Semiotics, also called
semiotic studies or (in the
Saussurean tradition)
semiology, is the study of
signs and sign processes (
semiosis), indication, designation, likeness,
analogy,
metaphor,
symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of
linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of
language more specifically. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:
Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their ''denotata'', or meaning
Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them
Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the natural sciences – such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take ''signs'' or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or zoosemiosis.
Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols. More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences." Charles Morris adds that semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects which they may or do denote; and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.
Terminology
The term, which was spelled
''semeiotics'', derives from the
Greek σημειωτικός, (''sēmeiōtikos''), "observant of signs" (from σημεῖον - ''sēmeion'', "a sign, a mark") and it was first used in English by
Henry Stubbes (1670, p. 75) in a very precise sense to denote the branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs.
John Locke used the terms
semeiotike and
semeiotics in Book 4, Chapter 21 of ''
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' (1690). Here he explains how science can be divided into three parts:
Locke then elaborates on the nature of this third category, naming it Σημειωτικη (''Semeiotike'') and explaining it as "the doctrine of signs" in the following terms:
In the nineteenth century, Charles Sanders Peirce defined what he termed "semiotic" (which he sometimes spelled as "semeiotic") as the "quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of signs", which abstracts "what must be the characters of all signs used by...an intelligence capable of learning by experience", and which is philosophical logic pursued in terms of signs and sign processes. Charles Morris followed Peirce in using the term "semiotic" and in extending the discipline beyond human communication to animal learning and use of signals.
Ferdinand de Saussure, however, founded his semiotics, which he called semiology, in the social sciences:
Formulations
Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted (see
modality). This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of
codes that may be the individual sounds or letters that humans use to form words, the body movements they make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear. To
coin a word to refer to a ''thing'' (see
lexical words), the
community must agree on a simple meaning (a
denotative meaning) within their
language. But that word can transmit that meaning only within the language's grammatical structures and codes (see
syntax and
semantics). Codes also represent the
values of the
culture, and are able to add new shades of
connotation to every aspect of life.
To explain the relationship between semiotics and communication studies, communication is defined as the process of transferring data from a source to a receiver. Hence, communication theorists construct models based on codes, media, and contexts to explain the biology, psychology, and mechanics involved. Both disciplines also recognize that the technical process cannot be separated from the fact that the receiver must decode the data, i.e., be able to distinguish the data as salient and make meaning out of it. This implies that there is a necessary overlap between semiotics and communication. Indeed, many of the concepts are shared, although in each field the emphasis is different. In ''Messages and Meanings: An Introduction to Semiotics'', Marcel Danesi (1994) suggested that semioticians' priorities were to study signification first and communication second. A more extreme view is offered by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1987; trans. 1990: 16), who, as a musicologist, considered the theoretical study of communication irrelevant to his application of semiotics.
Semiotics differs from linguistics in that it generalizes the definition of a sign to encompass signs in any medium or sensory modality. Thus it broadens the range of sign systems and sign relations, and extends the definition of language in what amounts to its widest analogical or metaphorical sense. Peirce's definition of the term "semiotic" as the study of necessary features of signs also has the effect of distinguishing the discipline from linguistics as the study of contingent features that the world's languages happen to have acquired in the course of human evolution.
Perhaps more difficult is the distinction between semiotics and the philosophy of language. In a sense, the difference lies between separate traditions rather than subjects. Different authors have called themselves "philosopher of language" or "semiotician". This difference does ''not'' match the separation between analytic and continental philosophy. On a closer look, there may be found some differences regarding subjects. Philosophy of language pays more attention to natural languages or to languages in general, while semiotics is deeply concerned about non-linguistic signification. Philosophy of language also bears a stronger connection to linguistics, while semiotics is closer to some of the humanities (including literary theory) and to cultural anthropology.
Semiosis or ''semeiosis'' is the process that forms meaning from any organism's apprehension of the world through signs. Scholars who have talked about semiosis in their sub-theories of semiotics include C. S. Peirce, John Deely, and Umberto Eco.
History
The importance of signs and signification has been recognized throughout much of the history of
philosophy, and in psychology as well.
