Since Saussure’s definition of linguistics as a branch of semiotics, the study of language has expanded to include non-verbal elements such as gestures, facial expressions, and social contexts. In today’s digital age, visual imagery increasingly rivals language as a primary mode of communication. This course examines the interplay between language and image as key semiotic resources, exploring how meaning is constructed through visual principles such as colour, perspective, framing, and composition. Students will analyse a range of texts – photographs, advertisements, magazine layouts, artworks, websites, and digital media – using a theoretical framework grounded in social semiotics. Visual structures, like linguistic ones, may be narrative, depicting dynamic actions and spatial transitions, or conceptual, representing subjects in terms of generalised and timeless qualities. The interactive dimension of images is central: each image functions as either a ‘demand’ or an ‘offer’, with camera shots and angles used to express social distance and attitude. The images are often composed with varying degrees of framing and salience to guide attention and meaning.

The course also considers how visual texts participate in broader discourses and reflect ideological positions. Concepts such as modality and information value are applied to examine how visuals construct particular versions of reality, identity, and power. Students will explore how visual design encodes assumptions about race, gender, class, and authority, and how these meanings circulate within cultural and media contexts. Although grounded in theoretical foundations, the course is equally concerned with practical application. It aims to equip students with a critical and analytical toolkit for interpreting visual texts, enabling them to engage with multimodal discourse and uncover the ideological work of images in everyday life.

• Visual resources for the representation of interactions and conceptual relations between the people, places and things depicted in images;
• The interaction between the producer and the viewer of the image;
• Visual modality;
• The realisations of information value, salience and framing in images;
• Colour as a semiotic mode and the communicative functions of colour;
• A social-semiotic theory of multimodality
• Making signs: semiotic modes, meaning potential and materiality
• Doing multimodal discourse analysis

1. Articulate ideas about the structures of visual design, the interactive relationship between image-producers and viewers, and how producers’ messages and attitudes are expressed in their design, through oral presentation of an individual research project.
2. Explore, interpret, and critically analyse expressions of visual communication in a wide variety of texts including adverts, magazine layouts, websites, etc., and identify the ways in which images communicate contrasts in meaning and present a synthetic analysis coherently in a succinct and visually appealing manner in an academic poster and essay.
3. Produce a visual essay and video presentation for the individual research project, applying key concepts of semiotics and multimodality to evaluate how visual structures realise meaning and how linguistic and visual semiotic resources mediate social and communicative functions.
4. Assess peers’ video presentations and provide constructive written feedback through online peer review, demonstrating evaluative insight and engagement with others’ work.

Assessment is by 100% coursework, consisting of: 

Class participation and discussion                                 20%

Academic poster                                                                40% 

Research project                                                                40%

A list of required and recommended readings will be provided.