Boxman-Shabtai, L. (2020) - Meaning Multiplicity Across Communication Subfields Bridging The Gaps.

Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Meaning Multiplicity Across Communication
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Subfields: Bridging the Gaps
Lillian Boxman-Shabtai
Department of Communication and Journalism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Subdisciplines in communication studies have developed competing and self-contained

theories of meaning multiplicity. Arguing that this fragmented scholarship falls short
of grasping the full scope of the phenomenon, this article offers Decoding
Convergence–Divergence (DCD) as an interdisciplinary analytical and conceptual
framework. Synthesizing principles from cognitive, cultural, and speaker-centered
approaches to meaning multiplicity, this framework was applied in a study that
examined news coverage of a CEO’s initiative to address income inequality and its
reception by different segments of the American audience. The study’s results provide
a novel demonstration of the joint contribution of opposing theories to the
understanding of meaning multiplicity. Specifically, it found that textual polysemy,
partisan selective perception, and the use of strategic ambiguity coalesced in the
interpretive dynamics of this story. Based on these results, the article discusses the
contribution of DCD to bridging competing approaches and the potential applications
of the framework.
Keywords: Communication Theory, Income Inequality, Interdisciplinarity,

Mixed-Methods, News, Polysemy, Selective Perception, Strategic Ambiguity
doi: 10.1093/joc/jqaa008
Meaning multiplicity is the phenomenon of a text (broadly defined as a set of

signs) invoking different interpretations, such as a gap between the reception of a
message and the intentions of its creator, and/or variances between different audien-
ces in their reception of a single message. Meaning multiplicity has been associated
with a multitude of factors, processes and contexts. For example, it may reflect the
political biases of its receivers. The Colbert Report was a parody of right-wing cable
news pundits, which developed a cult following of liberal viewers. However, an ex-
periment conducted in its early days found that both conservatives and liberals
thought the show was funny. Whereas liberals perceived Colbert’s performance as
satirical, conservatives understood him as a sincere figure, who was serious about
Corresponding author: Lillian Boxman-Shabtai; e-mail: lillyboxman@gmail.com
Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423 V C The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of 401
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Bridging the Gaps L. Boxman-Shabtai
his anti-liberal comments (LaMarre, Landreville, & Beam, 2009). In other cases,
meaning multiplicity derives from subversive readings that stem from distinct cul-
tural backgrounds. For instance, Liebes and Katz (1990) described how Russian
immigrants in Israel critically interpreted the American iconic program Dallas,

depicting it as American propaganda and expressing distaste toward its “rotten
capitalism.”
Meaning multiplicity might also derive from speakers’ intentional use of ambigu-
ity. For example, in 1944 Erwin Schrödinger published What Is Life? The Physical
Aspect of the Living Cell. The book, which examined genetics from the point of view
of physics, was acclaimed for its role in catalyzing the discipline of molecular biology.
According to Ceccarelli (2001), the book’s impact derived from its repackaging of
existing ideas in a polysemic way. The term “polysemy” relates to a word/phrase (in
its original linguistic use) or a longer utterance/text (in its broader application in com-
munication) that can be interpreted in multiple ways. Schrödinger’s polysemic writing
allowed for different interpretations by physicists and biologists, both seeing their
interests as being served in the book. Accepting the message for different reasons, the
distinct disciplinary communities were able to pursue an interdisciplinary alliance.
Meaning multiplicity is a complex phenomenon with divergent sources and pos-
sible implications. As the examples above illustrate, it can represent a speaker’s fail-
ure to get the message across and it can denote effective communication; It may
lead to a productive unification of discrete audiences, pluralism, or polarization.
However, instead of receiving the multifaceted treatment it warrants, research about
meaning multiplicity, a central puzzle in communication studies, is currently frag-
mented between subdisciplines. Arguing that fragmentation hinders understanding
of the phenomenon, this article presents an interdisciplinary path forward.
The article’s first section describes three approaches to meaning multiplicity in
communication studies: cognitive, cultural, and speaker-centered. It analyzes their
strengths and weaknesses, arguing that while providing useful insights into meaning
multiplicity, they fail to grasp the phenomena in its full complexity. The second sec-
tion addresses this gap by offering Decoding Convergence–Divergence (DCD) as an
interdisciplinary framework to analyze meaning multiplicity. The third section illus-
trates this framework through a case study of a news story about a CEO’s pledge to
address wage inequality. It demonstrates why and how only the combination be-
tween different approaches explains the multiple meanings ascribed to this story by
audiences. The article concludes by discussing how DCD contributes to the creation
of conceptual bridges across subdisciplines and by charting the framework’s limita-
tions and potential applications.
Three approaches to meaning multiplicity in communication studies
Meaning multiplicity has been interpreted, ironically, in communication studies in

different ways, each promoting distinct understandings of its source and power dy-
namics (Ceccarelli, 1998). The review below clusters these interpretations as
402 Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423

L. Boxman-Shabtai Bridging the Gaps
cognitive, cultural, and speaker-centered approaches. Since it covers a vast amount

of scholarship, it inevitably sacrifices nuances within the surveyed literature, and
does not provide a comprehensive summary of each approach. However, using a
“big picture” perspective enables a comparison between the fundamental assump-

tions of these approaches, which is necessary for the construction of an interdisci-
plinary framework.
Cognitive approaches
Cognitive approaches attribute multiple meanings to a receiver’s biased information
processing. These approaches, which evolved through studies of social psychology
(e.g., Bruner & Postman, 1947), theories of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1962)
and motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990), posit that people unconsciously process in-
formation in ways that are congruent with their needs, goals, and values. In commu-
nication studies, cognitive approaches have been most fully formulated in
“selectivity theories,” which described selectivity in exposure, perception, and reten-
tion as processes that mitigate the power of mass communication (Lazarsfeld,
Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944).
Particularly relevant to this discussion, selective perception is a process by which
individuals perceive information in a way that favors an interpretation congruent
with their predispositions. Empirical studies of selective perception typically fol-
lowed experimental designs: They categorized participants by pre-existing attitudes,
exposed them to a media message, and then probed for their interpretation of the
message. These studies have suggested two types of perceptual distortion:
“assimilation” is an individual’s perception that a message is closer to his/her pre-
existing attitudes than it really is, whereas “contrast” is the perception that a mes-
sage is further away from one’s attitudes than it really is (O’Keefe, 2002).
Studies that focused on entertainment like sports (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954) and
comedy (Vidmar & Rokeach, 1974) highlighted assimilation. For example, the afore-
mentioned Colbert Report study (LaMarre et al., 2009) illustrated how different audi-
ences enjoyed the show because their interpretation of it reaffirmed personal political
beliefs. Conversely, studies about selective perception amongst news viewers often
demonstrated contrast. Coining the term “hostile media effect,” Vallone, Ross, and
Lepper (1985), found that following exposure to news coverage of the 1982 Sabra and
Shatila massacre in Beirut, pro-Israeli and pro-Arab students rated the same news
item as biased against their side. Similar cross-partisan perceptions of media hostility
have been documented in responses to news reports about issues such as abortion and
GMOs (e.g., Gunther, Miller, & Liebhart, 2009; Hartmann & Tanis, 2013).
Recently, due to the proliferation of media outlets with strong political agendas,
a growing body of research has expressed concern about patterns of partisans selec-
tively consuming media that conform to their political ideology (e.g., Iyengar &
Hahn, 2009; Stroud, 2011). The combined effects of selective exposure and percep-
tion arguably amplify political extremism by intensifying pre-existing attitudes
Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423 403

