The diploma thesis is focused at mythology of the current myths and basic semiotic features that appear in these films. It analyses and uncovers mythological structures that create a platform for the mores, and derives conclusions about the present society. It chose 30 most successful movies as a muster to analyze. It is divided in two main parts; the first one is focused at mythological aspects. Firstly, it describes the most frequent myths that appear in the majority of the analyzed movies. In the next chapters, it analyzes briefly some specific movies and points out their most distinct features. The second part is focused at semiotic features that are used by the film makers and tries to explain their meaning. The last part of the diploma thesis compares the Euro-American film production with that of Asia (especially China).

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction Programs / F. Todd Goodson / This study examines representations of literacy and literacy pedagogy in films about school. Grounded in research traditions of textual analysis and cultural studies, the present study is a semiotic analysis of critical scenes in a study corpus comprised of key scenes from fifteen school films from the 1930s to present. Films were selected for inclusion in the study corpus based on five criteria: setting of the film in a K-12 school, teacher as a central character of the film, a school film with a serious message, a film that includes at least one literary event, and a film that is available for rent in the United States. Key scenes (those that embody the film's stance toward literacy and literacy pedagogy) were selected by an inter-rater group of veteran educators and researchers. A semiotic analysis of the texts determined what denotations, connotations, and myths exist in the following: o Components of literacy o Expressions of literacy o Importance of literacy o Role of the teacher o Role of the student o Role of the school The analysis was conducted through a textual study of the dialogue, basic cinematic techniques, and the semiotic codes of body codes, commodity codes, and behavioral codes found in the critical scenes to identify emerging themes. During the open coding stage, data revealed twelve categories that contributed to the four axial codes of Self, Beyond Self, Critical Connections, and Representations of Literacy. The four axial codes contributed to three different themes that emerged in the representations of literacy in popular school film: internal versus external forces, traditional versus non- traditional pedagogy, and traditional representations of literacy versus new literacies. A grounded theory based upon the research data proposes a symbiotic relationship between educational policy and the portrayal of literacy pedagogy in serious school film. This qualitative study brings to light the potential impact of media and popular culture on education and literacy pedagogy.

Doing business "the French way" in a Francophone market niche may be somehow different from doing it "the English way" in an Anglophone market niche. Since both the employees’ and the customers’ knowledge of an organisation underpins the organisation’s performance in complex business world environments, Multinational Organisations (MNOs) need to find a manner in which they can achieve coherence between their strategic vision, organisational culture and corporate image across the different linguistic and socio-economic markets they interact with through the various marketing tools they use to stimulate recognition. As a result this can support the integrity and sustainability of their corporate brand across markets and across different linguistics landscapes while interacting with their existing and new foreign markets. This study concentrates particularly on the rhetoric figures and visual cues employed in the selected French and English advertising/promotional messages from different types of advertisements and different product packages of multinational organisation subsidiaries. The study looks at how both the rhetoric figures and visual cues in the selected advertising/promotional messages support the integrity and maintain the sustainability of the corporate brand of the selected companies. The latter is examined across different linguistic and socio-economic markets. The study explores and examines how the possible linguistic properties are used in the selected French and English advertising/promotional messages from different types of advertisements, including those on different product packages. It also looks at how the linguistic properties in selected advertising/promotional messages belonging to different types of advertisements are used in creating and maintaining a positive corporate image of the MNOs and that of their parent companies. In addition, this study analyzes the potential impacts and challenges on moral, cultural and life-style values that multinational subsidiaries inflict on customers through the advertising/promotional messages from different types of advertisements in the promotion and branding of their products and how this affects their corporate image and that of their parent organisations. This is a content analytical study of language features evident in the selected advertising/promotional messages from different types of advertisements and different product packages at the lexical, syntactic and discourse levels and their role and impact on selected multinational parent organisations and their subsidiaries’ corporate images together with those of their selected products. In order to conduct a data-driven study, the author built a data corpus based on 29 advertising messages from different types of advertisements and advertising messages printed on different product packages. The types of advertisements include the photographs and scanned images of billboards, mural billboards, outdoor advertising billboards and leaflets advertising/promoting specific services or products. The product packages include photographs and scanned images of product covers/wraps, primary packages of products, product containers’ stickers with messages printed on them, and primary boxes. The sample comes from six selected multinational subsidiary organisations from two different countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo, a Francophone and multilingual country, and the Republic of South Africa, an Anglophone and multilingual country. Through a detailed content analysis of the advertising/promotional messages from a diversity of sources used as a means of communication, with a focus on rhetoric figures ,visual cues and language features, their roles and potential impact on MNO’s, corporate images in foreign markets will be summarized. In the end, possible conclusions are drawn in the light of the role and impact that they have on the selected companies’ corporate image across different linguistic and socio-economic markets.

