A Semiotic Approach to Discourse Analysis: A Case Study of the Movie: A Cube of Sugar

This study presents a theoretical - practical mechanism to analyze the discourse spaces with a semiotic approach that could be used in communication research and cinematic studies. To do so, we first provide an overview of the theoretical bases of the “semiotic” approach to discourse analysis, along with the practical foundations of this approach. The semiotic approach seeks to penetrate the semantic depth and explore the unstable meanings of movies within the discourse framework; the discourse that, particularly in cinema, forms the spaces in which the meaning creation process happens.
This research, simultaneously and in relation to each other, studies two main categories of discourse spaces namely the elements of the physical and the emotional space by which it explores the meaning in each and all of the movie-shots. In order to provide further implications for this approach, the study analyzes “A Cube of Sugar”, a well praised and important Iranian movie that contains a considerable semiotic aspects. At the end we suggest some concluding points about this approach to discourse analysis with examples from the movie.