Semiotics What is Semiotics?

Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes. What is a sign? These are things or units that may immediately come to our mind and refer to as signs in everyday life, such as even road signs, music signs, pub signs, etc. Indeed these are rather visual signs, but someone else may confirm that signs can also be drawings, paintings, a photograph etc. Thus it becomes clear that semiotic analysis is rarely considered a field of study in its own right, but is used in a broad range of disciplines, including art, literature, anthropology, sociology, and the mass media. Hence Cultural Semiotics is a branch of communication theory that investigates sign systems and the modes of representation that humans use to convey feelings, thoughts, ideas, and ideologies. We shall call this discipline Semiology. It comes from the Greek word semeon which means ''sign''. So, this subject will investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. The founder, not only of linguistics but also of semiotics is Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. In his course of General Linguistics once Saussure noted the laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge. Moreover, he added that signs comprising a language are not abstractions, but real objects, so linguistics studies these objects and the relations between them. They may be termed the concrete entities of that science. Two main principles are worthy of mentioning. 1. Any linguistic entity exists only in vertue of the association between signal and signification. It disappears the moment we concentrate exclusively on just one or the other. That is what would happen, for instance, if one were to begin by dividing the spoken sequence into syllables. A syllable is defined solely in phonetic terms. But a sequence of sounds is a linguistic sequence only if it is the bearer of an idea. The same is true of the signification as soon as we separate it from its signal. Concepts like 'house', 'white', 'sea' etc. considered in themselves belong to psychology. They become linguistic entities only by association with sound patterns. This unified duality has often been compared with that of the human being, comprising body and soul. Another example refers to water, it is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen: but taken separately neither element has any of the properties of water. 2. A linguistic entity is not ultimately defined until it is delimited, that is separated in a sequence of sounds. It is these delimited entities or units which contrast with one another in the mechanism of the language. According to the method of delimitation speech is represented as two parallel sequences: One of concepts & one of sound patterns. If we compare ''fortunate'' and ''unfortunate'' we shall see that the prefix ''un'' wholly changes the meaning. To summarize whatever has been said a language doesn't present itself to us as a set of signs already delimited. It requires us merely to study their meanings and organisation and it persists that the unit has no special phonic character. A segment of sound is the signal of a certain concept. Historical Development. Concerning the scholars of the ancient period, it is worth mentioning the works of Plato & Aristotle. Plato, for example, took into account that words possess some universal, objective meaning and he explored the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign. He suggested a separateness between an object and the name that is used to signify that object. He noted "Any name which you give, is the right one, and if you change that and give another, the new name is as correct as the old," so he is for the idea of the interpretation. Aristotle recognized the instrumental nature of the linguistic sign, observing that human thought proceeds by the use of signs and that spoken words are the symbols of mental experience. Six centuries later Augustine of Hippas, another prominent scolar in the field of Semiotics, elaborated on this instrumental role of signs in the process of human learning. For Augustine, language was the brick and mortar with which human beings construct knowledge. He stated that all instruction is either about things or about signs; but things are learned by means of signs. Semiotic consciousness became well articulated in the middle ages, due largely to the writing of Roger Bacon (1214-1293). In his extensive tract, De Signis (c. 1267), Bacon distinguished natural signs (i.e. smoke signifies fire) from those involving human communication (both verbal and non-verbal signs). Bacon introduced a triadic semiotic model that describes the relationship between a sign, its object of reference, and the human interpreter. Modern Semiotics. There are two major traditions in modern semiotic theory. One branch is grounded in a European tradition and was led by the Swiss-French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). The other branch emerged out of American pragmatic philosophy by its primary founder, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the signifier to the signified, as the mental concept. It is important to note that according to Saussure the sign is completely arbitrary, that is, the connection between the sign and its meaning is not necessary. This sets him apart from previous philosophers such as Plato and other scholastic thinkers, who thought that there must be some connection between the signifier and the object it signifies. According to Saussurean theory the units of human language are comprised of a limited set of sounds

