Q: Which elements of the advert do you think are the significant signs? Make some notes below and then click to compare your answer with a suggested response.
Click to show an answer
In this advert, there is a clear mortice around the visuals, so that they are all clustered together in one part of the advert, with the text in another. The mortice is thus invisible but evident, and it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to divide the image up into separate signs. So, using Barthes's notion of anchorage, discussed in section 6.3.1, I read the text to help me identify the visual signs in this advertisement. The first paragraph is all about ships, railways, rapid transit, cars and planes: that is, all the things pictured behind the telephone in the advert's image. So I made that into one sign. The text then breaks and, in a separate paragraph, the phone is described as different from those ships and so on. So I made the telephone a separate sign.
Text of answer 2.
|
