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Social semiotics and education
Social semiotics deals with how people use the resources of semiotic systems (e.g. language, movement, dress, depiction, architecture) to make socially significant meanings. It analyzes what we actually do with those resources: both the meanings we make in immediate contexts of use (conversations, lessons, dances, outfits, paintings, buildings) and the wider social functions of what we do, including the re-creation or transformation of our community's beliefs and attitudes, its distribution of power and resources among groups, and its patterns of social relations. Social semiotics builds on formal semiotics, which describes semiotic resource systems (the types and relations of socially significant signs). But in a larger sense social semiotics is itself the context for formal semiotics, since we cannot study meaning relations among signs apart from seeing how they are used in some community. Formal meanings (Saussure's [1915] valeur relations) are always abstractions from use-meanings (significations). In social semiotics it is not signs perse that are of interest, but signifying practices, the social processes of semiosis itself. Social semiotics asks first what meanings people make, and proceeds from there to an analysis of the system of signs used to make them. It puts Saussure's parole (talk, language-in-use) ahead of langue (the formal regularities such as grammars that we abstract from talk). To do this effectively it extends semiotic theory in two ways which make it an especially useful tool for the study of education and other social activities and institutions (Lemke 19833; 1984; In Press:a; In Press:c; Halliday 1978).
The first extension unifies semantics and pragmatics and places both before syntax. This requires that meaning not be regarded as separate from action, and that the formal resources for making meaning (e.g. grammar, vocabulary, graphic and pictorial conventions) are to be described in relation to which meaningful actions they enable us to perform. The way to do this for language has been shown by the British linguist Michael Halliday (1975; 1978; 1985). He has developed a model of grammar in which each formal feature (e.g. mood, tense, number) represents a resource for making a different meaning.
The second extension recognizes an intermediate level of patterned regularity in semiotic behavior between the highly abstract formal relations of grammar (or other semiotic resource systems) and...