Framing Ecological Crisis: A Multimodal Semiotic Analysis of Contemporary Environmental Posters

Abstract

The study examines the semiology of language used in contemporary environmental posters and its role in creating persuasive meaning within the context of the Anthropocene. This study argues that language in environmental posters is not merely an explanatory aid, but a key semiotic instrument that interacts with images, compositions, colours and typography to shape perceptions of ecological catastrophe. This qualitative, multimodal study draws on semiotics, the pragmatic philosophy of language, text-image relations and social semiotics. The corpus consists of four modern posters: STOP Plastic Pollution, Women & Climate Change, The War for Water and Global Warming (Warning!). These posters illustrate four dominant linguistic strategies in environmental graphic discourse: commands, naming, conceptual reframing and wordplay or lexical deformation. Environmental messages that use a slogan function based on speech acts such as force, implicature, anchorage, and multimodal reinforcement are examined. The study concludes that the persuasive force of environmental posters emerges from the integrated interaction of verbal and visual signs, and that language is indispensable to understanding how ecological crisis is publicly framed in the Anthropocene.