Sociosemiotics of Advertising

Experiences, Themes and Perspectives

Abstract

This paper aims to retrace the main stages of sociosemiotics of advertising in Italy, from the influence of French semiotics to the interdisciplinary dialogue with mar­keting and sociology of consumption. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the main research themes explored by the sociosemiotics of advertising in Italy, such as: the lan­guage of food, in its multiple and complex dimensions; the representation of family mod­els; the semiotic analysis of practices and, in particular, of consumption practices; the study of crisis communication, with specific reference to the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper then shows how, over the last ten years, sociosemiotics in Italy has been char­acterised by a particular attention to the analysis of social texts and how these studies are connected to the structuralist and generative approach of Greimasian semiotics: hence a series of tools to identify the dominant values, the narrative and discursive structures recurring within the texts, with the aim to grasp the representations of the social, the images of everyday life, the changing interactions between society and adver­tising texts.