QUALITATIVE TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND SEMIOTICS
While quantitative content analyses are descriptive in nature, aiming at ‘the
manifest content of communication’ (Berelson 1952: 18), textual analyses in the
tradition of literary criticism and art history are usually interpretive, aiming at what
is sometimes termed latent meaning. The basic questions, consequently, are
‘qualitative’: What does the text really mean, and how are its meanings organized?
Still, analyses may be concerned with either particulars or generalities. While
focusing on features that are characteristic of a single work or a small group of
works, studies also examine how the given works differ from all other works in
structural and thematic terms.
The sources of this analytical practice include the attentive ‘close reading’
practiced by the Anglo-American school of New Criticism and its French
counterpart, the explication du texte. In both of these traditions, it is the singular
or particular analytical object, its parts and its whole, which is at the center of
interest. The underlying assumption, and the very reason for giving particular
attention to the works in question, is that they are thought to be significant carriers
of cultural values and insights, or that they provide important and valuable
aesthetic experiences. This type of textual analysis has been transferred
successfully to film studies – an area of media studies that deals with textual
objects which are, in some ways, comparable to the unique works analyzed by
literary critics and art historians (see, e.g., Robin Wood on Hitchcock (1965) and
on Hawks (1968)). However, the basic aim of most other media research has been
to study prototypes, regularities, repeated patterns, and features which are shared
by masses of texts. Accordingly, textual analyses of media have usually taken their
inspiration from humanistic traditions which are oriented toward the study of
generalities, particularly structural linguistics and general semiotics.
Applied to media studies, Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1916) linguistic
dichotomy of langue and parole has proven to be an effective conceptual tool:
concrete media texts may be regarded as instances of parole, as generated from
one or more langues. Even though the various instances of parole are carried by
different types of signifiers (images, written or spoken language, combinations of
these, etc.); are transmitted through different media; and are produced according
to specific rules, it may be argued that all sign production is based on certain
general principles. Whether the analytical intention is to reconstruct the langue
behind a group of texts, or to study a single text as parole, knowledge of such
general textual principles is useful. The underlying langue is usually understood as
a ‘code’ that consists of signs, on the one hand, and of series of syntactic rules, on
the other. Meaning production is thus thought of as a process by which signs are
selected from latent groups of possibilities (paradigms) and combined according
to the relevant syntactic rules into strings of text (syntagms).
Saussure (1916) defined the sign as a material object – a signifier – evoking a
certain mental representation – a signified. Corresponding to these two aspects,
there are two main types of semiotic media analysis: a formal and material study
of signs in the media, and an analysis of media contents as representations with
an inherent meaning. However, since the two aspects of the sign are
interdependent, there can be no absolute distinction between the two types of
textual analysis.
