Icons and Signs.

Icons and Signs.

Saussure was the creator of the sign theories. Roland Barthes looked back at his work and created a course of general linguistics from it. Barthes termed denotation and connotation. The meanings of things vary depending on who is reading it, when it was written and the time someone is reading it. 

Signifier = Denotation 

Signified = Connotation 

A polysemous sign is a sign with lots of meanings. For example an X; this could be a kiss on a birthday card, a mark on a wrong answer or the 24th letter in the alphabet. Depending on the situation it is in depends on how we interoperate this sign. 

All signs contain two parts;

• The signifier - little black dress, red lipstick, burning clothes, paint fight, crying.

• The signified - From these we want our audience to see she is a young girl who has had her heart broken but is still strong and willing to move on with her life and not mope around after the boy.

These signs can be linked to Stuart Hall's 'encoding/decoding'.

• Dominant reading/preferred reading - the audience reads the text the way the author intended them to
• Negotiated reading - the reader partly believes the codes but sometimes modifies them to fit their own positions, experiences and understanding.
• Oppositional reading - the reader completely rejects the way the author intended them to read the text.

In our video we would like to have a negotiated reading but some parts of it will be dominant reading because our TA research showed us that they like a music video that makes them think for themselves.