Plato and
Aristotle both explored the relationship between signs and the world, and
Augustine considered the nature of the sign within a
conventional system. These theories have had a lasting effect in
Western philosophy, especially through
Scholastic philosophy. More recently,
Umberto Eco, in his ''
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language'', has argued that semiotic theories are implicit in the work of most, perhaps all, major thinkers.
Early theorists in this area include Charles W. Morris. Max Black attributes the work of Bertrand Russell as being seminal.
Some important semioticians
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), a
noted logician who founded philosophical
pragmatism, defined ''semiosis'' as an irreducibly triadic process wherein something, as an object, logically determines or influences something as a sign to determine or influence something as an interpretation or ''interpretant'', itself a sign, thus leading to further interpretants. Semiosis is logically structured to perpetuate itself. The object can be quality, fact, rule, or even fictional (
Hamlet), and can be (1) ''immediate'' to the sign, the object as represented in the sign, or (2) ''dynamic'', the object as it really is, on which the immediate object is founded. The interpretant can be (1) ''immediate'' to the sign, all that the sign immediately expresses, such as a word's usual meaning; or (2) ''dynamic'', such as a state of agitation; or (3) ''final'' or ''normal'', the ultimate ramifications of the sign about its object, to which inquiry taken far enough would be destined and with which any actual interpretant can at most coincide. His ''semiotic'' covered not only artificial, linguistic, and symbolic signs, but also semblances such as kindred sensible qualities, and indices such as reactions. He came ''circa'' 1903 to
classify any sign by three interdependent trichotomies, intersecting to form ten (rather than 27) classes of sign. Signs also enter into various kinds of meaningful combinations; Peirce covered both semantic and syntactical issues in his speculative grammar. He regarded formal semiotic as logic ''per se'' and part of philosophy; as also encompassing study of arguments (
hypothetical,
deductive, and
inductive) and inquiry's methods including
pragmatism; and as allied to but distinct from logic's pure mathematics. For a summary of Peirce's contributions to semiotics, see Liszka (1996) or Atkin (2006).
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the "father" of modern linguistics, proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the ''signifier'' as the form of the word or phrase uttered, to the ''signified'' as the mental concept. It is important to note that, according to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary, i.e. there was no necessary connection between the sign and its meaning. This sets him apart from previous philosophers such as Plato or the Scholastics, who thought that there must be some connection between a signifier and the object it signifies. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure himself credits the American linguist William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) with insisting on the arbitrary nature of the sign. Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign has also influenced later philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard. Ferdinand de Saussure coined the term semiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the University of Geneva from 1906–11. Saussure posited that no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a "signifier," i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the "signified," or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued "sign." Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts.
Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) studied the sign processes in animals. He borrowed the German word for 'environment', ''Umwelt'', to describe the individual's subjective world, and he invented the concept of functional circle (''Funktionskreis'') as a general model of sign processes. In his ''Theory of Meaning'' (''Bedeutungslehre'', 1940), he described the semiotic approach to biology, thus establishing the field that is now called biosemiotics.
Valentin Voloshinov (1895–1936) was a Soviet/Russian linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology. Written in the late 1920s in the USSR, Voloshinov's ''Marxism and the Philosophy of Language'' (tr.: Marksizm i Filosofiya Yazyka) developed a counter-Saussurean linguistics, which situated language use in social process rather than in an entirely decontexualized Saussurean ''langue''.
Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) developed a formalist approach to Saussure's structuralist theories. His best known work is ''Prolegomena to a Theory of Language'', which was expanded in ''Résumé of the Theory of Language'', a formal development of ''glossematics'', his scientific calculus of language.
Charles W. Morris (1901–1979). In his 1938 ''Foundations of the Theory of Signs,'' he defined semiotics as grouping the triad
syntax,
semantics, and
pragmatics. Syntax studies the interrelation of the signs, without regard to meaning. Semantics studies the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply. Pragmatics studies the relation between the sign system and its human (or animal) user. Unlike his mentor
George Herbert Mead, Morris was a behaviorist and sympathetic to the
Vienna Circle positivism of his colleague
Rudolf Carnap. Morris was accused by
John Dewey of misreading Peirce.
Thure von Uexküll (1908–2004), the "father" of modern psychosomatic medicine, developed a diagnostic method based on semiotic and biosemiotic analyses.