(Tsfati & Nir, 2017). For instance, Jamieson and Cappella (2010) found that heavy
Rush Limbaugh listeners possessed distorted perceptions of Bill Clinton’s views dur-
ing the 1996 presidential campaign, believing his positions were much further from
theirs than they were.

Cultural approaches
Cultural approaches postulate what could be seen as the mirror image to cognitive
approaches. Rejecting the notion of unconscious bias, they portray audiences as ac-
tive agents who deliberately evaluate the signs around them, and the media as a cul-
tural forum that invites the articulation of unpredictable and diverse stances
through polysemic texts (Newcomb & Hirsch, 1983).
Catalyzed in Birmingham in the 1970s, cultural approaches have been histori-
cally invested in the relationship between meaning and ideology, probing the me-
dia’s role in articulating and naturalizing hegemony and the audience’s role in
making sense of it. Stuart Hall (1980) argued in Encoding/Decoding that while mass
media encode “preferred meanings” that align with a hegemonic perception of the
social order, members of the audience may accept this meaning, negotiate with it, or
reject it completely. Hall’s model hinted at the dual residency of meaning multiplic-
ity as emerging from the encoded text and its decoders. Cultural scholars
acknowledged this duality, although in practice most empirical studies have focused
on either texts or audiences.
Text-focused studies explored the attributes of texts as sources of multiple mean-
ings by conducting semiotic analyses, namely, probes into the role that visual and verbal
signs and symbols play in constructing interpretation. Reasoning that audience decod-
ings reflect the degree of openness embedded in texts, some provided insight into
mechanisms of meaning multiplicity in particular media artifacts (e.g., Caragee, 2003;
Fiske, 1987; Rowland & Strain, 1994; Scott, 2012); Others comparatively differentiated
“open” and “closed” texts (Boxman-Shabtai & Shifman, 2014; Roeh & Cohen, 1992).
Audience-focused studies of interpretation drew on social semiotics, which ex-
plore the social practices that underscore meaning-making, such as membership in
an interpretive community (Jensen, 1991). Characterized as “ethnographies of read-
ing” (Morley, 1980), some examined media reception by embedding themselves in a
community of decoders; Others probed decoding by conducting interviews or by ex-
amining textual traces of reception. They explored the relationship between inter-
pretation and identity, focusing on class (e.g., Morley, 1980), gender (e.g., Ang,
1985; Radway, 1991), and ethnicity/nationality (e.g., Lewis, 1991). Liebes and Katz’s
(1990) aforementioned study of cross-cultural readings of Dallas exemplifies this
type of research.
Speaker-centered approaches
Focusing on message producers, speaker-centered approaches view meaning multi-
plicity as a beneficial outcome, manufactured by skilled individuals and institutions

in order to avoid unpleasant situations or reap rewards. This approach is the least
differentiated disciplinarily, representing research in rhetoric, political, interper-
sonal, and organizational communication.
When clear communication has negative consequences, equivocation arguably

serves a problem-solving function (Bavelas, Black, Chovil, & Mullett, 1990). Coining
the term “strategic ambiguity,” Eisenberg (1984) contended that speakers with high
credibility benefit from initiating ambiguous messages, as they allow deniability and
flexibility, and perhaps most importantly—“unified diversity.” An ambiguous mes-
sage can unite a diverse audience if it encourages the coexistence of different inter-
pretations, as was illustrated in Ceccarelli’s (2001) aforementioned account of
Schrödinger’s successful appeal to distinct disciplinary communities.
The function of unified diversity is especially salient in uses of “dog-whistle” rhe-
toric in the political sphere (Alberston, 2006; Friedman & Kampf, 2014). For exam-
ple, Mendelberg (2001) argued that as racial prejudice became unacceptable in the
United States, presidential candidates wishing to appeal to White audiences evoked
race by coding it implicitly in messages. Conversely, Joseph (2018) recently demon-
strated the utility of strategic ambiguity for powerful women of color wishing to crit-
icize racialized sexism while navigating the complexities of a “post-racial era.”
Commonalities and differences across approaches
Cognitive, cultural and speaker-centered approaches partially overlap. The speaker-

centered concept of “strategic ambiguity” is compatible with cognitive theories of bi-
ased information processing and its concept of “unified diversity” resonates with
cultural theories about polysemy as a feature of commercial media that seek diverse
audiences (Fiske, 1987). However, the three approaches present deep-rooted episte-
mological differences, that manifest themselves in different vocabulary, foci of
analysis, and methods to gauge meaning multiplicity (see summary in Table 1). In a
review of the cognitive–cultural divide, Livingstone (1998) identified three distinc-
tions: audience-text, denotation-connotation, and individuality-sociability. I elabo-
rate below on these distinctions in order to highlight the strengths and blind spots
of the three approaches.
Audience versus text

Cognitive approaches explain audience motivations, preferences and behaviors, but
they either ignore the text or simplify it. In contrast, cultural approaches analyze
texts in depth, and although some of the renowned studies in this tradition explored
audiences with meticulous detail, they do not offer robust theories about the audi-
ence. Neither pays much attention to the institutional creation of mass mediated
messages,1 although both acknowledge its importance. Speaker-centered approaches
offer just that. They typically probe texts as manifestations of the speaker’s objec-
tives, but often sideline the audience. The fragmentation between polysemic texts

