3.3 SEMIOTICS THEORY
3.3.4 ORDERS OR SYSTEMS OF SIGNIFICATION
Roland Barthes is a structuralist, whom many in the field of communication (for example, Fiske 1990, Cobley 1996, van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001, Berger 1995) look upon as the core founder of the more contemporary study of signs known as semiology or semiotics. He
produced a systematic model, because he felt Saussure’s linguistic system did not look at how the ‘reality’ to which it ‘referred’ related to the reader and his or her socio-cultural position. In a way, Barthes wanted to establish how the same sentence which Saussure was interested in was “constructed”. That is he wanted to find out what determines the meaning of a sentence and what makes the same sentence convey “different meanings to different people in different situations” (Fiske, 1990: 85). Barthes then discovered what he called “two orders of
signification”, namely denotation and connotation. The first order, Fiske (1990: 85) says, is equivalent to Saussure’s description of the signifier and the signified’s relationship within a sign and the sign’s relationship with its referent in external reality. Instead of talking of
“orders of signification” when referring to denotation and connotation, Cobley (1996: 129) refers to these two concepts as “systems of signification”. In visual semiotics, (denotation and connotation) Roland Barthes refers to the same concepts as “layers of meaning” (van Leeuwen and Jewitt (2001: 94).
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Denotation
According to Cobley (1996: 129), denotation is similar to the signifier of the second system, in that for people to be able to interpret what is being communicated they have to first be familiar with the structures or characters that make up, among others things, words or
language used. For example, in the case of print IEC materials used in the prevention of HIV, people have to be familiar with the text (language) and the picture(s) used in the material in order to be able to read what has been written. Van Leeuwen and Jewitt (2001: 94) continue to show that Barthes regarded denotation as “relatively unproblematic”, as people need not strive to construct meaning out of what is being communicated, but just need to be conversant with signs used to construct the language used in such a communication. For instance, in the case of print IEC materials people would just need to be able to interpret the apparent signs involved in the communication processes. They would need to be able to interpret the first layer of the meaning of the communication or be able to interpret the literal meaning of the involved signs, but not the core meaning of what is being communicated. That is, if the materials are written in Sesotho, they just need to be able to read Sesotho, but not necessarily interpret what the written message is all about.
Connotation
Cobley (1996: 129) indicates that this plane of expression is “wider than the first one” and is usually not easy to understand. That is, connotation is wider than denotation because it is made up of signifiers of connotation (connotators), signifieds and the process that unites the signifier to the signified. It is said to be more complicated than the first one in that sometimes a connotator can be made out of several denoted sign(s). Hence, large pieces of denoted communication are made up of numerous words but have a single connotator (Cobley, 1996:
130). Barthes, on the other hand, uses the term connotation to describe one of the three ways in which signs work in the second order of signification and is explained thus by Fiske:
…connotation describes the interaction that occurs when the sign meets the feelings or emotions of the users and the values of their culture …when meaning moves towards the subjective, or at least the intersubjective …when the interpretant is influenced as much by the interpreter as by the object or the sign… (Fiske, 2011: 81)
86 This implies that connotation involves an internalization process in order for people to make meaning out of any communication. It can be looked at as an implied understanding of the core message of what is being communicated, which means connotation determines the message’s degree of influence on the viewer’s attitude. Similarly, Berger (1995: 79) shows that connotation deals with the “historic, symbolic, and emotional matters suggested by or that go along with a term”. Fiske (2011) adds that Barthes considered the signifier in the first order to be very crucial in any communication process, as it is the one that starts communication among humans, even though the way people interpret things differs from culture to culture.
This is true with print IEC materials that contain messages for HIV prevention, as they are made up of not only numerous signs (words and images), but numerous content items, for example, information on how HIV is transmitted, how to avoid being infected with HIV, who is at risk of being infected, just to mention a few. But the underlying core message
(connotation) in all this combined information is to prevent the spread of HIV.
Van Leeuwen (2005: 219) goes on to point out that in constructing meaning out of
information, people normally do not think about it as a “whole” but think about it in terms of
“bits and pieces”. Yet those pieces of information that are usually ignored tend to have significance and could possibly add more value to the meaning of the chosen “bits”, if considered. This led van Leeuwen to assess what Maruyama (1980, in van Leeuwen, 2005) calls “contextual information” as: “the value of information lies in its relation to its context”
(van Leeuwen, 2005: 219). This implies that in communication, a single word that composes a piece of information has a meaning on its own, but it takes other words for this single piece to become a message. The next paragraph discusses how a certain piece of information can elaborate or extend information presented in others to make up a message and how meaning can be elaborated, anchored and relayed through certain sign combinations. Van Leeuwen (2005: 219) is of the opinion that how messages are constructed out of pieces (for example, words), and how meaning is constructed out of messages, depends on the interests and purposes of communicators and of the prior interests and knowledge of the recipients.
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Elaboration, Anchorage and Relay
According to van Leeuwen (2005: 229), elaboration, anchorage and relay are Roland
Barthes’s approach to the ‘linking’ of words and images. Elaboration is more or less the same as anchorage, where “words pick out one of the possible meanings of the image”, while relay is an extension of a message between two items that “provide different, but semantically related information”, one in a form of a text and another in a form of an image. With
anchorage, meaning of pictures is clarified through words. This implies that text helps people to make meaning out of the pictures, depending on their familiarity with the signs that
constructed the text. This means that even though text and images may look independent of each other, they stand in a complementary relationship and are both fragments of an additional
‘syntagm’ (Barthes, 1977), to which each contributes in its own way towards a message.
Following the above discussions, it can be concluded that, being culturally sensitive, IEC materials that are used to prevent HIV must carry carefully connoted and denoted messages because in Lesotho any information on sex or sexual intercourse is still a taboo, making it difficult for health educators to communicate HIV prevention messages in a straightforward and easy to understand manner. These debates helped in the realization of how ‘we’, as information providers, educators and communicators, underutilize semiotic concepts in our efforts to inform and educate the public and communicate HIV related issues to them. This can be identified in the next chapter (Chapter five), which presents and analyses data from my own point of view as a health professional, and in Chapters six, seven and eight, where data is presented and analysed from what the learners understood to be communicated by the signs and images in the print IEC materials. That is, these Chapters present and analyze what learners determined to be the communication messages that the signs and pictures in the print IEC materials attempted to portray.
Upon reflection, semiotics theory seems to ignore the ‘affect element’. Therefore, this component was addressed by discourse analysis of the participants’ responses. Discourse analysis theory was used as a tool to analyze how respondents make meaning out of the materials. This section, having presented the concepts of denotation, connotation, elaboration,
88 anchorage and relay, is followed by a discussion of discourse analysis theory, consulting the works of Fairclough and Gee.