Šiame darbe pristatomas bandymas atkurti keltų-galų mitą apie vandenų arba ežero žirgą, vadinamą kelpiu. Tyrime taikomas semiotinės analizės metodas, kurį sukūrė ir išvystė Algirdas Julius Greimas (1917–1992). Šiuo metodu siekiama atskleisti prasmės generavimo principus bei sudėtingą mitinio diskurso struktūrą. Pagrindinis darbo tikslas yra apibrėžti kelpio funkcijas keltų- galų mitiniame universume. Darbą sudaro dvi pagrindinės dalys – teorinė ir praktinė. Teorinėje dalyje apžvelgiamas Greimo semiotinis prasmės kūrimo modelis. Čia išdėstomi pagrindiniai metodo principai, supažindinama su svarbiausiomis kategorijomis, aprašomi prasmės elementų tarpusavio ryšiai. Praktinėje darbo dalyje aptariami kelpio izotopiją sudarantys konceptai. Ją sudaro septyni skyriai, kuriuose analizuojami arklio ir vandens įvaizdžiai, pagoniškoji mirties samprata ir pomirtinio pasaulio projekcija. Apibendrinus tyrimo rezultatus galima teigti, kad visi semantiniai elementai, sudarantys kelpio izotopiją, patvirtina iškeltą hipotezę, kad vandenų žirgas senajame keltų tikėjime funkcionavo kaip mirusiųjų sielų keltininkas į mirusiųjų karalystę. / The work attempts at the semiotic recosntruction of of the kelpie (kelpy) myth. The analysis is based on the semiotic method created and developed by Lithuanian born scholar Algirdas Julius Greimas (1917 - 1992), in western scholarly environment also known as Algirdas Julien Greimas. The firts chapter of the thesis describes the semiotic model of the construction of meaning. It explains the concept of the generative pathway which includes three stages of meaning articulation: the deep, narrative and discursive levels. The second chapter exlpores the mythical figure of the kelpie. It discusses the subordinate concepts of the horse, water, death (and its aspects) and the ancient projection of the Afterlife and depicts their significance in the structure of the Celtic-Gaelic kelpie myth.

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My question here revolves around my orientation with my own work; my own frustrations and inability to so often answer the question “can a meaningful place be designed?” This journey examines the theory of semiotics. Through this, three strategies have been developed to explore the branches of semiotic research in Landscape Architecture. The first strategy allows meaning to develop through time, and it is with the repeated usage of people that meaning will accrue. The second strategy shows how meaning can be determined before the design through mapping current and desired locations of meaning in space. And, the third strategy reflects on how meaning emerges from the earth when no interference from designers or users occurs. The result of the three individual strategies is a combination of solutions, illustrating how to create places of true richness. This new space will engage visitors, pull in new visitors, and help create something memorable for those engaging in a space.

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Digital cinema has provoked a strong response over the last decade, not only from the movie-going public, but also from film theorists. It has re-opened basic theoretical questions about cinematic representations of and reference to reality. / This thesis begins with a critical review of the vast theoretical literature dealing with the digitization of the cinema. Most theorists have come to the conclusion that the cinema is dead because digitization has severed the ties between what we see on the screen and real life. At root, this conclusion is derived from a structuralist, nominalist position prevalent in contemporary film theory. / I argue, instead, that film theory needs to re-address the complex issue of the relationship between image and reality, rather than simply accepting the traditional view. In so doing, I follow Stanley Cavell's call for a more thorough consideration of realist traditions in film theory, the premise of which is an unquestioned relationship between representation and reality. / The complexity and subtlety of that relationship has been addressed most systematically and fruitfully by Charles Saunders Peirce. Indeed, many structuralist theorists have made reference to Peirce in response to the shortcomings of a semiologically inflected film theory. In the second step of my argument, however, I show that structuralist theory has produced misleading conclusions, since a Peircian semiotics is incommensurable with the structuralist position. In fact, this implicit conflict has led theorists to doubt the real in the digital cinema, rather than investigating the logically necessary continuity of reality and representation, regardless of its technological kind.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to identify the relationship between color and semiotics and how a person’s opinon, regarding a game character’s different characteristics, can be affected by the use of various colors. Prior to this study people were asked, through an online survey, to write down words that they associated with different colors. The colors were then divided into four different groups depending on whether they had been associated with positive-strong words, positive-weak words, negative-strong words or negative-weak words. In order to further shed light on the effect of colors, the four palettes, consisting of the colors associated with the different words, were then used separately to give color to two characters: a man and a woman. People were then asked to describe what kind of characteristics they felt that the different color versions of the characters portrayed and if they believed that there was a link between colors and how we view different characters’ personalities. The results showed that all of the respondents believed that such link existed and showed different reactions towards the characters’ images depending on what colors were used while creating them. The majority associated an intensive shade of red with powerful and slightly negative personality traits while bright pastel colors such as light green, pink and sky blue had a tendency to make the characters appear more naive and childish. The results also showed that darker, dusty shades of grey and brown gave the characters a more negative and weak expression.

My question here revolves around my orientation with my own work; my own frustrations and inability to so often answer the question “can a meaningful place be designed?” This journey examines the theory of semiotics. Through this, three strategies have been developed to explore the branches of semiotic research in Landscape Architecture. The first strategy allows meaning to develop through time, and it is with the repeated usage of people that meaning will accrue. The second strategy shows how meaning can be determined before the design through mapping current and desired locations of meaning in space. And, the third strategy reflects on how meaning emerges from the earth when no interference from designers or users occurs. The result of the three individual strategies is a combination of solutions, illustrating how to create places of true richness. This new space will engage visitors, pull in new visitors, and help create something memorable for those engaging in a space.