Table 1 Cognitive, Cultural, and Speaker-Centered Approaches to Meaning Multiplicity
Cognitive Cultural Speaker-centered

approaches approaches approaches

Keywords Selective perception, Hegemony, poly- Strategic ambiguity,
assimilation and semy, oppositional coded
contrast reading communication
Source of meaning Audience (cognition) Text Speaker
multiplicity Audience (identity) Text
Operationalization Denotation Connotation Mixed
of meaning Individual Social
Method of Positivist Interpretive Mixed
investigation
Implications Perceptual distortion, Semiotic democracy, Speaker popularity,
extremism, subversion, unified diversity
polarization pluralism
and polysemic responses is limiting and artificial, as the two are equally important
elements of meaning multiplicity (see Livingstone, 1998; Neuman, 2016).
Denotation versus connotation

Cognitive approaches, utilizing positivist methods and quantitative measures, typi-
cally focus on denotational (literal) aspects of meaning. Accordingly, selective per-
ception is gauged by evaluating comprehension: Do respondents believe the
message is true or false, accurate or biased? Is it similar or dissimilar to one’s atti-
tudes? In many cases, such evaluations are premised on an assumption that there is
one correct reading to a message (thus subjects misunderstand or distort it). In con-
trast, cultural approaches, utilizing interpretive methods and open-ended probing
techniques, typically focus on connotational (associative and culturally embedded)
aspects of meaning. They gauge texts in terms of their normative and poetic compo-
nents, asking questions like: What do aesthetic and plot related features signify?
Who are the good guys and the bad guys? Such inquiries are based on the premise
that texts are polysemic, hence not restricted to one correct reading. The separation
between denotation and connotation overlooks important relationships between
these two aspects of decoding in fostering meaning multiplicity. Denotative differen-
ces may influence connotative divergences. For example, Schrøder (2000) found
that assessments made by respondents about the ethnicity of a character on a charity
ad (denotation) influenced subsequent interpretations about the aims of the charity
organization (connotation). Denotation and connotation may also mark different
patterns of meaning multiplicity. For example, Condit (1989) found that pro-life
and pro-choice students shared a similar denotative decoding of a show about abor-
tion, but differed in their connotative decodings.

Individuality versus sociability

Cognitive approaches conceptualize perception as a private mental process, which is
reflected in the use of individual questionnaires and attitudinal measures to probe it.
In contrast, cultural approaches treat interpretation as a social co-creation of mean-

ing and expression of social identity. They probe interpretation in social settings
through conversations (e.g., interviews) or discourse analyses (e.g., of user-
generated-content). The separation between individuality and sociability is limiting
because both settings shape media reception: Sometimes we consume and process
media privately, sometimes we do so in company. Comparing these contexts could
generate valuable insight about interpersonal dynamics underscoring decoding.
Speaker-centered approaches are less consistent in relation to denotation–con-
notation and individuality–sociability. Of the few speaker-centered approaches that
probed audiences, some used experimental methods involving denotative and indi-
vidual conceptualization of meaning (Bavelas et al., 1990; Mendelberg, 2001) and
some used interpretive methods involving connotative and social conceptualizations
of meaning (Ceccarelli, 1998, 2001).
Finally, the surveyed approaches differ in their assessment of the implications of
meaning-multiplicity. Speaker-centered approaches focus on the potential for in-
creased popularity of an addresser, which depending on context could be positive
(e.g., scientific progress in Ceccarelli, 2001) or negative (e.g., propagation of racism
in Mendelberg, 2001). Cognitive approaches associate selective perception with
advantages on an individual, ego-defensive level, but on a broader level with extrem-
ism and polarization (e.g., Jamieson & Cappella, 2010). The cultural tradition gener-
ally views multiple meanings positively, as a vehicle for “semiotic democracy”
(Fiske, 1987) and pluralism (Rowland & Strain, 1994). However, skeptics argued
that oppositional decoding is not always accessible (Condit, 1989) nor does it lead
to political action (Jensen, 1990).
Gaps in existing theories as an opportunity for interdisciplinary dialog
Despite addressing meaning multiplicity from different angles, cognitive, cultural,

and speaker-centered approaches fail to account for variations in meaning multi-
plicity occurrence. Cognitive approaches find that selective perception occurs
among a percentage of subjects exposed to a textual stimulus. If ego-defensive psy-
chological biases explain selective perception, what explains its absence? Moreover,
although textual genres seem to play a role in the dynamics of selective perception,
cognitive approaches provide theories that focus on the audience. Within cultural
approaches, reception studies that link divergent readings with the social identity of
decoders have not accounted for differences within social groups and for the influ-
ence of intersectionality (e.g., race and gender) on identity-motivated interpretation.
Semiotic comparisons of “open” and “closed” texts either ignore the audience
or rely on thin audience cues. Speaker-centered approaches are typically not

comparative, and often ignore the speaker’s audience, obfuscating the identification
of factors that differentiate successful and failed uses of strategic ambiguity.
Due to the gaps within each of the approaches, and the broader lacuna of inter-
disciplinary investigations of meaning multiplicity, we currently do not know why

some media-audience encounters produce meaning multiplicity while others do
not, or how attributes of speaker, text, and audience interact in the creation of
meaning multiplicity. That none of the approaches offers a complete theory of
meaning multiplicity suggests that an interdisciplinary approach could be instru-
mental in providing a comprehensive perspective on the phenomenon.
There are fundamental differences between the approaches. In particular, cogni-
tive and cultural approaches present entrenched divides, between positivist and in-
terpretive epistemologies. This article does not imply that such differences are
insignificant. Rather, adopting a pragmatist research philosophy (e.g., Johnson &
Onwuegbuzie, 2004), it suggests that interdisciplinarity facilitates a more productive
approach to meaning multiplicity than the current fragmented approaches, and that
a synthesis that is respectful to the three points of origin may highlight constructive
commonalties. The next section offers DCD as a framework for such as synthesis.
DCD: An interdisciplinary framework
DCD is a conceptual and analytical framework that facilitates interdisciplinary theo-

rizing around meaning multiplicity by refraining from adopting presuppositions
about the sources and consequences of the phenomenon. The framework’s title was
formulated to accommodate cognitive, cultural, and speaker-centered approaches.
“Decoding” is a neutral and common term for interpretation across approaches,
which differs from the more loaded “reading” or “textual poaching” on the cultural
end, and “perceptual distortion” or “selectivity” on the cognitive one. The terms
“convergence–divergence” describe decoding as an outcome, rather than determin-
ing its source and intentionality a-priori. The dash between them portrays decoding
as a spectrum rather than a binary (e.g., assimilation versus contrast) or limited set
of outcomes (e.g., oppositional, negotiated and dominant readings). The adjectives
“divergent” and “convergent” describe the poles of this interpretive spectrum—di-
vergent texts produce multiple interpretations while convergent texts produce a nar-
row set of meanings (even if met with diverse audiences).
The DCD framework uses “frame” as a bridging conceptualization of meaning.
A frame is an interpretive scheme that defines some elements of reality as more
meaningful and salient than others (Goffman, 1974). It is an “organizing principle
that holds together and gives coherence and meaning to a diverse array of symbols”
(Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, & Sasson, 1992, p. 384). News frames promote problem
definitions, causal interpretations, moral evaluations, and treatment recommenda-
tions of events (Entman, 1993). Frame is a “bridging concept” between subdisci-
plines in communication (Gamson et al., 1992). It is well known for its cognitive
applications in media effects studies (e.g., Iyengar, 1990). However, it has roots in