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a French literary theorist and semiotician. He would often critique pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois society used them to impose its values upon others. For instance, the portrayal of wine drinking in French society as a robust and healthy habit would be a bourgeois ideal perception contradicted by certain realities (i.e. that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics useful in conducting these critiques. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were second-order signs, or connotations. A picture of a full, dark bottle is a sign, a signifier relating to a signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage – wine. However, the bourgeois take this signified and apply their own emphasis to it, making ‘wine’ a new signifier, this time relating to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing wine. Motivations for such manipulations vary from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights brought Barthes very much in line with similar Marxist theory.
Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992) developed a structural version of semiotics named ''generative semiotics'', trying to shift the focus of discipline from signs to systems of signification. His theories develop the ideas of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001), a student of Charles W. Morris, was a prolific and wide-ranging American semiotician. Though he insisted that animals are not capable of language, he expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, thus raising some of the issues addressed by philosophy of mind and coining the term zoosemiotics. Sebeok insisted that all communication was made possible by the relationship between an organism and the environment it lives in. He also posed the equation between semiosis (the activity of interpreting signs) and life – the view that has further developed by Copenhagen-Tartu biosemiotic school.
Juri Lotman (1922–1993) was the founding member of the Tartu-Estonia (or Tartu-Moscow) Semiotic School. He developed a semiotic approach to the study of culture and established a communication model for the study of text semiotics. He also introduced the concept of the semiosphere. Among his Moscow colleagues were Vladimir Toporov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, and Boris Uspensky.
Umberto Eco (1932–present) made a wider audience aware of semiotics by various publications, most notably ''A Theory of Semiotics'' and his novel, ''The Name of the Rose'', which includes applied semiotic operations. His most important contributions to the field bear on interpretation, encyclopedia, and model reader. He has also criticized in several works (''A theory of semiotics'', ''La struttura assente'', ''Le signe'', ''La production de signes'') the "iconism" or "iconic signs" (taken from Peirce's most famous triadic relation, based on indexes, icons, and symbols), to which he purposes four modes of sign production: recognition, ostension, replica, and invention.
Eliseo Verón (1935–present) developed his "Social Discourse Theory" inspired in the Peircian conception of "Semiosis".
The Mu Group (Groupe µ) (founded 1967) developed a structural version of rhetorics, and the visual semiotics.
Current applications
Applications of semiotics include:
It represents a methodology for the analysis of texts regardless of modality. For these purposes, "text" is any message preserved in a form whose existence is independent of both sender and receiver;
It can improve ergonomic design in situations where it is important to ensure that human beings can interact more effectively with their environments, whether it be on a large scale, as in architecture, or on a small scale, such as the configuration of instrumentation for human use.
In some countries, its role is limited to literary criticism and an appreciation of audio and visual media, but this narrow focus can inhibit a more general study of the social and political forces shaping how different media are used and their dynamic status within modern culture. Issues of technological determinism in the choice of media and the design of communication strategies assume new importance in this age of mass media. The use of semiotic methods to reveal different levels of meaning and, sometimes, hidden motivations has led some like Yale's Harold Bloom to demonise elements of the subject as Marxist, nihilist, etc. (e.g. critical discourse analysis in Postmodernism and deconstruction in Post-structuralism).
Publication of research is both in dedicated journals such as ''Sign Systems Studies'', established by Juri Lotman and published by Tartu University Press; ''Semiotica'', founded by Thomas A. Sebeok and published by Mouton de Gruyter; ''Zeitschrift für Semiotik''; ''European Journal of Semiotics''; ''Versus'' (founded and directed by Umberto Eco), et al.; ''The American Journal of Semiotics''; and as articles accepted in periodicals of other disciplines, especially journals oriented toward philosophy and cultural criticism. The major semiotic book series "Semiotics, Communication, Cognition", published by De Gruyter Mouton (series editors Paul Cobley and Kalevi Kull) replaces the former "Approaches to Semiotics" (over 120 volumes) and "Approaches to Applied Semiotics" (series editor Thomas A. Sebeok).
Branches
Semiotics has sprouted a number of subfields, including but not limited to the following:
Biosemiotics is the study of semiotic processes at all levels of biology, or a semiotic study of living systems.
