Master Program: Language,

Communication & Society

Semester 1: Fall 2021/2022

Language Discourse in Use and the Multidisciplinary Advantage.

“If a hundred people watch a film in a cinema, they will end up with a hundred different
meanings for that film”, a commonplace statement often used to evoke the massive
interpretation variation among people watching the same film or –if the film is semantically
deciphered as a hyponym for its source- any media product in general. This article
specifically analyses the extent to which this statement is true, i.e. the same media message
is interpreted differently by different recipients, using semiotic, semantic and pragmatic
approaches, and suggests potential causes and possible consequences of such variation
based on previous communication and media theories.
Answering the question of whether meaning is fixed and uniform or changeable and prone
to variation requires us to first investigate its origin (where do meanings come from?).
According to De Saussure (1916), the meaning an arbitrary sign -be it verbal or nonverbal-
acquires is primarily established through social convention or agreement. That is to say,
linguistic and other semiotic signs do not have intrinsic meaning but we agree to associate
certain ‘signifiers’ with certain ‘signifieds’. B. Pearce and Cronen (2004) provide us with
understanding of how individuals create and coordinate these meanings, and G. H. Mead
(1934) in his Symbolic Interactionism explains how people (other than the ones who created
the meanings) learn these meanings through communication. Based on this alone, we can
imagine how our hundred film viewers can interpret the film differently if they had different
mental representations of the same signs; nonetheless, the possible dissimilarity in
interpretation usually takes place because of other reasons. Mead explains how meanings
are prone to modification over time, and Barthes (1972) further illustrates –in his
Mythologies- how signs, for countless reasons, can acquire new connotation(s) apart from
their literal, denotative meanings which turns the conventional signifier/signified model into
a new signifier/signifieds one in which a simple sign can be used to refer to multiple things.

1
So perhaps some of the viewers did not have the chance to learn the possible connotations
of some signs and therefore they ended up with different interpretations.
Apart from these semiotic explanations, a simple look at semantics reveals how the simplest
of words (linguistic signs), not counting homonyms or vague and ambiguous ones, can have
multiple lexicographic definitions, let alone phrases, sentences and larger units of discourse.
Furthermore, pragmatics tells us how the transmission of meaning depends not only on
structural and linguistic knowledge of the speaker and listener but also on the context of the
utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the
speaker, and other factors. On top of that, a close analysis of McLuhan’s famous phrase “the
medium is the message” shows how the meaning of a message, or media message for that
matter, is also affected by the medium- the channel of communication- employed to
transmit such message; this might explain why the same story can be interpreted differently
if read on a novel than if watched on a movie or heard on a radio (again, the same story if
watched on two different movies can still produce different interpretations). This huge
variety of potential meanings can help us justify the opposing statements that are made and
the alternative viewpoints that are advanced which put the meaning of some media
products in a state of contention. The first statement surely seems much more plausible by
now.
In this regard, Durant (2010) considers the general question of ‘what does a media product
mean?’ to be too vague to capture the crux of alternative interpretations being contested.
He argues that the meaning of an utterance or text lies somewhere between the strategic
act of choosing a particular form of discourse and the consequences of that discourse for
someone who is its recipient; thus, he distinguishes nine different sorts of questions
‘meaning issues’ arise—who or what it refers to?...who will read it this way?...and others
(Durant, 2010). By contrast, a person cannot help but argue how the fact that we, humans,
are able to communicate in a day-to-day basis without much misunderstanding despite the
myriad semantic and pragmatic meanings our statements can be subject to can refute the
argument that people interpret the same media message differently. Meanings typically
involve some degree of predictability either because they are conventionally associated with
a particular linguistic or other symbolic form, or because ,in context, meaning is prompted
as an inference that the interpreter is strongly encouraged or at least highly likely to draw
(Durant, 2010). For that reason, it is very unlikely not to notice the political insinuation in
novels like Orwell’s 1984 or the parallels between historical events or names in a novel
(religious characters referred to in N. Mahfouz’s Children of Gebelawi for instance) or a
movie… etc.
To Conclude, although much can be said in this regard, just because a movie –or any other
media product- can be decoded in various ways, it does not mean that a Moroccan actor
speaking ‘bad language’ or a Muslim playing the role of a terrorist in a Hollywood movie, or
any re-contextualized social practice or radicalized groups and languages can be decoded by
the audience in an optimistic ‘candid’ or naïve way that will make them somehow love
Muslims, respect the practices, and value the languages; the hundred viewers might have
different mental representations of the word ‘cat’, but it is sure as earth it is not a bird. Still,
it is not possible for us to claim again that the messages are completely interpreted in
exactly the same way with only unremarkable differences. We can borrow Hall’s

2
encoding/decoding model of communication –although used in a slightly different context-
to explain how the encoded messages can be decoded from three positions: the
dominant/hegemonic position through which the receiver takes the actual meaning directly
by decoding the message exactly in the way it was encoded because both the sender and
receiver operate within the dominant point of view and fully share the codes necessary to
interpret and reproduce the intended meaning; the negotiated position when he/she
acknowledges the messages but does not accept it all; and the oppositional position when
the receiver decodes the message in a globally contrary way due to different backgrounds.

References
Barthes, Roland (1972). Mythologies, Annette Lavers (trans.), Hill and Wang, New York.
Durant, A. (2010). Meaning in the Media : Discourse, Controversy and Debate. Cambrige
University Press.
Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1934.