Figure 1 DCD: analytic principles (black) and workflow (white), applied to the 70K
Initiative (gray). *one of the 14 texts in the corpus included an article and an interview,
hence the total of 15.
cultural research, which relates to framing battles as evidence of ideological struggles

(e.g., Gitlin, 1981). Framing can thus connect “parts of the field that need to be in
touch with each other: quantitative and qualitative, empirical and interpretive, psy-
chological and sociological” (Reese, 2007, p. 148).2
With frame as a conceptual connector, DCD exploits the differences between
cultural, cognitive and speaker-centered approaches as focal points for synthesis. It
aims to bridge contemporary splits between text–audience, denotation–connotation,
and individuality–sociability through two principles, represented in black arrows in
Figure 1. To bridge the text–audience divide, the analytical framework suggests us-
ing audience-informed textual analysis which enables a nuanced account of the rela-
tionships between textual cues and real-life interpretation. To bridge denotation–
connotation and individuality–sociability it conducts comparative audience analysis,
using the principle of triangulation in mixed-methods research.
Audience-informed textual analysis

Rather than prioritizing text/speaker over audience or vice versa, the DCD frame-
work suggests analyzing a text’s dominant frames and semiotic structure in light of
actual reception (i.e., the salient frames observed in audience decoding). In such an
audience-informed textual analysis, the researcher collects evidence about the ways
in which a text is framed in a population of interest and then probes the text based

on this evidence. This is akin to reverse engineering meaning. The point is not to di-
minish textual analysis, but to guide it by considering the audience. For instance, a
researcher may identify clues in the text that were not picked up by the audience
and discuss reasons for this neglect. This procedure allows an exploration of a text’s

semiotic depth without making assumptions about audience decoding.
Comparative audience analysis

Rather than commit to a singular conceptualization of meaning, the DCD frame-
work compares patterns of audience decoding by triangulating methods from the
repertoires of different approaches. Triangulation, a principle that guides mixed-
method research, is the use of multiple methods to gauge a phenomenon. The
reliance on distinct conceptualizations of a phenomena provides a holistic portrayal.
Moreover, if different methods point at similar variances within a phenomenon,
this enhances confidence that the observed variances are derived from the
phenomenon’s inherent traits, rather than the traits of the methods used to measure
it (Jick, 1979).
The comparative audience analysis triangulates methods that gauge social and
individual and denotative and connotative operationalizations of decoding. This
process is undoubtably “messy” as it requires the reconciliation of different types of
meaning. Using frame as a conceptual connector helps establish a baseline for com-
parison. For example, a statement in a questionnaire that elicits agreement with a
media frame taps into individualistic and denotative meanings. A frame that
emerges from a group discussion in which different interpretations are collectively
negotiated taps into social and connotative meanings. Despite emerging from dis-
tinct contexts of decoding, their operationalization with frame yields a shared unit
of analysis for meaning.
The goal of the comparative audience analysis is to evaluate patterns of conver-
gence and divergence in audience decoding across methods. A media text that pro-
duces disagreement about framing among survey takers (which may be expressed in
a broad distribution of values across respondents) and among interviewees (which
may be evident in heated groups discussions), could be characterized as luring
“divergent” responses. Triangulation presents a challenge if different studies yield
inconsistent results. DCD suggests the following guiding questions to address these
issues: Are results similar across methods of audience analysis? If results are incon-
sistent, methodological biases may have shaped the observed dynamics. If different
methods produce similar (albeit not necessarily identical) results, the researcher is
able to search for patterns that structure decoding across studies, by asking: Do
some texts/speakers consistently evoke more divergent decodings? Are some popula-
tions consistently more divergent in their decodings?
The implementation of audience-informed textual analysis and comparative au-
dience analysis is based on the following workflow: (a) sample a corpus of texts, (b)
analyze its reception using a combination of methods that probe decoding as

denotation and connotation, in individual and in social settings, (c) compare/trian-

gulate observed decoding patterns (d), identify mechanisms that pattern decoding
convergence and divergence, and (e) return to the texts for a semiotic analysis.
These steps are represented in the white boxes in Figure 1. The next section

describes how they were applied to the case of Gravity Payments’ 70K Initiative
(gray shaded boxes in Figure 1).
Case study: Gravity Payments’ 70K Initiative
The DCD framework was developed as part of a project that examined news dis-
course about the role of Corporate Social Responsibility (henceforth, CSR) in
addressing inequality in the United States. CSR represents “practices that improve
the workplace and benefit society in ways that go above and beyond what companies
are legally required to do” (Vogel, 2006, p. 2). This project focused on the story of
CEO Dan Price of Gravity Payments, a Seattle-based credit card processing com-
pany, who pledged in April 2015 to raise the company’s minimum annual salary to
$70,000 (henceforth, the “70K Initiative”). To offset the costs of this plan, Price cut
back his own $1.1 million compensation to $70,000 and redirected company profits.
Price’s pledge, which was purportedly motivated by a realization of his employees’
financial struggles, went viral, tapping into a national debate about income gaps.
Many journalists showered him with accolades, while some conservative commenta-
tors termed him a socialist and forecast bankruptcy.
Comparatively probing a single event (a design inspired by Roeh & Cohen,
1992) enabled isolation of speaker, text, and audience. This story was selected due to
the intersection of several factors: it was thematically relevant to the broader topics
of inequality, fair wage, and CSR; it was covered by news outlets across the political
spectrum; it presented potential for polysemy (for example, through Price’s complex
persona, a Seattle-based millennial entrepreneur raised by devout Evangelical
parents in rural Idaho); and it was highly symbolic (e.g., Price invoked analogies to
figures like Robin Hood and Jesus).
The goal of this study was to explore the multiple meanings ascribed to the news
stories about the 70K Initiative by their readers through the DCD interdisciplinary
framework. Specifically, it was driven by the following research questions: How did
individuals and groups in the American audience decode news reports about
Gravity Payments’ 70K Initiative? How did characteristics of audience, text, and
speaker interact in the decoding dynamics of this news story?
I first created a corpus of news stories covering Price’s announcement of the ini-
tiative. Reports were collected from the Media Cloud archive using the string “Dan
Price” AND “Gravity Payments”. The search was confined to the week following the
initiative’s announcement. It yielded 29 relevant news stories, from which I only
sampled those that were posted on the official Facebook pages of reporting news
outlets. This final corpus (n ¼ 14) included news articles reporting about the 70K
Initiative and televised interviews with Price. I analyzed the texts and their reception

