What is ‘legitimacy’? Is legitimation possible through non-linguistic modes? These are the key theoretical questions with which this study is concerned. It explores them in conjunction with an analysis of American political spot advertisements. These ads are situated at the nexus between legitimation and multimodality, and their relevance to contemporary politics on the world stage is reflected in the immense financial and skilled resources which have been — and continue to be — devoted to them. A historical perspective into legitimation, multimodality and the attendant concepts of rationality and irrationality is given, followed by a discussion challenging the assumed rational role accorded to language. So challenged, the discussion moves to looking at the pairing of multimodality and politics; first from a historical viewpoint, and then from a more contemporary one. The role of myth, in the form of the American Dream, is investigated, leading to discussion of political appropriation, branding, tangibility, affordances and the (im)possibility of restricting interpretation. Spot ads are analysed with a specific focus: first on modal salience, and secondly on how the semiotic richness of the concept of nature is exploited for purposes of legitimation.

Semiotics and the concept of signs can be used to analyse the signs that can be found in a Swedish primary school in order to understand and expand our understanding of the role of signifiers, including cultural ones, in child education. The study identifies what signs can be found, what purpose they have and what category of sign they belong to, whether they are signs as defined by Saussure, how they might be categorized within Peirce‘s triadic typology and, applying Barthes’ notion of cultural signification, the extent to which they contribute to maintaining and promoting a school’s identity and values. In order to analyse the signs, a Swedish public primary school located in Halmstad was visited and the visible signs were photographed and catalogued. In order to confirm the intentions behind the design and meaning of signs, an interview with a senior teacher was arranged. The result, and signs, that were documented and described; these included drawings, emergency escape signs, posters, diplomas and other instructions with picture or sign language representations. The signs were categorized and analysed using semiotic theories of signs suggested by Saussure, Peirce and Barthes. The study facilitates a clearer understanding of the range of functions of signs in schools, both for practical purposes and as signifiers of culture and identity, and also highlights the possible applications and limitations of using semiotic theories in investigating generated meanings in physical locations.

The main purpose of this quantitative and qualitative study A study in crime: about sexuality, ethnicity and mental illness has been to reveal the relation between how the evening newspaper Aftonbladet and the Internet forum Flashback forum represent two men who has been convicted for the murder of two underaged girls. Hence more than one sixth of the swedish population has a lot of confidence in this newspaper it has been important to see how mental illness, sexuality, masculinity and ethnicity is produced and therefore reproduced through its descriptions of these men. The central theories which have been used to visualize the representation of masculinity, sexuality, ethnicity and mental illness is R.W. Conell´s theory of hegemonic masculinity, Judith Butler´s hetereosexual matrix, semiotics, media commodification and framing. In addition, previous studies in the media reporting of the convicted rapist ”Hagamannen” and the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik as well as theory of the ideal vicitim and therefore the ideal perpretator has been relevant. The material consists of a number of articles about the resolution of the homicide of Lisa Holm in 2015 and Helén Nilsson in 2004 in which Nerijus Bilevicus and Ulf Olsson were condemned. Furthermore, comments on Flashback forum where the abovementioned cases have been discussed were analyzed. Denotation and connotation, the heterosexual matrix and the pressethical rules applied as methodological tools. In the current media landscape of 2016 newpapers´ foremost competitors of the readers’ attention are the complimentary websites and Internet forums. The comparison indicated that the users of Flashback forum discussed similar subjects as Aftonbladet regarding the previous mentioned attributes. Also, we identified that the journal more frequentely violated the pressethical rules in the describtions of the perpetrator who suffered from mental illness and was both bisexual, transsexual and also a pedofile. However, the ethnicity of the second perpetrator appeared early in the reporting of the homicide. The results of the study have shown that the mechanisms of the commodification of media were more substantial in 2004/2005, concerning the descriptions of the perpetrator. The journal in 2015/2016 does not seem to have delievered such information to satisfy the crowd in comparison to the comments on Flashback forum. This is in contrary to the admitted opinion by media scholars.

