‘Third Meanings’: On the Semantics of the Sign Elements Position in Polycode Texts

The relevance of the topic is determined by the scientific community growing interest in the problems of the media texts polysemiotic impact. The aim of the article is to rethink in relation to modern, radically changed technologies the Umberto Eco’s concept of structuring audiovisual text (1970s). The author focuses on the semiotic-rhetorical interpretation of the tools used by Eco, as well as on his vocabulary, with the specification of parameters related to the potential distribution of meanings across the registers of the polycode text. The study is based on the methodology of applied semiotics, which allows the analysis of television programs as individual cultural phenomena, by eliminating the direct content of the episodes, while maintaining the general principles of systematicity, integrity and complexity. Given article focuses on the problematic areas of media communication and on the mechanisms of viewer correlation of words and images that reveal additional meanings to the screen-text. The author examines the symbolic elements of coded and non-coded nature, and the mechanisms of their perception by the media recipients. The ligaments between the visual and verbal fragments are consistently laid down at the stage of the author’s media message creation, based on the principles of illustrativeness and (or) paradoxality. Their potential integral impact on the viewer leads to the conclusion about the holistic nature of the media message perception by the audience, which doesn’t divide the polycode text into autonomous components. The transforming of the word’ position towards the image can be the source either of the obvious (clarified) or unexpected (unspoken) perceived meanings.