Semiotic and Rhetoric Analysis of Adoption in the Eyes of The Indian Association for Promotion of Adoption and Child Welfare

Found at:http://www.karmayog.org

    Semiotics and Rhetorics differ in the way they relay the meaning of a word or symbol to get the point across.  Semiotics refers the relation of a symbol and an object relation meaning that the symbol has a relationship to the object.  Rhetorics is more of discovering usually what I consider to be the hidden meaning of a subject.  It also is related more to speech versus the symbol given in semiotics.

While performing the semiotic and rhetoric analysis on the image above I came up with the following conclusions:

The verbal signifier in the image is the statement “Adopt. You will receive more than you can give.”  I took it as meaning the creator of the image is wanting to persuade people into adopting because the gift they will receive is the love from the child and in the creator’s head that means more than anything to a person adopting.  The visual signifier is the image of a child being blown up in size to hold its adopted parent which to me is giving opposite roles to which I am use to seeing; a parent holding a child not the other way around.  It is giving the impression that the child can/will love the adopting parent more than ever.  On the rhetoric side of things, the audience targeted is people who can adopt children and people who are thinking/interested in adopting children.  The kairos of the image is showing how loving and caring the child is toward the parent.  In the logos perspective the image does not state anything about the cost but it does imply the a benefit of adopting a child is love.  In the ethos perspective credibility of the writer is given because their logo is in the right top right hand corner but as far as the statement being made throughout the image is not a credible simply because we don’t know if the author is speaking from experience.  Last but not least is pathos.  The image relates to the audience by giving a subtle and sweet image.   Overall, if I was someone looking to adopt, I’m not sure if this image would convince me to do so because I would want to know more about the adoption that the writer is portraying