With a statistical rise in visible, audible and cultural minorities in Canada, the importance of recognizing the relationship between immigrants, culture and identity as constructed in collective discourse becomes paramount. Through hermeneutic and sociocritical paradigms, this research applies a constructionist approach to qualitatively analyze representations of cultural identities in Canadian and Quebec films projecting intergenerational conflicts within immigrant families. From these analyses, five tendencies were elicited: guilt, displacement, in-betweenness, reflections on Canadian society, and heterogeneous perspectives. While deconstructing cultural identity portrayals remains crucial, it is equally important to study these systems of meaning within production. The research is extended through the appendaged short film,Tracing Shadows, a glimpse into the voices of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada. Both textual analyses and the filmic creation demonstrate the symbiotic connection between society and culture, nurtured within collective identity narratives’ depictions of time and space.

Piñata: A Dark Comedy is a dark comedy written to explore what an audience is willing to laugh at and what remains when the laughter has finished. Set in a tavern, Piñata showcases the comedic on goings of a few young adults. Stephen enacts an extensive scheme to show Marcy that her boyfriend is no good for her. Stephen’s friend Wick attempts to cope with haunting trauma as his sister, Lily, does what she can to get Stephen’s attention. The characters navigate each others desires and needs through witty banter and outrageous stories. These comedic antics build in intensity until the play reaches a shocking climax. This moment thrusts the audience into a state of discomfort. The play is prefaced with a critical chapter that explores the way in which the play deals with its audience and how the play utilizes audience laughter. / February 2016

In evaluating the Middle Ages on film, this thesis combines two different critical approaches, drawn from historiography on one side and semiotics on the other. In the first chapter, I argue that historiographic criticism has largely undermined our belief in a monolithic, objective History, and that modern historical enquiry contains a tacit admission of its own subjectivity. In Chapter Two, I use these admissions to argue the case for history on film, demonstrating that in terms of the construction of history, the processes of filmmaking closely resemble those of ‘doing’ history, and that criticisms of historical films are often the same criticisms which Historians raise in respect of their own works of ‘pure history’. In the remaining chapters (3-6), I look at specific examples of types of historical character, drawn from the medieval separation of society into “those who work, those who fight and those who pray”, as well as “those who rule”. In each case, I adopt a similar methodological approach, conducting close cinematographic analysis on a range of film extracts in order to see how filmmakers have tried to construct the past visually in their representation of historical characters. Here my arguments move away from historical criticism to focus instead on aesthetics and cinematography. The overall theory is that there exist two fundamental approaches to the medieval past in film: the first iconic and syntagmatic, the second paradigmatic. Iconic approaches, I argue, work to try to recreate the lost medieval referent by using aesthetic ‘signifiers’ in order to communicate their significance to a medieval audience. The paradigm, on the other hand, works in the opposite way; in order to explain a medieval object, the filmmaker casts about for modern equivalents to use as metaphors. Where the icon recreates the object to communicate the concept, the paradigm communicates the object by re-presenting the concept.

This paper compares seemingly similar words from a variety of acting teachers, and shows how it is impossible to draw clear comparisons between words that are often used as synonyms. The paper is a reflection of the journey from believing in translation to recognizing its impossibility. In Chapter 1 we focus on one of the most common elements in actor training, Attention/focus/concentration, and analyze the shades of meaning in those words and the difficulty of talking about them in isolation. In Chapter 2 we look at the way in which semiotic analysis can explain the words resistance to equivalence. In Chapter 3 we look at one of the central terms in most collegiate actor training objective, and see how it reveals both the problems inherent in translation. In Chapter 4 we look at how this knowledge can influence the classroom in a positive way.

