Geosemiótica y Análisis del Discurso Mediado: Actores Sociales, Orden de Interacción y Semiótica del Espacio

Geosemiotics within the Mediated Discourse Analysis approach

Geosemiotics analyses how language appears in the material world and how everything that surrounds us can influence the particular actions we take. Four central elements must be taken into account when doing geosemiotic analysis:

• Social actor: the person who moves and acts in the physical world and emits different signals, such as race, age, gender, etc.
• Interaction order: the set of social relationships we engage in and try to maintain with the other people who are in our presence.
• Visual semiotics: pays attention to aspects such as how the interaction order is represented visually and how the placement of visual symbols affects their interpretation.
• Place semiotics: all human actions take place somewhere in the physical universe. Both semiotic spaces (which provide pictures, discourses or actions) and non-semiotic spaces (spaces where signs are forbidden) are taken into consideration.

Compare the method and concepts used by post-structuralists and social theorists to those of conversation analysts in unit 5.

Context

Post-structuralists: focus on the history of the social practices around their topic of research, as well as on all the political and sociological aspects related to the discourse in question.

Conversation analysts: do not require much background information about the broader social context, as it is not considered necessary for a successful analysis.

The relationship of discourse with the real world, objective truth and the result of its generalization

Foucault claims that discourse constitutes reality because it studies the material and the cultural together, a claim that is part of the constructionist theory of meaning.

For post-structuralists and post-modernists, there are no absolute truths. Truth is always relative to the discourse or language game of the moment. The set of knowledge/power relations that produces the truths of one historical period will inevitably change and be replaced by other truths in another period. Thus, post-structuralists are against universal truths or absolute ethical positions.

The position of analysts with respect to the topic: are they politically engaged?

All critical discourse analysis perspectives necessarily take a politically engaged stance. A critical or politically engaged stance of some kind is probably the most common position among discourse analysts.