(see Supporting Information) using the DCD framework, starting with the mixed-
methods reception analysis (triangulating quantitative and qualitative approaches)
and then moving to the textual analysis.

Social and connotative decoding: Facebook comments on the news articles
The first study probed 5,995 comments posted in response to the sampled news
articles on the Facebook pages of the reporting media.3 The examination of the
story’s reception in a public digital sphere allowed a probe into interpretation as a
naturally occurring phenomenon with minimal intervention on my part (thus offer-
ing high ecological validity). The analysis was conducted with Interpretive Frame
Competitiveness (IFC), a procedure I developed for this study which composes of an
inductive analysis of interpretive frames in comments followed by a quantitative
comparison of frame distribution between comment threads.
First, to understand how the story was decoded, the comments were analyzed
qualitatively, using principles of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).
Following a reading of all comments, I developed an unstructured list of frames.
Frames, defined here as distinct thematic elements in a comment, presented differ-
ent foci and sentiment. For example, the most salient frame in the corpus, “accolades
for Dan Price” conveyed positive sentiment toward the CEO. Another frame, “hard
work,” which lamented the Initiative’s negative implications on work ethics, focused
on morality using a critical sentiment. The frame “don’t mess with the free market”
focused on the economy, and it was marked by an ambivalent stance (within this
broad frame, some framed the 70K Initiative as exemplary of free market economics,
some framed it as a threat). After consolidating the list, I coded all comments twice
using MAXQDA software in light of the identified frames, with each iteration result-
ing in fine-tuning. In the final pass, I reviewed the corpus top to bottom, probing
each frame for the fit of the segments associated with it. This inductive analysis
resulted in the identification of 28 unique interpretive frames.
Next, I analyzed the distribution of frames with the Herfindahl–Hirschmann
Index (HHI). The index, used by economists to measure market concentration,
equals the sum of squares of the percentages of the market share held by each firm
in an industry. It ranges from 0 (competition) to 1 (concentration). Conceptualizing
comment threads as marketplaces of interpretations and the interpretive frames
within them as competing entities (see Entman, 2006), I used the formula to assign
threads with a score for interpretive competitiveness. I calculated the salience of the
frames identified in the first step within each of the 14 comment threads, and then
squared and summed their percentages to produce an HHI score. This allowed a
differentiation between competitive (divergent) and concentrated (convergent)
comment threads.
Although this study incorporated quantitative methods, it was premised on a
qualitative inductive analysis, and it was mainly inspired by the cultural approach’s
emphasis on the exploration of nuance and associative/connotative meanings

through social semiotics. The next steps incorporated methods relating to cognitive
and speaker-centered approaches.

Individual and denotative decoding: M-Turk survey
The second audience study was an online survey circulated on Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk which gauged the effects of the various articles and the demo-
graphic and attitudinal attributes of the respondents on the story’s decoding, in a
controlled research setting. Each of the survey’s 1,197 participants was presented
with one randomly assigned news article.
The study’s two main variables for decoding were influenced by measures used
in the cognitive approach. First, sentiment towards the 70K Initiative was a compos-
ite variable that averaged responses to statements (e.g., “the 70K Initiative is a good
idea”), inspired by the interpretive frames identified on Facebook. The second vari-
able, perception of bias in reporting about the 70K Initiative averaged responses to
questions (e.g., “would you say that the article was strictly neutral, biased in favor of
the 70K Initiative, or biased against the 70K Initiative?”) adapted from studies of the
hostile media effect (e.g., Gunther et al., 2009). These variables targeted different, al-
beit related, facets of decoding. Sentiment addressed respondent attitudes toward
the 70K Initiative (i.e., the subject of the news reports), tapping into the relationship
between news framing and audience attitudes. Bias captured the extent to which
respondents thought the plan was covered impartially by the news media.
Complementing these measures of decoding, which were denotative at their core,
were two open-ended questions gauging connotative forms of decoding: a prompt
that instructed respondents to summarize the story in their own words, and a
prompt that instructed them to write a hypothetical Facebook comment on the
story.
Respondents were also asked about their attitudes toward income inequality,
media consumption habits, knowledge about the economy, and demographics (age,
race, education, gender, income, political orientation). Decoding was examined
through analyses of variance (ANOVA), examining the relationship between senti-
ment and bias and the assigned article, with demographic and other audience data
as controls. The essays and Facebook responses were analyzed qualitatively, similar
to the inductive analysis of Facebook comments in the first study.
Comparative audience analysis

To compare the audience studies, I triangulated the qualitative data, which captured
the substance of decoding, and the quantitative measures developed in each study to
gauge convergence and divergence. On Facebook, convergence–divergence was rep-
resented through the HHI scores of the different comment threads: High HHI
denoted a concentrated marketplace of interpretive frames (convergence), whereas
low HHI denoted a competitive marketplace (divergence). In the survey, decoding

patterns were gauged through the distribution of respondents’ sentiment toward the
70K Initiative and their rating of journalistic bias for the different assigned articles.
Despite methodological differences between studies, the comparison highlighted
three important consistencies: (a) similarities in decoding, and in particular, a

shared positive sentiment toward the 70K Initiative, (b) stability in the role that poli-
tics played in decoding patterns—Facebook comment threads reacting to conserva-
tive media and survey respondents identifying as conservative displayed more
ambivalence toward the 70K Initiative, and (c) recurring patterns of convergence–
divergence across articles—with the exception of two articles that “flipped” positions
across studies, news articles that ranked as divergent in the Facebook study were
also characterized as divergent in the survey, and vice versa. These consistencies
provided confidence that the observed interpretive dynamics of the case study were
not biased by the methodological idiosyncrasies of the different studies. At the same
time, the triangulation presented useful tensions (e.g., those articles that were incon-
sistent) for further exploration.4 As will be elaborated below, the comparison also
suggested that although audience attributes influenced decoding, the articles played
a role, thus justifying a shift to an in-depth, audience-informed, analysis of their
texts.
Semiotic analysis of core texts

