Maria KERAMYDA: "Gender stereotypes in Greek Television Advertisements for Children"

This study provides an approach to an analytical framework for cultural studies of ideological representations in visual mass media. Our aim is to explore the use of gendered codes, dominant ideologies and stereotypes in children's toy advertisements and in order to do so we also try to propose/produce an inter-scientific analysis model for the purposes of children's TV advertisements. We also apply the semiotic model on the specific advertisement of the baby doll - Baby Amore and we detect a gendered and family code, which emphasises the role of motherhood.      [Article in English]

Göran KJELLMER: "Literary Conventions and the Human Body"

Changes in speakers' states of mind are often reflected in their facial expressions or bodily movements. The relation between a physical expression and the state of mind that goes with it is often firmly established and conventionalised. Writers can make use of such correlations and indicate without having to describe them what emotions and sensations their characters experience by referring to their physical actions. The paper is concerned with unintentional and perhaps unconscious com­municative manifestations and discusses the degree to which they have become conventionalised. A list of bodily expressions and their corresponding states of mind is drawn up, and illustrative material is supplied from two large language corpora.      [Article in English]

Kawakib AL-MOMANI: "Experimental Study on the Interpretation of Gender Role Manifestation in ESL Reading Texts"

This study investigates how signs inserted in texts are sometimes lost in the process of interpretation. It focuses on the decoding strategies Arab students at university level use in interpreting the meanings in their English reading texts and the impact of their cultural rooted thinking on their choices of interpretation. A short narrative English text in which gender role stereotypes are encoded was chosen. The text was first analyzed semiotically within Hall's (1974) framework of encoding and decoding embracing the three factors of sender, message and receiver. Then the text was given as a reading task to 100 Jordanian English major students, freshmen and sophomores at Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST). Their responses were analyzed and interpreted quantitatively and qualitatively. Three strategies of decoding were identified: the dominant code, the negotiated strategies, and oppositional strategies. The study showed that the majority of the students opted for the negotiated and oppositional strategies in interpreting the signs related to gender issues. It also showed that their rooted gendered thinking played a crucial role in their interpretation of the embedded message and lead to loss of the intended message.

Keywords: Semiotics, interpretation, encoding, decoding, dominant code, negotiated strategy, oppositional strategy, stereotypes, culture, gendered thinking.      [Article in English]

Ibrahim TAHA: "Semiotics of the Literary Title: Three Categories of Self-Reference"

The basic assumption is that a literary title, like the body of the text, includes various historical, cultural, biographical, literary, and stylistic signs. It may be termed the collection point or the melting pot of different types of raw materials. It processes, improves, and reproduces these raw materials in a certain dosage, which the author tries to adjust to the needs of both text and reader. Accordingly, I am referring to the relationship between the title and these factors as "mutual incorporation" or intertextuality, based on the three categories of reference: the title as a system of external reference, the title as a system of self-reference, and the title as a system of internal reference.      [Article in English]