A Semiotic Analysis Of Visuals

As we enter the twenty first century, we are being surrounded by more and more visuals from bulletin boards to Internet, from advertisement banners to book covers. Visuals are everywhere and visuals play an especially crucial role in the advertisement. Since the advertisement is an important part of our life, there is an urgent need for us to interpret the advertisement, especially the visuals. Currently, many studies mainly focus on the verbal form or the language-oriented form. The visuals in advertisement have not been much researched.This paper examines visual visuals by semiology (also called semiotics). Its prominence is due to the fact that semiology offers a full box of analytical tools for taking an visual apart and tracing how it works in relation to broader systems of meaning.As a method, semiology draws upon the notions of several major theorists: Saussure, Peirce, Morris, Sebeok, Eco, Roland Barthes, etc. The important concepts used in this paper are "sign", "code", "denotation", "connotation", "syntagmatic analysis", "Paradigmatic analysis", "icon", "index", and "symbol". The samples are collected from the Coca Cola advertisements both on the internet and magazine. These samples are a variety of visuals with the time span of 50 years. The visuals are the representative of both different times and different styles of visuals.In Chapter One, a brief introductiOn of the history of visual analysis is presented. Chapter Two demonstrates the different theoretical foundations of this thesis: semiotics, visual semiotics, visual literacy and semiotics of advertising visuals. Thanks to a semiotic analysis entailing the deployment of a highly refined set of concepts, these concepts can produce detailed accounts of the exact ways the meanings are produced through the visual.Next, from Chapter Three to Chapter Five, here comes the main part of this thesis.Based on the semiotics of visuals, in Chapter Three,â… analyze the visuals selected mainly from Coca Cola. As a scientific approach, semiology is deployed to probe into and interpret the visuals. Through this analysis, we could have a clear understanding of the visuals in the advertisement.In Chapter Four, after an explicit view of the visuals itself, this study further makes a clarification of the interaction between word and visual in the advertisement, including the characteristics and functions of word and visual respectively in the advertisement, and more importantly, the corresponding roles of word and visual in the long history of Coca Cola advertisement.Another focus of analysis is in Chapter Five: how is meaning produced and conveyed in messages that are primarily visual? How do viewers construct their own meanings from visual communication cues? As for this part, we will employ the questionnaire. This study investigates the production of meaning from visual messages in advertising from the view of Peirce's theory of icon, index and symbol.In Chapter Six, this paper summarizes the content of this thesis. We can see how the semiotic approach has helped to analyze the advertisement in detail. In general, more viewers note more iconic message elements than symbolic or indexical elements. However, those elements with symbolic meanings can create great impact because of the interest to the ambiguity, therefore, which will be the further studies in the future.