ABSTRACT
Sociosemiotics – sometimes ‘social semiotics’ – clearly stands in relation to ‘semiotics’, a term that is itself infrequently defined with any great rigour. Furthermore, it also has a close relationship with different kinds of applied semiotics (cf. Pelc 1997) and their attempts to reconfigure sign study as the appropriate means for closely studying the phenomena of everyday life. Amongst the very few explicit definitions of sociosemiotics is that of Gottdiener and Lagopoulos who state, simply, that ‘sociosemiotics is materialistic analysis of ideology in everyday life’ (Gottdiener and Lagopoulos and Lagopoulos 1986: 14). This definition, however, may be open to accusations that it is ‘too materialistic’ in the sense that in semiotic analysis it is impossible to escape from everyday life and the consummation of signs at the stage of data collection (see, for example, Danesi and Perron 1999: 293ff.). Nor is it easy to escape from the necessarily pragmatic angle of semiotic studies (see, for example, Morris 1971: 43-54) in which the ‘context’, embedded in sign use, should be an important guide to interpretation. Stressing ideology may have also encouraged Gottdiener and Lagopoulos to distinguish sociosemiotics from so-called ‘mainstream semiotics’ by associating the former exclusively with the analysis of connotative signification connected with ideological systems. Yet, one would be hard pressed to find a cultural phenomenon in which denotative aspects were deprived of connotative codes.