In reference to Moleleki (1988:122), African poetry as a result of contrast rather than individual, is the representation of a community. This representation contains a scale of values based on the community, and it gives symbolic expression to the community: manifesting a community of tradition from the past through the present to the future. Going by the above notion, the poet assumes the responsibility of being the spokes-person of the community in which he/she finds and identifies himself/herself. He/she feels the pain felt by his/her people, and shares the joy shared by them. His/her representation therefore is both genuine and representatively expressive in nature. In the chosen poems of S. E. K. Mqhayi the above mentioned aspects of poetic writing are well expressed. This representation being a symbolic expression on behalf of the community holds a magnificent semiotic significance. Such semiotic significance, which boarders around the several highs and lows of the community’s lifestyle. The community poet in this context blends the past and the present in his verses attempting to both preserve and express the sorrows, the joys, the pains as well as the fears of his community and its people. These are captured in chapters three and four of this study. The community poet under the worst form of systematized inhuman, racist subjection called apartheid employed careful and skilful means of reciting as well as penning his verses. In the last four chapters one discovers a skilful means of masking in order to avoid being penalised. S.E.K Mqhayi’s element of symbolic expression is by far the most significant aspect of his poems. A man who lived in the days of abject institutionalised racism and being one of those discriminated against, had no choice but to be loyal to his oppressors and at the same time, expressing himself in the most creatively careful manner. His works are rich with encodings and embellishments. These encodings and embellishments require some careful skills to decode and unveil. This research work will centre mainly on the unravelling of all that was either encoded or embellished within each selected work.

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.

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.

Interpreting studies has so far tended to concentrate on simultaneous interpreting over the consecutive mode. Note-taking – an integral part of consecutive interpreting – has therefore received very little scholarly attention. As an indispensable tool in consecutive interpreting, note-taking plays an important role in supporting the interpreter’s memory. This study argues, however, that the interpreter's notes should not be viewed merely as a memory storage tool, but as a third visual language with its own logic and meaning-making practices that need interpreting. The way in which interpreters read their notes is explored here from the perspective of Social Semiotics for two reasons. Firstly, Social Semiotics conceptualises signs as meaning-making resources which are realized in specific communicative contexts to convey specific communicative intentions – unlike previous approaches to note-taking, that have tended to categorise signs as static constituents of relatively finite sign codes. Secondly, Social Semiotics not only accounts for how written language is used in notes, but also how the pictorial component of communication is encoded and interpreted through interpreter’s notes. The interpreter, as a viewer, has to make use of semiotic resources deployed in the notes in order to reconstruct the information given by the speaker and to produce the target speech for the audience. Therefore, the interpreters’ note-reading stage, based on the interaction between signs, can be conceptualised by reference to the concept of visual grammar. This study draws on visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) to analyse interpreter’s notes with a view to gaining a better understanding of how linguistic and visual semiotic resources are deployed in the process of note-taking. Insight into interpreters’ meaning-making practices and note-taking patterns is gained through an experimental study of the notes produced by nine qualified, practising conference interpreters, during a consecutive interpreting task from English into Chinese. The patterns identified in my data set are then compared with the established prescriptive approaches to note-taking training – which are typically based on relatively stable correspondences between note-taking signs/symbols and their meaning. The analysis focuses on certain elements of the source speech (concepts that can be noted down through the use of vectors, geometrical shapes, specific classificational structures, margin, and salience) as reflected in the notes. The way in which interpreters read their notes involves the interaction between two core modes, such as image and language, and a range of sub-modes, such as vectors, geometrical shapes, composition, framing, salience and calligraphy. The results of the analysis indicate that the way in which interpreters arrange the contents of their notes reflects the depth of the information processing effort required by the note-taking process. The findings suggest that the narrative structure in notes seems to assist interpreters in retrieving information at a micro, lexical level, whereas the visual structure would appear to assist interpreters in retrieving information at a macro, contextual level, e.g. in representing the hierarchies of information value, constructing the structure of rendition, and showing the importance of specific signs.

This paper deals with the meaning of fashion and the role that fashioin brands play at how one looks at himself/herself and what way they become the source of expression of his/her personality.

Every music teacher is likely to teach one or more children with autism, given that an average of one in 54 persons in the United States receives a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ASD persons often show tremendous interest in music, and some even become masterful performers; however, the combination of deficits and abilities associated with ASD can pose unique challenges for music teachers. This experimental study shows that phonomimetic (conducting-like) gestures can be used to teach the expressive qualities of music. Children were asked to watch video recordings of conducting-like gestures and produce vocal sounds to match the gestures. The empirical findings indicate that motor training can strengthen the visual to vocomotor couplings in both populations, suggesting that phonomimetic gesture may be a suitable approach for teaching musical expression in inclusive classrooms.

Influencer marketing is one of the fastest growing trends within marketing in Sweden. By using a semiotic analysis, this study aims to analyze how influencers communicate through sponsored posts on Instagram. Two posts each posted by six different influencers were selected for the study. The influencers were divided into three categories, parental influencers, fashion influencers and fitness influencers. The analysis showed that influencers describe the product as an essential part of their everyday life by telling how much they like it. The posts also reproduce certain stereotypes, as it for example displays women as engaged mothers and consumers of beauty products. The fashion and the fitness influencers Instagram posts both display stereotypes concerning thin and well-shaped bodies. The captions function for the viewers understanding of the posts meaning is anchoring more often than relay.