The textual studies were guided by observations attained in the comparative audience
analysis. I used the recurring patterns of convergence and divergence in audience
decoding as a starting point to classify and compare between texts. I also probed for
textual cues that could have generated the enthusiastic sentiment toward the Initiative
and Dan Price in particular, and for cues that triggered political divides in interpreta-
tion. To this end, I used several qualitative analysis techniques, which combined in-
ductive “open-coding” (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) and predefined coding schemes.
News reports were coded with Pan and Kosicki’s (1993) typology of news frame struc-
tures. Based on insight that emerged in the inductive probing of audience interpreta-
tion, the analysis of reports also incorporated literature about mythology in
journalistic storytelling (e.g., Lule, 2001). News interviews with Price were transcribed
and analyzed through a combination of conversation analysis (Clayman & Heritage,
2002), frame analysis, and critical discourse analysis. In both reports and interviews,
polysemic textual mechanisms identified in previous studies (Boxman-Shabtai &
Shifman, 2014; Roeh & Cohen, 1992) were utilized as sensitizing concepts.
Results: Cultural, cognitive, and speaker-centered interpretations of the

70K Initiative
The analysis of the 70K Initiative with the DCD framework created a rich dataset that
combined the strengths of the three surveyed approaches to meaning multiplicity.
It examined speaker, texts and audience, and it collected data about decoding as both

a social and an individual experience, that produces both denotative and connotative
meanings. Continuity in these diverse data was maintained by incorporating framing
into the analytical methods of each study. The analysis thus provided a novel opportu-
nity to weigh cognitive, cultural, and speaker-centered approaches against one an-

other. A clear conclusion followed: All are imperative in a holistic portrayal of
meaning multiplicity. I describe below the project’s main results through the perspec-
tives of the three approaches. Due to space limitation, this section provides general
descriptions of the results, as a means to examine the utility and types of insights
emerging from DCD. Readers interested in a more detailed account are invited to
contact the author.
The cultural approach was illuminating in explaining the semiotics of convergent
and divergent stories about the 70K Initiative. Across methods of audience analysis,
several texts stood out as consistently more divergent (i.e., evoking a broader spectrum
of decodings) than others. The textual analysis identified differences between conver-
gent and divergent news reports. Divergent stories, originating from three right-
leaning (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Market Watch) and two left-leaning media
outlets (The New York Times and Vox), revolved around a conflict frame, employing
a rhetoric of balance and an appeal to empiricism (e.g., by describing research about
life satisfaction and productivity) in their descriptions of the 70K Initiative. They were
skeptical about the social utility of the initiative, and constructed multivocal texts
through the use of multiple sources. Convergent stories, originating from centric (e.g.,
NBC’s Today Show) and left-leaning (e.g., Huffington Post) media, weaved two
frames—Dan Price and income inequality. They developed a mythological narrative
of the hero’s journey around Price’s pledge, thus providing a sense of closure and
confidence that Price would be successful in his quest to “solve inequality.”
Differences in framing and style between convergent and divergent news articles
supported the cultural assertion that meaning multiplicity derives from the affor-
dances of polysemic texts. The semiotic analysis was also instructive in highlighting
ideological presuppositions. While all of the articles shared a premise that income
inequality is a problem, their discourse around solutions differed. Divergent texts,
which examined the 70K Initiative from a business-oriented perspective challenged
CSR from the right. Conversely, convergent texts endorsed the 70K Initiative.
Price’s catchphrase “a capitalist solution to a social problem” which many conver-
gent articles reproduced, involved two presuppositions: one is that the government
is unfit to solve social problems like inequality, and the second is that the market is
an appropriate agent. Convergent articles embraced the neoliberal ethos of individ-
ual responsibility (Harvey, 2007) in their acceptance that social reform could be
entrusted to private individuals like Price. Moreover, by recasting this ethos into a
narrative about Price’s quest to restore justice, convergent articles propagated a fairy-
tale which foreclosed debate about the potential detrimental implications of CSR
for democratic forms of problem-solving around inequality (Giridharadas, 2018).
These patterns suggest that neoliberalism was an organizing ideological structure in
the coverage of this story.

Cognitive approaches were helpful in deciphering attitudes driving audience

decoding. Overall, although audience decodings ran a wide gamut of interpretive
frames, it was rare to find radically critical readings of the 70K Initiative or CSR.
These patterns did not align with the emphasis that cultural studies place on textual

interpretation as “semiotic resistance” (Fiske, 1987). Instead, both reception studies
demonstrated patterns of politically motivated decoding. The Facebook analysis
found a red–blue divide: Right-leaning media triggered divergent comment threads,
whereas most left-leaning media triggered convergence. In the absence of demo-
graphic data about commenters, the Facebook study could not determine whether
these divides originated from the properties of texts or from the audiences com-
menting on each platform. The survey study enabled an isolation of these factors,
and suggested interrelationships between them. On the audience end, the survey
found that political identification correlated with decoding: Conservative respond-
ents were less favorable to the 70K Initiative and saw reporting about it as more bi-
ased. On the other hand, the survey found that texts (i.e., assigned articles)
influenced decoding patterns above and beyond audience factors. A handful of
articles clustered together with significantly lower than average means both for
respondents’ sentiment toward the 70K Initiative and for their evaluation of media
bias, thus evoking more critique of the initiative and its coverage. These patterns
remained after controlling for political identification and other demographic
variables.
A qualitative analysis of responses to an open-ended prompt in the survey that
instructed respondents to write hypothetical Facebook comments on the articles
suggested a possible interaction between textual divergence and partisan selective
perception. Focusing on a subsample of respondents from the political poles (those
identifying as “liberal” and “very liberal” and as “conservative” and “very con-
servative”), I coded responses as supportive, ambivalent, or critical toward the 70K
Initiative. I found that overall, conservative readers reacted more critically to the
story than liberal readers, regardless of the articles to which they were assigned.
However, in convergent articles, the differences between liberals and conservatives
were less stark—both groups were dominated by supportive reactions to the initia-
tive. Divergent articles, in contrast, were more polarizing, evoking larger gaps be-
tween positive and negative sentiment from liberals and conservatives. This finding
suggests that the semiotic features of convergent and divergent texts may moderate
the relationship between pre-existing attitudes and decoding.
Finally, the speaker-centered approach was supported in the analysis of Dan
Price’s performance in five televised interviews. Price skillfully tailored his message
to the audience: On left-leaning and centric outlets (NBC Today Show, MSNBC
Morning Joe, CNN), he was outspoken about his commitment to solve income in-
equality, whereas in right-leaning outlets (Fox News, Wall Street Journal) he evaded
the topic and stressed his commitment to capitalism. Price also used strategic ambi-
guity: Across interviews, he was evasive about the social implications of his message,
using vague terminology about “leadership” as a method to address inequality, but

clear about his brand (i.e., the service provided by Gravity Payments). Price’s ambi-
guity paid off. Even though conservatives were more critical of the story than liber-
als, they still overall displayed positive sentiment toward the 70K Initiative, and
toward Dan Price in particular.

