• A form of enquiry for investigating the way people uses semiotic resources in social and cultural contexts
• Explains the meaning making process as a social practice

How does social semiotics work?
In the example given by the author, framing is used as the semiotic resource in various social contexts like magazine advertisements, seating layout in schools and office buildings. All these different contexts make use of the same meaning potential of framing, which is to:

1) disconnect elements to show that it is separate and independent
OR
2) connect elements to show belonging together as continuous or complementary

However, people in different contexts make different choices from the same overall semiotic potential, which then yields different meanings.

Semiotic system provides us an array of resources for meaning making to happen. Therefore social semiotics will explain why we choose a particular resource over another.

For example, Chinese prefers to wear Red instead of Black colour clothings on Chinese New Year. From a social semiotics point of view, we can see that in the Chinese community's social semiotic believes that the colour Red is auspicious and brings prosperity.







Really auspicious, isn't it? =)

Social semiotics has extended beyond its traditional focus on linguistics to accommodate the multiplicity of the new modes of communications such as verbal, visual and aural etc. To adapt to the multimodality of the new-age communications, new 'resources' have been created for meaning making in other semiotic modes of communications.

7:15 PM