Semiotical Analysis Of The Cultural Visual Image System Of The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

Proposed by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, semiotics, which is a science of phenomenon and connotation, has been studied early in the west and there have been various theoretical systems and schools. Saussure's semiotical theory has been largely studied in China since the eighties, 20th and has been focusing on two subjects. The first one is Saussure's semiotical thoughts and its basic principles and the second one is the studies on Saussure's pairs of concepts. Since semiotics was originated from linguistics, its significance and practice have been obviously embodied in applied linguistics. And as a new methodology as well as a new aspect, it has the practical significance in other fields, especially in arts. During the recent years, there have been some studies about Saussure's theoretical thoughts applied to analyze advertisements and other cultural and artistic phenomenon.The tradition of Saussure's semiotical theories is to extend the subjects of semiotics from linguistic semiotical fields to non-linguistic semiotical fields. However, Saussure's research was still confined to linguistic fields and there have been two major problems in the researches in the semiotical fields. The first one is that most of the studies are over-theoretical and not so practical in use. The second one is that the studies on Saussure's semiotical theories have been mainly focused on the linguistic functions but give little attention to its social functions.In order to add some new blood to the semiotical field, and to extend the subjects of semiotical studies, as well as to give some useful implications to the relative fields, this thesis chooses"Semiotical Analysis of the Cultural Visual Image System of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games"as its topic, raising the following two research questions based on the above problems:Question1: What are the basic elements of each cultural visual image of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games? Question2: What are the semiotical significances of the identified elements in each cultural visual image of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games?With theoretical analysis and empirical research as its research methods, this thesis uses Saussure's semiotical theories as well as the documents on the traditional Chinese culture to analyze the five main cultural visual images in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, namely, the emblem, the mascot, the medals, the torch and the designs of the programs, aiming at extending the usage of Saussure's semiotical theories from the linguistic field to the cultural and the artistic fields, in order to make the theories more practical and to give some advise to the cross-cultural communication as well as to offer useful promotional ideas to the large-scaled sports or cultural games in China in the future.