Discussion: DCD’s contribution to an interdisciplinary understanding
of meaning multiplicity
The 70K Initiative illustrates the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach to mean-

ing multiplicity, as none of the individual approaches explained it on its own. This
section discusses how the synthesis of the three different approaches through the
DCD framework provided an avenue for interdisciplinary theorization that bridges
competing explanations of the phenomenon.
Cognitive and cultural approaches present the largest gaps in their theorization
about meaning multiplicity, with the former’s emphasis on the role of pre-existing
attitudes in biasing perception contrasting with the latter’s emphasis on audiences
as active agents probing polysemic texts. The DCD-based analysis suggested that
cultural and cognitive approaches can actually complement each other in under-
standing the workings of meaning multiplicity. As aforementioned, partisan selec-
tive perception was heightened in reactions to polysemic articles. Divergent texts,
characterized by an appeal to conflict, empiricism, and skepticism, triggered politi-
cally motivated interpretations. Convergent texts, characterized by an appeal to fan-
tasy, emotion, and drama, subdued partisanship. This observation, enabled by the
audience-informed textual analysis, suggests an interaction between texts and audi-
ences: Polysemic texts “activated” political gaps in decoding. The triangulation of
decoding measures through the comparative audience analysis was instrumental in
pinpointing this interaction. For example, sentiment—a survey measure that gauged
decoding from a denotative and individualistic perspective (cognitive approach)—
pointed at an overarching correlation between the political affiliation of individuals
and their decoding. The open-ended prompt to formulate a hypothetical Facebook
comment, which tapped into connotative and social forms of decoding (cultural ap-
proach), enabled a nuanced breakdown of this correlation, as it provided detailed
descriptions of sentiment in free form.
Other case studies may tie different semiotic and audience properties with con-
vergence and divergence: Perhaps for other topics in the news it is the appeal to
emotion that contributes to divergence; other topics might also present interpretive
divides along other demographic features, such as gender or religion. Nevertheless,
the DCD framework enables an identification of the interaction between decoding,
the demographic attributes and identity needs of audiences, and the semiotic prop-
erties of media messages. In so doing, DCD contributes to theorization about mean-
ing multiplicity that bridges the cultural–cognitive divide.
A second bridge between approaches concerns the role that message creators
play in generating meaning multiplicity. Whereas speaker-centered approaches treat

meaning multiplicity as an accomplishment for a speaker, cultural approaches see it

as the result of audiences subverting authorial intentions. The analysis of the 70K
Initiative produced a more complex picture. The power of the speaker, in this case
Dan Price, was mitigated by the affordances of media texts. In news articles, Price

was dependent on framing choices that journalists made when constructing his
character. Divergent articles that were skeptical about the initiative, resonated with
the cultural assertion that polysemy presents semiotic fissures that undermine the
intentions of speakers. In interviews, Price actively shaped the text’s meaning, as he
delivered his message directly to the audience, demonstrating the use of speaker-
centered concepts such as “strategic ambiguity.”
Moreover, Price’s performance, especially in news interviews, complicated the
distinction between “speaker” and “audience” in the first place, as Price tailored his
messages to what he perceived would be appealing to the audience of different me-
dia. When the sensibilities of distinct audiences permeate the text through the
speaker’s mental conceptualization of them, it is hard to determine where the
speaker ends and where the audience begins. The reciprocal relationship between
speaker and audience is not unique to the 70K Initiative. Media institutions are pre-
mised on this duality: They shape social preferences by supplying a certain informa-
tion environment, but they also adapt to social demand by measuring audience cues
and studying their preferences (Webster, 2014). Dan Price was clearly adept at
addressing the needs of different audiences. Other case studies may present different
forms of dominance within the speaker–audience relationship, an evaluation of
which requires an analysis of the speaker’s interests (i.e., what is the speaker trying
to achieve vis-à-vis the audience?) and the extent to which these interests have mate-
rialized in the audience’s reception of the message. Since the DCD framework pro-
vides a nuanced portrait of audience decodings, as well as a consideration of the
speaker as an integral part of the text, it is geared to generate datasets that bridge
speaker-centered and cultural approaches.
Finally, in its fusing of competing concepts and methodological principles, DCD
bridges the three approaches by spanning three levels of analysis: ideological struc-
tures, individuals, and media systems. Corresponding with cultural and some
speaker-centered approaches, the analysis of ideology probes the power structures
and social assumptions that underscore the framing of social issues like CSR and in-
equality. Corresponding with speaker-centered and cognitive approaches, the analy-
sis of media systems examines how organizational features within the media
ecosystem, such as fragmentation, political polarization, commercialization, and
waning resources, shape the range of meanings available in media texts.
Corresponding with all three approaches, the analysis of individual agents considers
the myriad ways with which media producers and receivers reinforce, resist, and
transform social structures through their encoding and decoding of meanings in
media messages.
The DCD framework is limited by a risk of data overfitting: The audience-
informed textual analysis examines data (texts) on the basis of observations attained

from the same data (audience reception of those texts). This design could potentially
lead to a textual analysis that seeks to confirm observations attained from the audi-
ence. While the triangulation of different audience data sources mitigates the prob-
lem, a potential solution would be checking the robustness of mechanisms identified