This study looks at how professional male athletes—particularly undersized athletes—are represented throughout televised sport. Based on the assumption that televised sport is a gendered and predominantly masculine genre, the focus of this analysis is to demonstrate whether or not professional male athletes are evaluated differently based on physical stature, and whether or not such representations reinforce a dominant—mythic—male ideology. Grounded mainly in Gramscian hegemony and Peircean semiotics, the subsequent analysis compares broadcast commentary and visuals taken from the 2010 men’s Olympic ice hockey tournament and the 2010 men’s FIFA World Cup. In both events, it was generally found that taller athletes were praised more positively than smaller athletes. These findings appear to support common sports-related stereotypes, such as, the apparent media-reinforced expectation that professional male athletes be almost inhuman, mythical representations of ordinary men, i.e., the best athletes should be large, intimidating, aggressive, and hyper-masculine symbols.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis concerns the intersection of social semiotic theory and critical discourse analysis (CDA), applying systemic-functional (SF) theory to verbal-visual news media texts. The aim of the thesis is to develop social semiotic descriptions of visual meaning in order to facilitate analyses of evaluative stance in visual-verbal text. The texts studied are ‘factual’ daily broadsheet news photos and prominent visual-verbal ‘displays’ that incorporate these photos alongside headlines and captions. Such displays introduce investigative stories on the front page of broadsheet weekly news reviews and are referred to in the thesis as ‘standout’ texts. They are significant because they may also be read as independent texts and play a critical role in positioning a wide readership on the issues investigated in the story. The SF system of verbal appraisal was used in this thesis to develop a corresponding system of visual appraisal. The process involved applying general appraisal options to a corpus of news photos and proceeding to further delicacy in a repeated cycle of analysis and system-building. Once refined in this way the system was applied alongside the verbal appraisal system to account for evaluation in verbal-visual standouts. In the thesis four Australian and four Greek standouts introducing stories on asylum seekers were analysed in order to explore the potential for variation and the impact of context on evaluative meaning choices. The thesis contributes insights into SF theory, media discourse and CDA. The visual systems developed allow appraisal analysis to be extended to images and to verbalvisual texts. Visual appraisal analysis in the thesis provides new evidence for the ideological and evaluative power of news photos. Verbal-visual appraisal analysis shows how each semiotic contributes to evaluative meaning, and to its accumulation and spread across a text. In respect to media discourse, the thesis also provides evidence for the ‘standout’ as an orbital verbal-visual news genre. The comparison of evaluative stance in two sets of standouts demonstrates consistent editorial choices in texts within each context and contrasts across the two sites. The Australian texts display more evaluative complexity, greater emphasis on entertainment and offer two different stances, aligning a diverse target audience. The Greek texts are more straightforward and construct a single stance, aligning a narrower audience. By identifying the semiotic choices involved in the evaluative positioning of readers by visual-verbal texts, the thesis can contribute to more informed and reflective practice. Thus, as well as making theoretical advances, the findings have relevance for journalism and education at a time when the impact of images is changing our conception of literacy.

In this thesis, I ask about the descriptive purchase on discursive events of some accounts of speech as action. To do so, I turn to speech act theory, which I read at first restrictively, and later more broadly, moving from John Langshaw Austin to John Rogers Searle to Judith Butler, appealing along the way to Charles Sanders Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-François Lyotard and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. In so doing, I construe speech act theory as a genre (or set of genres) of theoretico-critical inquiry. By genre I mean a set of differentiated, recurrent forms of practice which have their own functions or ends, their own means, protocols and postulates: their own speaking positions and objects of representation or inquiry. For my purposes, then, speech act theory denotes a capacious genre of inquiry turning on the topic of speech as action. I take this topic to raise a range of rhetorical issues concerning the pragmatic question of discursive linking. To talk of discursive linking, I suggest, is minimally to presuppose notions of semiosis, of rhetorical situation or occasion and of rhetorical agency, with its attendant postulates of intention and responsibility. I thus read speech act theory rhetorically, as an open set of engagements with the question of how we do things with words: how utterances come to count as action, and how utterance action is described as having determinate consequences and effects. I begin in chapter 1 by reading Austin for his two tensively related, if not countervailing, descriptive tendencies: those of illocution and perlocution. In chapter 2, I attend to Searle as an exemplary development of an illocutionary inquiry, before examining Butler’s work on hate speech and performativity as a type of perlocutionary inquiry in chapter 3. Illocution and perlocution, I suggest, comprise distinct engagements with the questions of speech as action and discursive linking. Although postulates of semiosis and situation, and figures of responsibility, intention and agency are put to work in both illocutionary and perlocutionary inquiries, in each they work differently. This differential work, I argue, marks the differing capacities of illocutionary and perlocutionary inquiries adequately to describe a discursive event. Different construals of speech as action tell different tales of uptake or linking, enabling and constraining different accounts of discursive events. With this in mind, I turn by way of an extended example in chapter 4 to the caso Belsunce, a high-profile homicide case begun in Argentina in 2002. I do so to suggest that a focus on utterance actions as semio-discursive events relates the perlocutionary concerns discussed in chapters 1 – 3 to postulates of cultural memory-work, kairos and rhetorical community. Taken together, this range of concerns helps us to describe the mediatic uptake of the Belsunce case as a particular, complex semio-discursive event. But a description of a discursive event is of course itself a sign, something which, as Peirce notes, ‘stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ and which strives, in turn, to determine subsequent interpretant effects. In this respect, the critical description of discursive events is itself an instance of speech as action which cannot but continue to raise hermeneutic, rhetorical and semiotic questions of discursive upshot or uptake.