semiotics

The paper discusses the complex genre of tourist booklet as a fixed type of multimodal text that serves in a communicative situation of promoting a tourist product. This genre is a semiotically complex phenomenon, which conveys information through different semiotic systems. The methodological issues are posed as to a perspective model of genre analysis that would take into account the multimodal nature of genres. The author points to major hindrances that an analyst faces when doing multimodal analysis.

Despite both being great names in semiotics, Roland Barthes and Juri Lotman have more differences than they share similarities – not only because of their different political and historico-cultural environments, but also because they do not have the same object of study: it is ‘ideology’ for Barthes, and ‘culture’ for Lotman. Thus, there is no intellectual common ground between them, yet comparing them can lead us to a more important question: what is semiotics, and what has structuralism to do with it.