ADVERTISEMENTS AS SOCIO-SEMIOTIC TEXTS:Case Study of Cosmetic Commercial Fair & Lovely

Abstract

The term semiotics derives from its Greek root ‘semeion’ that stands for ‘sign’. Signs that form the bases of semiotics are affected by the social context in which they exist and from which they are sourced. Halliday argues “that the grammar of a language is not a code, not a set of rules for producing correct sentences, but a ‘resource for making meanings’”1  Semiotic resources not only deal with the language mode, but pressed into service for understanding various meaning generating contexts and modes. 
The evolution of semiotics, especially its Barthesian variant, thus opened up a possibility for its application in study and analysis of cultural representations like advertisements. The methodology and its underlining reading praxis opens up a possibility of approaching advertisements as narrative texts, and analyzing its various components in their relatedness and totality as signifying spatio-temporal codes and structures refer back/reflect to their engendering locations. This methodology helps us arrive at a coherent and thoughtful description and analysis of the language of advertisements. It helps us situate advertisements as narratives in the field of semiotics and analyze the structure of ads as a system of signs. It helps us unfold the politics and poetics of the  advertisement and packaging, elucidating how meaning is constructed and communicated through the components of ads.