Social Semiotics: What You See and What It Means
According to the Glossary of Multimodal Terms, social semiotics can be described as the approach to communication that works to understand how people communicate through various different means in a social setting. It is a study not just of language but of the meaning being made and why such meanings are derived from actions, words, symbols, and icons. The discovery of social semiotics is often attributed to Michael Halliday from his 1978 book, "Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning." In this methodology, language and communication are not looked at as being defined by a set of rules or standards, but rather by how they impact and are used in everyday life. This is incredibly important because it assigns value to not just the words and composition of those words as a language, but it also serves to explain the meaning derived from other instantiations that occur in real life interactions within a social setting. This reminded me a lot...