Hi. It seems to me that semiotic is the bigger container and rhetoric refers to the constituting parts of a visual element. Therefore, "semiotic resource" refers to a bigger concept than rhetoric resource.

Federico,

You are surely right that part of the difference will be one of emphasis within some particular frame.  Roughly, I would say that rhetoric is about (but not just about) arranging and using semiotic resources.  I hesitate to say that this is a form-content relationship, but it feels close.

As I understand it, what the social semiotician is trying to emphasize in talking about a "semiotic resource" are modes of communication and the various tools/acts which consist in them.

Social semiotics is about explaining practices of meaning making and rhetorical practices are practices of meaning making.  Semiotic resources are resources for meaning making, so rhetorical practices surely rely on  them.

A rhetorician might claim that rhetoric happens through semiotic resources or that rhetoric makes use of semiotic resources, though not only these.  I say this because I think the social semiotician may be disinclined to claim that concepts, rhetorical commonplaces, figures, and tropes are semiotic resources.  Instead, all of those things are forms in which the rhetorican would place semiotic resources.

I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a semiotic resource needs some kind of substance to it.  I feel like claiming that ANY communicative action is signifying and therefore rhetoric can ONLY make use of semiotic resources seems reductive, but maybe this is what a semiotician would claim?  I would think that some rhetoricians would claim that rhetoric is often about reconfiguring patterns of signifying in a way that couldn't be reduced to the previous patterns of signification.  That is, some rhetoricians would probably claim that rhetoric can "create" something unprecedented.

In any case, your question is good and I think hard to resolve. In my experience rhetoricians are far more familiar with classical semiotics and are more likely to just talk about signs and symbols (ex: symbolic action), and those are the exact terms that the social semiotician is replacing with "semiotic resource."  When I do see rhetoricians using the SR term, it seems like mostly they are referring to some physical artifact or communication technology.  In some ways I am surprised that the new turn toward sociology that many subfields of rhetoric have gone through have not made more use of the term.  Perhaps we just have too many disciplinary terminologies to use them all.

I am not well-versed enough in social semiotics to know whether or not rhetoricians give the term its due, but certainly lots of folks working in visual rhetoric and technologically mediated rhetoric use both terms to refer to different things.

For an example of what I mean, take a look at how the terms are used in this paper from JAC: http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol25.4/sheridan-available.pdf 

If you are a social semiotician, I'd be interested to know if you think that this view (from the rhetorical side) rings true at all.

Thanks for your answer, George, and for the reference. I can add a few more thoughts to this: as I understand it, semiotic resources are means that can be put to an end, i.e. signs of any kind and from any media that we can use in our discourses.

Since semiotics is concerned with meaning-making we can assume that the aim of using a semiotic resource is to express some meaning. On the other hand, rhetoric deals with other process as well—e.g., persuasion—so we can assume that, in a rhetorical perspective, a semiotic resource can be used to achieve many communicative ends. That is, rhetorician do not consider signs only for their meaning but also for other effects they can foster in the audience.

Federico,

You have given a much more elegant statement of the distinction than I did.

It sounds exactly right to me to say that the rhetorician does not consider signs only for their meaning but instead for effect.  Alternatively, a rhetorician might claim that the meaning of a sign just is what can be done with the sign (in conjunction with other signs, probably).  I don't think all rhetoricians would want to be that ungrounded, but certainly a peculiar combination of deconstruction and pragmatism runs strong in our tradition.