Dans une étude critique, s'appuyant sur l'analyse aristotélicienne du langage (Aristote, 2000a; Benveniste, 1966), sur l'émergence historique de ce que (Crosby, 1997) appelle la mentalité pentamétrique de la société moderne, sur l'exposé anthropologique de (Jorion, 2009) de l'invention par l'Occident des concepts de Vérité et de Réalité (objective), et, s’inspirant, sur un plan plus limité, des incursions dans la pensée chinoise du philosophe helléniste Jullien (Jullien, 1995, 2009), il est démontré que les nombres, l'espace et le temps sont des constructions sociales sémiotiques ; et exposé que les méthodes philologiques, en révélant les fossés sémiotiques (Cruse, 2004; Lyon, 1995), apportent un éclairage absent des études multiculturelles traditionnelles (Hofstede, 1983; Maison, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, et Gupta, 2006). De là, sont mis en avant les bien-fondé de (a) l'exercice du doute de soi, de l'ouverture d'esprit, et de la capacité de désapprendre dans les contextes interculturels et interdisciplinaires, et de (b) la prise de conscience des fossés sémiotiques entre cultures et entre disciplines et leur impact sur la cognition des individus, des équipes, des groupes et des organisations. Ancré épistémologiquement dans la réfutabilité poppérienne (Popper, 2002) et le paradigme kuhnien du progrès scientifique (Kuhn, 1996), partant du traité sociologique sur la confiance sociétale en les nombres (Porter, 1995), l’auteur se joint au débat sur la nature des sciences sociales. Ces constats empiriques éclairent l’activité de modélisation dans les sciences sociales. Exposant que la qualité de construction sociale des mathématiques (Berger & Luckmann, 1966b; Jorion, 2009) est en pratique ignorée à la fois par les chercheurs en sciences sociales et les praticiens des affaires, sont évoquées (a) la façon dont la théorie physique post-newtonienne avance en construisant de nouvelles algèbres, et (b) les alternatives théoriquement licites à l'arithmétique de Péano et la géométrie euclidienne qui n'ont pas été explicitement rejetées ou considérées dans les modélisations sociales. Des tentatives indépendantes et superficiellement paradoxales de théorisation des organisations avec divers outils mathématiques —en particulier (Bitbol, 2009; Donaldson, 2010)— sont ensuite conciliées. Puis, des principes de développement d’un corpus mathématique phénoménologiquement fondé et spécifique aux sciences sociales sont exprimés. Ensuite, est exposé comment une double perspective de réseaux sociaux, appliquée conjointement aux niveaux sémantique et culturel, peut utilement étendre l'analyse qualitative de discours. Pour illustrer les implications pratiques de cette thèse, un terrain fertile est retenu ; une méthodologie d’intégration post-fusion de la connaissance organisationnelle sans perte d'information, proposée. Jouant du rôle particulier des énumérations, des informations spatiales, et des informations temporelles dans le discours et la langue occidentaux (Aristote, 2000a; Benveniste, 1966), une méthodologie, qui s'appuie à la fois sur la normalisation de base de données du domaine des systèmes d’information (Codd, 1970, 1972, 1974; Date, Darwen, & Lorentzos, 2003; Fagin, 1977, 1979, 1981) et du modèle dynamique de création de connaissances SECI (Nonaka, 1994) du domaine de la gestion des connaissances en sciences de gestion, est décrite. Cette méthodologie, baptisée Archinormalisation par l’auteur, introduit le concept sociologiquement ancré d’Entité sans Attribut.Enfin, de nouvelles voies de recherche sont évoquées / In a critical management study, drawing on Aristotelian analysis of language (Aristotle, 2000; Benveniste, 1966), (Crosby, 1997)’s historical analysis of the emergence of what he coins modern society’s pentametric mentalité, (Jorion, 2009)’s anthropological exposition of the West’s invention of Truth and (objective) Reality, and following, albeit with a much more limited scope, in the footsteps of Hellenist philosopher Jullien’s forays into Chinese thought (Jullien, 1995, 2009), numbers, space and time are revealed as semiotically-grounded social constructs and philological methods —revealing semiotic gaps (Cruse, 2004; Lyons, 1995)— shed light unmatched by past multicultural surveys (Hofstede, 1983; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2006).From this, are defended the merits of exercising self-doubt, open-mindedness, and unlearning capability, whilst in cross-cultural and crossdisciplinary contexts, and awareness of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary cognitive gaps at the individual, team, group and organizational levels.Anchored epistemologically in Popperian falsifiability (Popper, 2002), Kuhnian scientific progress (Kuhn, 1996) and Porter’s sociologicaltreatise on our trust in numbers (Porter, 1995), the author joins the debate on the nature of social science. What this thesis’ empirical findings reveal in the context of mathematically supported model-building in the realm of social science is explored; that social scientists and business practitioners model-building is blindsided to the socially constructed nature of mathematics (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Jorion, 2009) is pondered; how post-Newtonian theoretical physics builds new theory by building new math is evoked; mathematically sound alternatives to Peano arithmetic and Euclidean geometry that have not been explicitly dismissed or considered by social scientists is exposed; independent and superficially paradoxical attempts to theorize organizations with various bodies ofmathematics are reconciled —notably (Bitbol, 2009; Donaldson, 2010); and development principles towards a phenomenologicallygrounded mathematics corpus are yielded. Next, how a social network perspective applied conjointly at the semantic and cultural levels of analysis may usefully extend and bring insights to standard qualitative content analysis is put forward. To illustrate the practical implications of this thesis, one fertile ground is focused upon and a loss-less method to merge indwelled information systems is posited. Empirically illustrating the Aristotelian breakdown of language into its component parts (and the special role numbers, space, and time play in Western discourse and language), a methodology is described for nonloss post-merger integration of organizational knowledge that builds both on (Codd, 1970, 1972, 1974; Date et al., 2003; Fagin, 1977, 1979, 1981) database normalization from the field of Information Management in Computer Science, and on (Nonaka, 1994)’s SECI dynamic model of knowledge creation fromthe field of Knowledge Management in Business Administration Studies. This methodology, coined Archnormalization by the author,introduces the sociologically-grounded concept of Attribute-free Entities. Finally, further avenues of research are outlined that ultimately lie beyond the scope of this thesis.

