Media Language

Every medium has its own language, or combination of languages that it uses to communicate meaning. Television, for example, uses verbal and written language as well as the languages of moving images and sound. we call these 'languages' because they use familiar codes and conventions that are generally understood. Languages of newspapers: masthead, headline. Media messages are constructed using a creative language with it's own rules. Each form of communication has its own creative language: scary music heightens fear, camera close ups convey intimacy.There are formal codes and conventions, and generic code and conventions. A media text is made up of two things: form, and content. Gaining an understanding the grammar, syntax, and metaphor system of media language increases our appreciation and enjoyment of media experiences as well as helping us to be less susceptible to manipulation.

Semiotics is the science of signs. According to American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1931) "we only think in signs". These signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects. These things have no intrinsic meaning, they become signs because we invest them with meaning. Anything is a sign as long as someone interprets it signifying something "nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign".  We interpret things as signs at a subconscious level by relating them to familiar conventions. 

He states that there are three types of sign:

• Icon/ iconic: A mode in which the signifier is perceived as resembling or imitating the signified..
• Index/indexical: A mode in which the signifier is not arbitrary but is directly connected in some way (physically or causally) to the signified - this link can be observed or inferred. 
• Symbol/symbolic: A mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is fundamentally arbitrary.. 

Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1974) offered a two part model of the sign. He stated a sign consists of: a 'signifier' (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes, and  the 'signified' (signifié) - the concept it represents.

In semiotics, denotation and connotation are terms describing the relationship between the signifier and it's signified, and an analytic distinction is made between two types of signified: a denotative signified and a connotative signified. Meaning includes both connotation and connotation.

Roland Barthes (1967) nothed that s.'s model of the sign focused on denotation at the expense of connotation and it was left to subsequent theorists

death of the author//true meaning comes from the audience//we interpret the signs and give them meaning. In 1977 he argued that in photography connotation can be analytically distinguished from denotation. related to connotation is what Barthes refers to as myth. For Barthes, myths were the dominant ideologies of our time. The 1st and second orders of signification called denotation and connotation combine to produce ideology - which has been described as the third order of signification by Fiske and Hartley (1982).

John Fiske (1982): "denotation is what is photographed, connotation is how it is photographed".
This means that how something is presented can change its meaning. Eg:high angle/low angle.

Paradigms and syntagms

Roman Jakobson (1956), and later Claude Levi-Strauss, emphasised that meaning arises from the differences between signifiers; these differences are of two kinds: syntagmatic (positioning of the audience), and paradi... concerning institution. In film and television, paradigms include ways of changing shot (such as cut, dade, dissolve, wipe). The medium or genre are also paradigms, and particular media texts derive meaning from the ways in which the medium and genre used differs from the alternative.

Evaluating media language is an evaluation of all the mico elements and how they have created meaning to inform us about genre, narrative, representation/ideology, targeting of audience. This therefore requires us to use semiotic terminology to explain our encoding of elements and codes and conventions within our texts. We must also remember to to discuss the preferred meaning (Hall 1980) that we wanted our audience to decode based on what we encoded - could lenk to readings.