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An Social-Semiotic Analysis of Leaflets in theKorean War

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ABSTRACT

This study paid attention to the importance of communications involving leaflets at the Korean War in terms of psychological tactics and made an analysis of the social-semiotic features of the fliers scattered at the hostilities. In this connection, this survey took a close look at 42 kinds of leaflets strewn at the battle and looked into the general features and tendencies of the leaflets issued during the period from the perspective of social semiotics on the basis of the findings. The study was designed to examine how one can derive meanings from the images of the objects and how they correlate with broader semantic systems by reading images through the concepts of ‘social semiotics' when it comes to an analysis of leaflet images. With this in mind, this paper resorted to Kress, G.'s and van Leeuwen, T.'s social-semiotic approaches as a vehicle for focusing on visual signs. This study aimed at clarifying how the flier images were expressed with what image practices and symbols and what kinds of social meanings the signs conveyed through these techniques. The factors of this analysis may help to investigate the features of the fliers and to draw their logics and effects in light of social semiotics, which will offer a profound insight into the military strategies, the occupation policies, and the propaganda policies of the state parties concerned and the cultural acceptance of contemporary ideologies as well. The study shows that the South and the North forged mirror-image effects from the angles of their recognition of each other, their propaganda, and their ways of waging psychological wars and that both the states' leaflets displayed social-semiotic characteristics: the ideology-based puppet- regime claims of the parties, their military strategies and their ways of waging wars, a big difference in each state's philosophy on wars and the leaflets using their tactical psychology operations. The standardizing tendencies of visual communications based on mass media and the Internet, or currently dominant visual languages, should be kept in mind in preparation for future war. It is necessary that a wide diversity of social-semiotic application should, as far as various visual representations are concerned, be made by combining the vividness that attracts the attention of viewers with persuasive communications designed to deliver messages to propagandize and to evoke the emotions that one wants.

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