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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
structure of access to different discourses is determined by social
position’ (Morley 1983, 113; cf. Morley 1992, 89–90). Different
interpretive communities have access to different textual and interpretive
codes (which offer them the potential to understand and
sometimes also to produce texts which employ them). Morley added
that any individual or group might operate different decoding strategies
in relation to different topics and different contexts. A person
might make ‘oppositional’ readings of the same material in one
context and ‘dominant’ readings in other contexts (Morley 1981, 9
and 1992, 135). He noted that in interpreting viewers’ readings of
mass media texts attention should be paid not only to the issue of
agreement (acceptance/rejection) but to comprehension, relevance
and enjoyment (Morley 1981, 10 and 1992, 126–7, 136). There is
thus considerable scope for variety in the ways in which individuals
engage with such codes.
The interpretation of signs by their users can be seen from
a semiotic perspective as having three levels, loosely related to
C. W. Morris’s framework for branches of semiotics (Morris 1938/
1970, 6–7).
1. syntactic: recognition of the sign (in relation to other signs);
2. semantic: comprehension of the intended meaning of the
sign;
3. pragmatic: interpretation of the sign in terms of relevance,
agreement, etc.
The most basic task of interpretation involves the identification of
what a sign represents (denotation) and may require some degree of
familiarity with the medium and the representational codes involved.
This is particularly obvious in the case of language, but may also
apply in the case of visual media such as photographs and films.
Some would not grant this low-level process the label of ‘interpretation’
at all, limiting this term to such processes as the extraction
of a ‘moral’ from a narrative text. However, some theorists take the
stance that comprehension and interpretation are inseparable (e.g.
Mick and Politi 1989, 85).
Semiotics has not been widely applied to the practice of decoding.
While social semiotics stakes a claim to the study of situated