Magister Artium - MA / This study demonstrates how advertisers re-voice and re-perform others' gestures and actions (Prior and Hengst, 2010). The focus is on the mobility of semiosis across boundaries and practices. It uses Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001, 2006) Semiotic Remediation/Resemiotization (Iedema, 2003, 2010; Prior and Hengst, 2010) as the theoretical/analytical framework. The idea is to explore how semiotic elements are remediated through intertextual references and multimodality and how semiotic remediation is employed in the process of re-creation and re-purposing of objects and messages in the selected television advertisements. Drawing on MTN, Vodacom, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Nando's television advertisements, the study shows how popular, historical, cultural and political discourse is reproduced and re-lived as a creative idea in the selected television advertisements in the process of re-branding. In this regard, resemiotization or semiotic remediation is seen as social practice and an integral part of the marketing strategy in the South African television advertising industry. Upon examination, the study establishes that some selected television advertisements have been extensively re-worked and re-purposed. Therefore, resemiotization and/or semiotic remediation are found to be resourceful tools for the marketing discourse. Thus, the study found that South African advertising discourse depends primarily on societal discourses such as politics, history, cultural traditions and popular culture as its base for creativity. In terms of language use in South African advertising, the study has revealed that television advertisements are moving towards a localised language practice and/or localised English.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In this thesis I investigate the reconstruction of the life history of Sandra Laing and the recreation of the apartheid context by analyzing two artefacts. These main artefact for investigation is the movie Skin, by Anthony Fabian which is based on the book "When She Was White: A Family Divided By Race" by Judith Stone, which is the second artefact for investigation. The latter artefact is based on the life of Sandra Laing. Sandra Laing was born to white parents in the apartheid era, but she did not ascribe to the physical description of a person who was classified 'white' in accordance with legal and social framing thereof in apartheid South Africa. This posed many legal, social and political difficulties for her family. I was particularly interested in the composition of information sources and how semiotic resources are re-enacted, reused and repurposed in the movie ‘Skin.’ The study is more theoretical than applied in that it seeks to answer the question posed by Prior and Grusin (2010: 1): "How do we understand semiotics/multimodality theoretically and investigate it methodologically?" In the study I develop Prior and Grusin’s (2010) thesis by working with notion of semiotic remediation as a focus on semioticity helps me to focus on the signs across modes, media, channels and genres. Therefore, the book on Sandra Laing and the movie are used as databases from which to extract semiotic resources in the exploration and extension of multimodality theory through multisemiotic analysis using semiotic remediation as 'repurposing' in particular. In the process, the notion of semiotic remediation becomes the tool for extending theory of multimodality, by demonstrating the repurposing of semiotic material from the book, such as apartheid artefacts, racialised discourses, dressing, racialised bodies and bible verses, for example, into the recreation of apartheid in the movie 'Skin.' I employed a multisemiotic discourse analysis to analyse the data, which is multimodal, and because I was interested in the complexity of the meaning making process involving multiple modes of representation. This framework was useful in analyzing the complex interaction between the various modes for meaning making. I used resemiotisation and remediation as conceptual tools to trace the translation of events across artefacts and how the material and generic traces are reframed and repurposed within its new contexts for new meanings in the movie 'Skin'. This study makes important contributions to research on the race debate in South Africa in particular. Although apartheid laws have been repealed and new democratic order is in place, the issue of race has flared in the media and South African society generally. The recurrent debates on lack of transformation in former whites only universities, the #FeeMustFall Movement and recent debates in parliament about revisiting the land redistribution issue all have racial undertones – the continued disempowerment of the non-white South Africans. The focus on the recapturing of the complexities surrounding the race debates and the implications of the racialised society, particularly how they are conceptualized and rematerialized within the semiotic limitations of book and a film contributes to a novel understanding of the making and lifestyles of inequality in apartheid South Africa. From a theoretical and analytical perspective, the study feeds on and extends the notion of multimodality to multisemioticity using the extension, semiotic remediation, not in the ordinary sense of mediating a new, but on the notion of the reframing and particularly repurposing of a particular social, political, cultural and historical semiotic material in new contexts in the recreated new worlds in the film and book. In this regard, the study provides interesting insights into the remediated reconstructions of race and racial inequalities, and the remodeling of artefacts and semiosis that are used in this reformation of the apartheid material cultures and contexts. In analysing the remaking of the apartheid culture in the film and the book, I theorefore make a unique contribution in identifying the semiotic materials that are indicative of the flawed nature of biological arguments for racial classification and race-based social structuring. I discuss the implications of this by analysing the remediation of the body as a racial scape, and the apartheid material culture as providing the semiotic landscape on which meanings are produced and consumed. The study thus contributes to research on recent developments in multimodality through its extension of semiotic remediation, which is designed to uncover the intricate interaction between semiotic resources in various media as well as their translation and repurposing across artefacts. In this regard, the study adds to extending the theoretical framing of multimodality thus: resemiotization accounts for the circulations of texts from mode to mode or one context to another, while semiotic remediation accounts for the repurposing of semiotic resources for different purposes and for their multiple meaning potentials. / National Research Foundation