Semiotic anthropology
Cognitive semiotics is the study of meaning-making by employing and integrating methods and theories developed in the cognitive sciences. This involves conceptual and textual analysis as well as experimental investigations. Cognitive semiotics was initially developed at the Center for Semiotics at Aarhus University (Denmark), with an important connection with the Center of Functionally Integrated Neuroscience (CFIN) at Aarhus Hospital. Amongst the prominent cognitive semioticians are Per Aage Brandt, Svend Østergaard, Peer Bundgård, Frederik Stjernfelt, Mikkel Wallentin, Kristian Tylén, Riccardo Fusaroli and Jordan Zlatev.
Computational semiotics attempts to engineer the process of semiosis, say in the study of and design for Human-Computer Interaction or to mimic aspects of human cognition through artificial intelligence and knowledge representation.
Cultural and literary semiotics examines the literary world, the visual media, the mass media, and advertising in the work of writers such as Roland Barthes, Marcel Danesi, and Juri Lotman.
Design Semiotics or Product Semiotics is the study of the use of signs in the design of physical products. Introduced by Rune Monö while teaching Industrial Design at the Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden.
Law and Semiotics. One of the more accomplished publications in this field is the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law.
Music semiology "There are strong arguments that music inhabits a semiological realm which, on both ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels, has developmental priority over verbal language." (Middleton 1990, p. 172) See Nattiez (1976, 1987, 1989), Stefani (1973, 1986), Baroni (1983), and ''Semiotica'' (66: 1–3 (1987)).
Gregorian chant semiology is a current avenue of palaeographical research in Gregorian chant which is revising the Solesmes school of interpretation.
Organisational semiotics is the study of semiotic processes in organizations. It has strong ties to Computational semiotics and Human-Computer Interaction.
Social semiotics expands the interpretable semiotic landscape to include all cultural codes, such as in slang, fashion, and advertising. See the work of Roland Barthes, Michael Halliday, Bob Hodge, and Christian Metz.
Structuralism and post-structuralism in the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, etc.
Theatre Semiotics extends or adapts semiotics onstage. Key theoricians include Keir Elam.
Urban semiotics.
Visual semiotics – a subdomain of semiotics that analyses visual signs. See also
visual rhetoric.
Pictorial semiotics
Pictorial Semiotics is intimately connected to art history and theory. It has gone beyond them both in at least one fundamental way, however. While art history has limited its visual analysis to a small number of pictures which qualify as "works of art," pictorial semiotics has focused on the properties of pictures more generally. This break from traditional art history and theory—as well as from other major streams of semiotic analysis—leaves open a wide variety of possibilities for pictorial semiotics. Some influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, and structuralist and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology/sociology.
Semiotics of food
Food has been one traditional topic of choice in relating semiotic theory because it is extremely accessible and easily relatable to the average individual’s life.
Semiotics is the study of sign processes when conducted individually or in groups and how these sign processes give insight as to how meaning is enabled and also understood.
Food is a semiotic regardless of how it is prepared. Whether food is prepared with precision in a fine dining restaurant, picked from a dumpster, plucked, devoured, or even consumed by a wild animal, meaning can always be extracted from the way a certain food has been prepared and the context in which it is served.
Semiotics and globalization
Present research found that, as airline industry brandings grow and become more international, their logos become more symbolic and less iconic. The iconicity and symbolism of a sign depends on the cultural convention and are on that ground in relation with each other. If the cultural convention has greater influence on the sign, the signs get more symbolic value.
Main institutions
A world organisation of semioticians – the
International Association for Semiotic Studies, with its journal
Semiotica – was established in 1969. The larger research centers together with extensive teaching program include the Semiotics Departments of
Tartu University,
Aarhus University, and
Bologna University.
See also
Outline of semiotics
Index of semiotics articles
References
;Bibliography
;Notes
External links
;Further reading
Applied Semiotics / Sémiotique appliquée
Communicology: The link between semiotics and phenomenological manifestations
Language and the Origin of Semiosis
Semiotics for Beginners
Signo — www.signosemio.com — Presents semiotic theories and theories closely related to semiotics
The Semiotics of the Web
;Peircean focus
Arisbe: The Peirce Gateway
Minute Semeiotic, English, Portuguese
Peirce's Theory of Semiosis: Toward a Logic of Mutual Affection — free online course
Semiotics according to Robert Marty, with 76 definitions of the sign by C. S. Peirce
The Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms
;Journals, book series — associations, centers
Category:Cybernetics
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