in the textual analysis by applying them to a different population. For example, the
original vision for this project included an additional step of group interviews. This
step would have examined how different groups decoded texts that proved to be
highly convergent and divergent in the semiotic analysis, with the aim of validating
observations attained in the previous steps. Thus, in an improved version of the
DCD framework, the audience-informed textual analysis would be followed by a
text-informed audience analysis.
Notwithstanding this limitation, and with the potential addition of the robust-
ness check in future applications, the DCD framework lays a useful foundation for
interdisciplinary work around meaning multiplicity. As an analytical and conceptual
framework, DCD offers principles that could be applicable to other contexts, topics,
and media genres. Future applications could use different methods to operationalize
these principles, depending on the subject matter and the researcher’s expertise. For
example, to gauge denotative and connotative and individual and social aspects of
decoding within a comparative audience analysis, a future study may triangulate
experiments and focus groups. Future applications may also conduct audience-
informed textual analyses using different semiotic methods. For example, ubiquitous
internet genres, like memes and parodies, would require methods emphasizing vi-
sual language and intertextuality.
The framework could also be scaled up and down. The 70K Initiative project
used a relatively small corpus of core texts and a large corpus of audience input.
This ratio could be reversed in future applications. For example, following up on the
topic of income inequality, one could compare different news stories on the topic,
or perhaps, the topic’s treatment across genres (e.g., news versus mock news/drama/
comedy). With a larger corpus of core texts, it would be sensible to collect a smaller
sample of audience data per each group of texts.
Conclusions
In their approach to meaning multiplicity, subdisciplines in communication studies

resemble the parable about the blind men grasping the elephant, failing to under-
stand its true anatomy because each is describing a different organ. The application
of the interdisciplinary DCD framework to the 70K Initiative suggested that cogni-
tive, cultural, and speaker-centered approaches exceled at explaining different
aspects of the case study, but none of them, individually, was able to describe the
whole picture. The DCD framework enabled an evaluation of the three approaches’
combined contribution to meaning multiplicity that would not have been possible
with an approach-specific lens, as well as a consideration of conceptual bridges
across subdisciplines. By highlighting potential interactions between competing

theories, the interdisciplinary approach facilitated by DCD provides a whole that is

greater than the sum of its parts.
Rigorous cross-disciplinary research could ultimately lead to a unified theory
of meaning multiplicity, which could contribute to the discipline in two ways.

First, meaning multiplicity is so rudimentary to the communicative process that
improved knowledge about the phenomenon would benefit numerous fields of in-
quiry. For example, this article touched on the topic of political polarization which
preoccupies several subdisciplines in communication studies. While concerns
about polarization are mainly focused on patterns of media consumption, a con-
sideration of the text-audience interaction discussed above, and its melding of cog-
nitive and cultural logics, could contribute to theorization about patterns of
interpretive polarization in the media. Likewise, the relationship between speakers
and audiences is a focal point for various subject areas. An interdisciplinary probe
of meaning multiplicity that amalgamates speaker, texts and audiences, as well as
ideology, media ecosystems, and individuals, enables future theorization about
pervasive concepts in the discipline, such as like dog-whistle communication (of
potential interest for scholars of rhetoric, advertising, PR, political campaigns),
audience engagement (journalism scholars), and impression management (social
media and interpersonal communication).
Second, as this special issue stresses, the downside of the trend toward
specialization in communication studies is increasing intellectual fragmentation.
The 70K Initiative illustrated how this fragmentation: (a) makes knowledge
acquisition at the broad disciplinary level more laborious and (b) neglects
developing interrelationships between concepts and theories that are germane
to multiple specializations, even if defined differently. The DCD framework
provides a path for interdisciplinary conceptualization and collaboration that
could hopefully attenuate this trend.
Notes
1. Deacon, Fenton, and Bryman’s (1999) study is an exception that illustrates the utility of
evaluating texts and their reception against the institutional constraints of their creation.
2. Although scholars have called to increase precision around framing (Cacciatore,
Scheufele, & Iyengar, 2016), I believe that the concept’s “openness” is conducive for an
interdisciplinary approach.
3. News comments were scraped through Facebook’s API. In four large comment threads,
the first 1,000 comments were sampled using Facebook’s default relevance sorting.
Otherwise, all comments were collected for each thread.
4. Space constraints limit my ability to fully detail this line of inquiry. In general, the incon-
sistency presented by these two outliers was examined as part of the textual analysis. It
strengthened the conclusions of the semiotic analysis while illuminating contextual fea-
tures of the audience studies (e.g., practices related to Facebook posting) that explained
inconsistencies.

Acknowledgments
This article is based on a doctoral dissertation that was conducted at Northwestern
University. I am indebted to Northwestern’s School of Communication and The

Graduate School for the intellectual and funding support they provided, and in par-
ticular, to James G. Webster, Wendy Griswold, and Aymar J. Christian for their
guidance. I would also like to thank Jonathan Boxman, Edith Boxman, Raymond
Boxman, Limor Shifman, the editors of this special issue, and the reviewers, for their
constructive comments on different versions of the article.
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Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916

Meaning Multiplicity Across Communication

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Subdisciplines in communication studies have developed competing and self-contained

Keywords: Communication Theory, Income Inequality, Interdisciplinarity,

Meaning multiplicity is the phenomenon of a text (broadly defined as a set of

Corresponding author: Lillian Boxman-Shabtai; e-mail: lillyboxman@gmail.com

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Three approaches to meaning multiplicity in communication studies

Meaning multiplicity has been interpreted, ironically, in communication studies in

402 Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423

cognitive, cultural, and speaker-centered approaches. Since it covers a vast amount

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Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423 403

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404 Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423

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Commonalities and differences across approaches

Cognitive, cultural and speaker-centered approaches partially overlap. The speaker-

Audience versus text

Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423 405

Table 1 Cognitive, Cultural, and Speaker-Centered Approaches to Meaning Multiplicity

Cognitive Cultural Speaker-centered

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Denotation versus connotation

406 Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423

Individuality versus sociability

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Gaps in existing theories as an opportunity for interdisciplinary dialog

Despite addressing meaning multiplicity from different angles, cognitive, cultural,

Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423 407

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DCD: An interdisciplinary framework

DCD is a conceptual and analytical framework that facilitates interdisciplinary theo-

408 Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423

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cultural research, which relates to framing battles as evidence of ideological struggles

Audience-informed textual analysis

Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423 409

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Comparative audience analysis

410 Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423

denotation and connotation, in individual and in social settings, (c) compare/trian-

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Case study: Gravity Payments’ 70K Initiative

Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423 411

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412 Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423

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Comparative audience analysis

Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423 413

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Semiotic analysis of core texts

Results: Cultural, cognitive, and speaker-centered interpretations of the

414 Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423

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Journal of Communication 70 (2020) 401–423 415

Cognitive approaches were helpful in deciphering attitudes driving audience

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