Magister Artium - MA (Linguistics, Language and Communication) / Fairy tales have been changing continuously. From the likes of the Greek and Chinese versions of the Cinderella tale, Cinderella has been transformed into other versions. Charles Perrault and The Brothers Grimm had their way with the story of Cinderella with both parties putting their own mark on the tale. Disney made the story notorious as the consumers mostly tend to remember Disney's version and not earlier writers of the story (Zipes, 1999). Since then, various other versions in the current sphere of story-telling, especially through movie-making, have had a series of re-telling of the story. James Finn Garner's "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories" has made its mark in the world of politically correct, versions of fairy tales. He has graced readers with his satire and thereby challenged the more traditional versions of the story of Cinderella (and others) by posing a dry, humorous twist and facing the 'issues' which underlie the social problems in Cinderella such as equality, sexism and patriarchal, inappropriate gender biased terminology. Garner takes it upon himself to remediate the story of Cinderella through transformations of events and socially structured power relations, reworking the plot and characters and reformulation of gender-biased terminology. This results in a witty politically correct remodelling of the story which upholds a general moral in line with the contemporary socio-political ethos, championing usage of politically correct language.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study explores how HIV and AIDS discourse is differently constituted and evaluated across different modes by different communities of speakers in Malawi. Particularly, the study explores how different languages and other social semiotics are used as resources across the different modes. Among other things, it further investigates the implications of the unequal social distribution of modes of communication and semiotic resources in Malawi (eastern region in particular) for the fight against HIV and AIDS. The study employed the Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) approach, the notions of Resemiotisation (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, Norris 2004, Martin and Rose 2004) and semiotic remediation (Prior and Hengst 2010) in analysing the data. This approach is necessary as the study focuses on HIV and AIDS communication which is essentially multimodal in nature. The study used both quantitative and qualitative methodologies involving questionnaires, interviews, focus group discussions, document analysis and observation of television programs, traditional dances and other modes such as music videos. The study found that different practices have been semiotically remediated and reformulated for health palatability. As a result, taboos have been de-tabooed and technical terms have been ‗untechnicalised‘ so that even ordinary people are able to use health technical terms. The study also shows how cultural practices (such as having ‗live‘ sexual contact with the widow) have been semiotically remediated with the usage of condoms or herbs for cleansing rituals. The study further finds that literacy is not a major challenge for the consumption of HIV and AIDS messages. However the study also shows that wrongly presented messages such as textual overcrowding, usage of proverbs and depiction of western culture in HIV and AIDS messages obscure consumption. In addition the study reveals that proverbs can hardly iv be understood by all consumers and in turn led to division between mostly the older generation and rural who understand and the younger and urban people who have difficulty comprehending the proverbs. Lastly the study finds that some modes of communication did not prove effective, for instance, SMS, television and radio as these do not benefit all consumers as they are socioeconomically determined.

This research is in the area of lexicography and investigates the relationship between Shona terminology development and the culture of the language community for which the terminology is intended. It is a contextual analysis of compound nouns found in Shona terminological dictionaries. The study specifically explores how lexicographers together with health, music, language and literature specialists make use of their knowledge about Shona cultural contexts in the creation of compound nouns. Thus, this research foregrounds Shona socio-cultural contexts and meaning generation in terminology development. This study employs a quadruple conceptual framework. The four components of the framework that are utilised are the Traditional Descriptive Approach (TDA), Cognitive Approach (CG), Systemic Functional Approach (SFL), and Semiotic Remediation (SRM). TDA is used in the linguistic categorisation of Shona compound nouns. In addition, it provides the metalanguage with which to describe the constituent parts of Shona compound nouns. As TDA is mainly confined to the linguistic dimension, this research employs CG, SFL, and SRM to explore the cultural and socio-cognitive dimensions of terminology development.

This research is in the area of lexicography and investigates the relationship between Shona terminology development and the culture of the language community for which the terminology is intended. It is a contextual analysis of compound nouns found in Shona terminological dictionaries. The study specifically explores how lexicographers together with health, music, language and literature specialists make use of their knowledge about Shona cultural contexts in the creation of compound nouns. Thus, this research foregrounds Shona socio-cultural contexts and meaning generation in terminology development. This study employs a quadruple conceptual framework. The four components of the framework that are utilised are the Traditional Descriptive Approach (TDA), Cognitive Approach (CG), Systemic Functional Approach (SFL), and Semiotic Remediation (SRM). TDA is used in the linguistic categorisation of Shona compound nouns. In addition, it provides the metalanguage with which to describe the constituent parts of Shona compound nouns. As TDA is mainly confined to the linguistic dimension, this research employs CG, SFL, and SRM to explore the cultural and socio-cognitive dimensions of terminology development.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This research is in the area of lexicography and investigates the relationship between Shona terminology development and the culture of the language community for which the terminology is intended. It is a contextual analysis of compound nouns found in Shona terminological dictionaries. The study specifically explores how lexicographers together with health, music, language and literature specialists make use of their knowledge about Shona cultural contexts in the creation of compound nouns. Thus, this research foregrounds Shona socio-cultural contexts and meaning generation in terminology development. This study employs a quadruple conceptual framework. The four components of the framework that are utilised are the Traditional Descriptive Approach (TDA), Cognitive Approach (CG), Systemic Functional Approach (SFL), and Semiotic Remediation (SRM). TDA is used in the linguistic categorisation of Shona compound nouns. In addition, it provides the metalanguage with which to describe the constituent parts of Shona compound nouns. As TDA is mainly confined to the linguistic dimension, this research employs CG, SFL, and SRM to explore the cultural and socio-cognitive dimensions of terminology development. / South Africa