater sense of racial tolerance than its predecessor and, despite remnants of racial stereotyping, the overall tone of the later adaptation feels more progressive.

This thesis holds that the application of the archaeological method, developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, to the field of anthropology reveals a hitherto hidden primitive episteme. Such a project represents a rejection of a search for a fundamental Truth, available through the traditional figures of rationality, either vertically in history or horizontally across cultures. The form of reason posited by this project does not have a constant and universal occurrence but is given in the discontinuous figures of the episteme. The quest for a single manifestation of the conditions of validity in reason is replaced by a study of the conditions of possibility of the truths, discourses and institutions of a primitive peoples. The conditions of possibility for the emergence of the elements of primitive knowledge and practices are available through the application of the explanatory unities of the archaeological method. These unities replace the traditional explanatory role of the subject, with all of its psychological baggage, which has a central role in modern theories of rationality. The subject-knowledge link that dominates traditional anthropological analyses is replaced by a powerknowledge link that postulates the two axes of discursive and non-discursive concerns. The discursive axis is concerned with the objects, concepts, statements and discursive formations of primitive knowledge while the non-discursive axis is concerned with the systems of power that propagate and sustain those discourses. These two axes constitute the nature of the archaeology employed in this study. This thesis is sustained by both negative and positive evidence. The negative evidence takes the form of an antisubjectivist thrust where the subject-dependent explanatory unities of the tradition are replaced by the positivistic elements of archaeology. The positive evidence primarily takes the form of a detailed analysis of the presence of the guiding codes of the episteme amongst the Trobriand Islanders that give rise to their primitive knowledge and practices. In this area, I make extensive use of Malinowski's ethnographic observations for their breath of detail and application without employing his subject-dependent psychobiological conclusions. Further, I am proposing a transformative position such that orality becomes a feature of the episteme rather than its condition of possibility. The guiding codes of the Trobriand episteme take the form of enclosed oppositional figures that are everywhere related to space. The Trobriand episteme provides the conditions for the emergence of primitive discourses and orders the experiences of the Trobrianders. The guiding figures of the episteme are based in a form of complementary opposition, causation as vitality and a dogma of topological space that give rise to primitive knowledge which is a form of divination. A significant part of this dissertation is taken up with an examination of the detail and limitation of these figures where ideas from Levy-Bruhl, Hallpike, and others are employed to produce the most appropriate configuration for my project. A particular form of language as the manipulation of real signs, rather than ideational signs, has its possibility in this configuration which has consequences for the type of knowledge produced. The form of knowledge appropriate to the presence of such a model of language is magic. Writing has no possibility for emerging in this episteme and, therefore, there are significant consequences for the type of knowledge that can be maintained and propagated in a context which must utilise static tradition to the detriment of reflection. An archaeological analysis of the Trobriand Islanders, focusing on discourses on sex and marriage, the nature of tabooed sexual acts, economic relations arising out of marriage and the role of the polygamous chief, the nature of love-magic and magic in general, reveals a shared possibility for all of these discursive realms in the figures of the episteme. These discourses are regulated by the presence of a fundamental opposition between a brother and his sister. This opposition forms the motif for primitive problematizations and constitutes a vulnerable boundary which is the appropriate focus of taboos relating to sex and food, amongst others. This primitive episteme characterises the unity of the experiences of the Trobrianders. This experience is discontinuous with our own and does not involve a role for the individual ego. This project represents a worthwhile contribution to an understanding of human experience and knowledge in general which does not seek to reduce the natural diversity of man to just the monotonous experience of modern man. In conclusion, I tentatively speculate about the appropriateness of the Trobriand figures for primitive experience in general.

Alternate reality games (ARG) are a relatively new type of game that distributes game content across several media without explicitly identifying that content as part of a game. While players benefit from this aesthetically immersive experience the type of game has the potential to cause confusion over the status of its dispersed content as real or as part of a game. This thesis offers a case study of the 2012 game. The case is contextualized within the disciplines of media studies and games studies, in a wider digital culture where the ubiquity of technology converges to user experience design. A theoretical framework based on Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic, supplemented by Erving Goffman’s frame analysis and James J. Liszka’s transvaluation theory is used to explain the ARG’s problematic relation to the experience of reality.

