Barthes’ semiotic analysis: advantages, limitations and prospects

The article provides an overview of semiotic analysis offered by Roland Barthes, its advantages and limitations. The author argues that the methodology presented by Barthes in his work The Rhetoric of the Image (1964) could become a basis for a more complex methodology of multimodal texts analysis in the field of advertising. In The Rhetoric of the Image Barthes demonstrates how to distinguish and analyze advertising messages based on the advert of the Italian pasta ‘Panzani’. Barthes’ methodology includes identification of advertising messages and their meanings. Barthes provides a description of the images and messages that the ‘Panzani’ advert contains. Those messages are linguistic, connoted and denoted. The methodology of semiotic analysis enables one to explore denoted and connoted meanings of the advertising message of a multimodal advertising text. According to Barthes, the connoted meaning is derived from the denoted meaning of the advertising message. This aspect makes the most valuable advantage of Barthes’ approach. The idea of connoted meaning also relates to another Barthes’ concept of myth integration. Myths might be integrated into advertising and thus convey a deeper meaning of it. The proposed methodology might be applied to analysis of multimodal advertising texts as their structure is formed by elements from different semiotic systems. However, the elimination of a recipient outlines one of the limitations of the proposed methodology since it makes one focus only on the linguistic features and ignore the perception process. Cognitive approach to multimodal texts could help to overcome this limitation. Due to analysis of conceptual domains of different structural components of a multimodal text it might be possible to explore interconnection mechanisms between the components.