Social Semiotics for a Complex World: Analysing Language and Social Meaning

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Social semiotics reveals language's social meaning - its structures, processes, conditions and effects - in all social contexts, across all media and modes of discourse. This important new book uses social semiotics as a one-stop shop to analyse language and social meaning, enhancing linguistics with a sociological imagination. Social Semiotics for a Complex World develops ideas, frameworks and strategies for better understanding key problems and issues involving language and social action in today's hyper-complex world driven by globalization and new media. Its semiotic basis incorporates insights from various schools of linguistics (such as cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistics) as well as from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and literary studies. It employs a multi-modal perspective to follow meaning across all modes of language and media, and a multi-scalar approach that ranges between databases and one-word slogans, the local and global, with examples from English, Chinese and Spanish. Social semiotics analyses twists and turns of meanings big and small in complex contexts. This book uses semiotic principles to build a powerful, flexible analytic toolkit which will be invaluable for students across the humanities and social sciences.

Bob Hodge is Research Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney.

Preface PART I: Principles and Practices Chapter 1: Key Concepts Chapter 2: Some Notes on Method PART II: From Linguistics to Semiotics Chapter 3: Words Chapter 4: Grammar Chapter 5: Reading and Meaning PART III: Meaning and Society Chapter 6: The Semiotics of Reality Chapter 7: Ideology and Social Meaning Chapter 8: Multiscalar Analysis Chapter 9: Conclusions