L’ambition de François Rastier est d’unifier le mot, la phrase et le texte au sein d’une sémantique interprétative coordonnée en paliers textuels micro, méso et macrosémantiques. L’œuvre en tant que totalité signifiante se définit par la somme de ses parties, et le titre par la somme de ses traits (morphèmes, lexies, sémèmes, etc.). Pour cette thèse que nous présentons sur les interactions sémantiques entre titres et œuvres, il s’agit de rechercher la production, la dissémination, la propagation / distribution des traits sémantiques et tensifs impliqués par le titre. La nécessité étant de comprendre du point de vue textuel le sens des sémèmes. Nous exploitons donc la sémantique interprétative de François Rastier et la sémiotique tensive de Claude Zilberberg comme cadres théoriques en analysant le titre d’un texte comme une condensation ou groupement structuré de sèmes. Notre hypothèse de travail étant que le titre est un interprétant pour l’œuvre. L’interprétant, ce sont des données (savoirs) sémiotiques qui permettent de construire une interprétation. Le titre permet d’actualiser, de virtualiser ou de changer le degré de saillance de l’œuvre. On se demande en problématique comment les sèmes d’un titre sont générés dans les unités de complexité comme le corpus ? Quels sèmes des titres sont inhérents / afférents, actualisés / virtualisés, spécifiques / génériques et quels sont les degrés de systématicité (idiolectal, relations réflexives, transitives et semi-symboliques) qui les structurent ? / The ambition of Francis Rastier is to unify word, sentence and text into an interpretive semantics structured in micro, meso and macro semantic levels. A literary work is defined as a totality of meaning, and its title as lots of features (morphemes, lexical and semantic features). In this thesis on semantic interactions between title and literary work, the aim is to study the production, the dissemination, spread /distribution of semantic and tensive features involved by the title. To understand the meaning of semantic features in a textual point of view, we choose Zilberberg theorical frames. The title is considered as a condensation of a structured organization of semantic features. We work on the hypothesis that the title is one of the interpretants of a literary work. Those interpretants give semiotic information on interpretation. The title allows actualize, virtualize and change the saliency level. The question is how semes of the title are generated as units in a complex and holistic corpus? Which semes of the title are inherent/afferent, actualized/virtualized, specific/generic and what are their systematic structuring levels (idiolectal, reflexive or transitive relations, semi-symbolism)?

Previous literature discussing Japanese women's language (JWL) has shown that it is an ideal more than an existing genderlect (Inoue 2006; Nakamura 2007). As a social construct, it has been rendered a powerful truth through institutionalized practices and representations as well as individual negotiations. JWL, a cultural knowledge about how women speak, has been dynamically constructed in certain spatio-temporal intersections (Inoue 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2006; Washi 2004). Mass media have served as one of the influential sites of production and reproduction of the discourses that naturalize indexical orders of JWL of the given temporality. The purpose of this study was to reveal how modern female speakers of Japanese negotiate the presented media discourses and contribute to recontextualization of JWL discourses through metapragmatic narratives. Three participants were asked to analyze the speech styles of two female characters from a TV drama in terms of linguistic femininity, and to discuss what it means to speak feminine to them. The participants' written scene analysis data, individual interviews, and the focus group discussion were triangulated in order to effectively uncover and denaturalize the intertwined discourses of feminine speech and JWL. The participants' metapragmatic narratives were examined based on the principles of the discourse centered approach (Sherzer 1987), shedding light on their dynamic articulations of JWL discourses. The participants' scene analyses in terms of femininity and generalization of what consists of femininity showed both interpersonal and intrapersonal similarities and differences. Simultaneously, the participants' metadiscursive narratives revealed some contradictory discourses around JWL: discourse of JWL in the contemporary Japanese society and discourse of JWL as cultural heritage. In the articulation of these discourses, the imagined continuity of JWL is romanticized as a cultural heritage, so the semiotic value of JWL is that of an icon of an ideal woman. However, the participants also acknowledged the structural transformation of Japanese society and the higher socioeconomic status of modern women, which naturalizes the masculinization of women's speech to keep up with men. These two contrastive discourses make JWL a vicarious language, through which the participants appreciate the continuity of JWL in the future.