Dialogicality in selected Nando's television advertisements: A multisemiotic approach

• Main Author: Roberts, Zulpha
• Other Authors: Banda, Felix
• Language: en
• Published: University of the Western Cape 2018
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11394/5836

Magister Artium - MA (Linguistics, Language and Communication) === This thesis explored the mobility of semiosis other than language in the discourse of television advertising. Gilje (2010) highlights that remediation is the defining characteristic of new digital media and researchers have been slow in the development of theories and frameworks within multimodal phenomena. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore how Nando's producers recycle semiotic resources in the selected television advertisements. The researcher used a multimodal/multisemiotic approach, in which, concepts of semiotic remediation as re-purposing, resemiotisation and intertextuality proved to be a common discourse practice used by Nando's producers to produce new meaning in the new mediated representation. The researcher demonstrated that the 'new' advertisements created a new world order that is both real and fictional. This means that Nando's producers were able to remediate real life aspects and recontextualise them into their fictional advertisements, and vice versa, to evoke immediacy and hypermediacy. The double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy is complemented by the notion of semiotic remediation, and considered an aspect of remediation. Hence, the researcher's contribution towards this study was to introduce the notions of remediation and the double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy as tools in the social semiotic approach to multimodality. Moreover, this study showed that the Nando's advertising discourse relies primarily on everyday social discourses of culture, economics, religion and politics as their base for creativity. Thus, the researcher demonstrated, through the notion of chronotopes, how Nando's has invented advertisements that were able to conflate past and current timescales through the integration and recycling of prior semiotic material from past objects, events and activities for new purposes. This investigation proved, to a large extent, that the production of Nando's advertisements are re-presentations of prior semiotic material in time and space.