Student Number : 0311003J - MA research report - School of Literature and Language Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This dissertation examines the representations of youth identity in print advertisements found in Y Magazine and SL Magazine. The researcher uses Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the identities that are constructed in four fashion brands. The print advertisements are also interpreted by young people from Grade 11 classes in two Johannesburg high schools. Learners completed survey questionnaires and participated in focus group discussions. My interpretation of the advertisements reveals three over sexualized identities in the Soviet, Guess and Diesel advertisements. Soviet depicts an image of a male penetrative sexual fantasy; Guess depicts feminine self-centred sexual pleasure and Diesel communicates a message of funky, sexy, heterosexual male-female desire. It is proposed that advertisers base their strategies on assumptions that sex sells to the youth. The Levi’s advertisement differs from the rest by constructing a Hip Hop brand identity that appeals to a majority of the respondents. The learners’ responses are varied; some identify with the brands and accept the subject positions that are offered by the advertisements and others critique the sexuality that pervades the majority of the advertisements. Learners’ interpretations also reflect different reading positions, as well as unclear gendered target audiences. I conclude that media representations provide a range of powerful resources, which young people draw on in constructing their identities. I argue that print advertisements can be used productively in the language classroom as part of the body of literature that is studied in the English syllabus, especially because of their contemporary value and role in shaping post-modern subjects.

A canção popular conquistou, desde o início do século XX, uma significativa importância na sociedade brasileira. Sua presença cultural marcante pode ser constatada, atualmente, pela grande quantidade de publicações acadêmicas dedicadas ao assunto, ligadas às mais diversas áreas do conhecimento. Nesta pesquisa, estudaremos a relação entre a composição e a linguagem oral, adotando a abordagem da semiótica da canção desenvolvida por Luiz Tatit (teoria que sistematiza os processos específicos da canção vislumbrando-a como linguagem artística autônoma). Pretendemos, por meio da análise de exemplos (bem como mediante a atividade de recriação linguística e melódica de alguns deles), elucidar os diferentes graus de presença da fala na canção e as diferentes formas de oralização. Examinaremos as suas sutis nuances entoativas a partir de três patamares de análise (a sílaba, a palavra e a frase), tentando esquadrinhar esse misterioso encontro entre a sua letra e a sua melodia. / Popular song has obtained an important role in Brazilian culture since the beginning of the 20th century. Nowadays, it is widely recognised across various disciplines of academia. Based on the song semiotics theory developed by Luiz Tatit (a systematisation of songwriting concepts and practices in which song is considered an independent artistic language, separate from poetry and music), this study intends to analyse the relationship between song composition and oral speech. Drawing on the analysis and re-creation of some examples, we want to study the different levels of oral language in song. The focus of this thesis is to observe these nuances of speech through three linguistic levels: syllable, word and phrase. Results obtained from this inquiry will help us to understand the mysterious combination of lyrics and tunes.