What modes can and cannot do: Affordance in Gunther Kress’s theory of sign making

IF 0.8 3区 文学 Q3 COMMUNICATION
Text & Talk Pub Date : 2023-11-15 DOI:10.1515/text-2022-0055
Jeff Bezemer
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This paper presents a conceptual analysis and critical review of the notion of ‘affordance’ and its uptake, transformation and application in the work of Gunther Kress. It traces its origins and explores how Kress, co-founder of social semiotics, (re)conceptualised affordance and incorporated it in his social semiotic theory of sign making, defining affordance in terms of the “potentials and limitations of specific modes”. The paper discusses how his take on the term was received, and develops a radical critique questioning the analytical merits of affordance. It concludes with a call for a return to Kress’s original question of exactly what it is about a form (signifier) that makes it suitable, in the eyes of the sign maker, for what they want to express (signified), and to consider materiality and social convention alongside the sign maker’s lifeworld, audience, situation, and conditions of sign making.
模式能做什么和不能做什么:冈瑟·克雷斯符号制作理论中的功能支持
本文对冈瑟·克雷斯(Gunther Kress)作品中“提供性”的概念及其吸收、转化和应用进行了概念分析和批判性回顾。它追溯了它的起源,并探讨了Kress,社会符号学的联合创始人,如何(重新)概念化功能,并将其纳入他的社会符号学的符号制作理论中,根据“特定模式的潜力和局限性”来定义功能。本文讨论了他对这个术语的看法是如何被接受的,并提出了一种激进的批评,质疑提供性的分析价值。最后,它呼吁回到Kress最初的问题,即在标识制造商的眼中,一种形式(能指)究竟是什么,使其适合于他们想要表达的东西(所指),并考虑物质性和社会习俗,以及标识制造商的生活世界、受众、情况和标识制作的条件。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Text & Talk
Text & Talk Multiple-
CiteScore
1.70
自引率
16.70%
发文量
70
期刊介绍: Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.
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