called phonemes, and these comprise an unlimited set of words and sentences, which are put together according to a set of simple rules called grammar, that is, they are grammatically bound. Hence, from simple units we derive more complex units that are applied to new rules to form more complex structures (themes, characters, stories, genres, style, etc.). Thus, the smallest unit of analysis in Saussure's semiology is the sign made up of a signifier or sensory pattern, and a signified, the concept that is elicited in the mind by the signifier. Saussure emphasized that the signifier does not constitute a sign until it is interpreted. Like Plato, Saussure recognized the arbitrary association between a word and what it stands for. Word selection becomes a matter, not of identity, but of difference. Differences carry signification. The second tradition is based on outstanding logician Charles Sanders Peirces theory. Charles Sanders Peirce shared the Saussurian observation that most signs are symbolic and arbitrary, but he called attention to iconic signs that physically resemble their referent and indexical signs that possess a logical connection to their referent. To Peirce, the relationship of the sign to the object is made in the mind of the interpreter as a mental tool which Peirce called the interpretant. In other words, a thought is a sign requiring interpretation by a subsequent thought in order to achieve meaning. This mediating thought might be a schema, a mental model, or a recollection of prior experience that enables the subject to move forward toward understanding. The interpretant itself becomes a sign that can elicit yet another interpretant, leading the way toward an infinite series of unlimited semioses. According to him signs are closely related to logic. http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/semiotics_este.html The Russian School of Semiotics Among the Russian Semioticians are Mikhail Bakhtin, Valentin Voloshinov, Lev Semionovich Vygotsky, Yuri Lotman and others. Russian scholars admit the fact that language is highly contextual and it is not a fixed system, but it changes, as it is always in interaction between the addresser and the addressee. This approach is known as dialogics, in which language and understanding emerge. Voloshinov argued that all utterances have an inherently dialogic character. According to Voloshinov, dialog is the fundamental feature of speech. In his view, signs have no independent existence outside of social practice. Signs are seen as components of human activity, and it is within human activity that signs take on their form and meaning (Voloshinov, 1929/1986: 25). Another Russian, Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934), applied the instrumental notion of semiotics toward cognition and learning (the relationship suggested much earlier by Augustine and Aristotle). Vygotsky identified the pivotal role of language during the exercise of complex mental functions. In Mind and Society (1930/1978) Vygotsky observes how planning abilities in children are developed through linguistic mediation of action. The child "plans how to solve the problem through speech and then carries out the prepared solution through overt activity" (Vygotsky, 1978:28). He observed the similarity between physical tools and verbal artifacts as instruments of human activity. 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. Although Lotman's writings covered a wide range of subjects, from cinema to poetics, card games to animated cartoons, and mythology to the history of culture, his major interest was in literature. Lotman was the first Russian linguist who rejected Saussure's principle of arbitrariness, in the connection between signified and signifier, stating that the sign is the model of its context. Thinking in ecological terms about the interaction of different semiotic structures and languages led the Russian cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman to coin the term semiosphere to refer to the whole semiotic space of the culture in question . He defines the semiosphere as, the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages. Lotman's spatial model refers likewise to reality, and is linked to the specifics of actual space. Outside the semiosphere, the space of culture, there is no communication or language. There is also one general point of view concerning the Russian semioticians who share with the western and American scholars, is that the branch of linguistics known as semantics have a common concern with the meaning of signs. Semantics, however, focuses on what words mean, whereas semiotics is concerned with how signs mean. Hence it becomes clear that semiotics embraces the following traditional branches of linguistics: semantics, that is, the relationship of signs with words and their meaning; sentactics, which provides the formal or structural relations between signs; pragmatics, that is, the relation between signs to interpreters. This point of view is shared by a lot of scholars and semioticians, like Morris, Charles Pierce, Umberto Eco, Emily Benveniste and others.