Language Essay

Every medium has its own language, that it uses to communicate meaning. Television uses verbal and written language as well as moving images and sound. They use familiar codes and conventions that are generally understood.

Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules. Each form of communication (television etc.) has its own creative language: scary music heightens fear, camera close up convey intimacy, big headlines signal significance. Understanding the grammar, syntax metaphor system of media language, especially the language of sounds and visuals which can reach beyond the rational to our deepest emotional core. It increases out appreciation and enjoyment of media experiences as well as helps us to be less susceptible to manipulation.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1931) says "we only think in sings". Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, colours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning. However, "nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign" says Peirce. Anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as 'signifying' something - referring to or standing for something other than itself. We interpret things as signs largely unconsciously by relating them to familiar systems of conventions. It is this meaningful use of sigs which is at the heart of concerns of semiotics.

Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure offered a dyadic or two - part model of the sign. He states that there are three different types of sign...

1. Icon/iconic: a mode in which the signifier is perceived as resembling the signified (looking, sounding, smelling etc like it) - being similar in possessing some qualities
2. Index/indexical: a mode in which the signifier is not arbitrary but is directly connected in some way to the signified - this link can be observed; e.g. natural signs (thunder, smoke, echoes) and medical symptoms (pain, itching)
3. Symbol/symbolic: a mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional.  

Denotation and connotation are terms described the relationship between the signifier and its signified, and an analytic distinction is made between two types of signifieds: a denotative signified and a connotative signified.

As Roland Barthes noted, Saussure's model of the sign focused on denotation at the expense of connotation and it was left to subsequent theorists to offer an account of this important dimension of meaning. It suggests true meaning comes from the audience. Barthes argued that in photography connotation can be distinguished from denotation.

John Fiske puts it "denotation is what is photographed, connotation is how it's photographed".

Related to connotation is what Roland Barthes refers to as a myth. Barthes myths were the dominant ideologies of our time. Denotation and connotation combine to produced ideology - described as a third order of significance by Fiske & Hartley.

Paradigms & Syntagms

Roman Jakobson and later Claude Levi-Strauss, emphasised that meaning arises from the differences between signifiers; there are two different kinds; syntagmatic (the positioning) and paradigmatic (substitution - changing things around).

In film and television, paradigms include ways of changing the shot (cut, fade). Medium/genre also paradigms and particular media texts derive meaning form the ways in which the medium and genre used differs from alternatives.

Evaluating media language is the evaluation of all micro elements (cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, sound) and how they have created meaning to inform us about genre, narrative, representations/ideology, target of audiences. It requires us to use semiotic terminology to explain our encoding of elements and coding & conventions within texts. The preferred meaning is based on Hall's theory, want the audience to decode based on what we encoded.