Toward an Integration of Textual and Response Analysis Applied to the 1988 Presidential Campaign

The semiotic analysis of texts seems to have proceeded relatively independently of the analyses of receiver perceptions of those texts. It is the purpose of this chapter to illustrate one way in which textual analysis and perceptual analyses might be used to complement one another. Our thesis is that the combination of two such approaches can be useful in describing a media campaign, such as the television commercials of the 1988 presidential campaign.