Anchorage is used to describe the ‘relay’ between words and visuals where text and image stand in a complementary relationship. In our visual culture and media, it is rare that images and words are not placed together for example graphic design webpages or comic books. 

- Word specific: words (either text or verbal) providing all or most of the information needed to decode an image.
- Image specific: Images providing all or most of the information needed to decode a message.
- Dual message: words and images communicating the same message either in tone or content (amplified design).
- Interdependent/convergent: Words and images working together whilst also contributing information independently to convey an idea that neither could do alone.
- Parallel/divergent: words and images appear to follow different paths and/or communicate ideas that do not seem to intersect.

- Denotation: This is the primary meaning, the most immediate reading of a sign. It is a literal deduction that reflects broad opinion or consensus. 
- Connotation: This is the secondary reading, for example a reader/viewer may pick up on style, mode of production, medium and materials, plane of expression, or abstraction. 

Semiotics is defined as the study of signs and sign systems within society. Anything that is capable of conveying meaning is a sign (e.g words, images, clothes, gestures, symbols). Often, signs are grouped together to form codes, such as gestures (body language) and clothing/dress (dress codes). Clothing is in fact a cultural sign system which has strong communicative value and which is used on  a daily basis to negotiate meaning and interaction on the basis of that negotiated meaning. Semiotics provides a useful framework for deconstructing visual ‘texts’ around us, and looking beyond their mere surface at any underlying cultural messages and ideas. 

- Signifier: physical representation (stimulus: verbal or textual context)
- Signified: mental concept (response: cognitive reading) (signifier + signified = sign)
- Langue: whole language system 
- Sign: single word
- Parole: partial example of speech or writing
- Syntagm: a complete, ordered sequence of signs, eg a sentence (eg my dog smells bad)
- Paradigm: point of substitution in a sentence (or a group of signs) which allows for an exchange of a similar sign, abstract sign or metaphorical sign without changing the overall structure

- ‘The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have seen that of ancient theatres.’
- ‘Even in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bull fights.’
- ‘The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not.’
- ‘It abandons itself to the primary virtue of a spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what one thinks, but what one sees.’
- ‘Wrestling offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning.’ 
- ‘The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasises and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle.’
- ‘Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity since one must always understand everything on the spot.’