The Mechanisms of Color Meaning-Making in Tehran’s Commercial Billboards: Case Study of Moallem Insurance, Taj Washing Powder and Cheetooz Snack Commercial Billboards

Monfared, Narjes; Haghbin, Faride

The Mechanisms of Color Meaning-Making in Tehran’s Commercial Billboards: Case Study of Moallem Insurance, Taj Washing Powder and Cheetooz Snack Commercial Billboards

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Alzahra University

Abstract

This research was planned to investigate color semiotic system in the discourse of some commercial billboards in Tehran to systematically reveal dimensions of meaning-making in colors. The research corpus involved three Commercial Billboards of Moallem Insurance, Taj Washing Powder and Cheetooz Snack companies. The corpus was collected by field work, through taking pictures from the billboards in Tehran, between1392 - 1394. The research method was descriptive-analytic. Accordingly, an integrated model was utilized for analyzing the corpus, which included methodological considerations of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2002), Van Leeuwen (2011), and Holtzschue’s (2006) theoretical foundations, which served as basis for using color minimal features and color Metafunctions as concepts with which to study meaning-making mechanisms in colors. Furthermore, Color Harmony was applied in addition to Color Contrast. Finally, the results showed that meaning-making mechanisms of colors’ semiotic system in the research corpus could be studied better by means of color Minimal Features and color Metafunctions in the Socio-Cultural and Situational contexts. Eventually, in this regards, color Textual Metafunction by means of Inside textual relations among color semiotic modes and through outside textual relations with other semiotic modes such as image and language, could play a key role in meaning of colors as compared to Ideational and Interpersonal Metafunctions.

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