Definition and the History - Universitas...
Transcript of Definition and the History - Universitas...
• Semiotics related to different types of theoretical criticism and fields of knowledge
•Defining Semiotics
Semiotics
Linguistics
Literary Studies
Communication Studies
Anthropology
• Semiology (06:30)
the study of existing conventional communicative system
(Saussure)
language as system the world negotiation tool
gestures
semaphore
a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life
(Saussure in Chandler 3)
• Semiotics
• “Semeiotic” formal doctrine of signs closely related to
• logic (Charles Peirce)
• concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign
• (Umberto Eco)
• the science of signs (Charles W. Morris)
Sign
anything stands for something else
words, images, sounds, gestures and objects (Chandler 2)
What to study in Semiotics
- Sign-system medium or genre
- How meanings are made
- How reality is represented
mental process
• Language is ... a purely semiotics system... (Jakobson)
• Semiotics draws heavily on linguistics concepts, partly because of his influence, and also because linguistics is a more established discipline than the study of other sign-systems (Saussure)
• linguistics is branch of semiology (Chandler 7)
• semiology is branch of linguistics (Roland Barthes in Chandler
• 8)
• Language is the central and most important among all human semiotic systems (Jakobson).
Why Semiotics is important to Linguistics?
• The exploration of signs and the world Plato and Aristotle
• Founder of Semiotics Saussure and Peirce
Etimology of Semiotics
• σημείο /sim̱eío/ sign
• σήμα / sím̱a / signal, sign
Use of terms two traditions
- Semiology in the tradition of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Barthes
- Semiotics in the tradition of Peirce and Morris
•History and Development
Plato (427-347)
- Verbal signs (either natural or conventional) incomplete representations of the true nature of things
- The study of words reveals the true nature of things since the realm of ideas is independent of its representation in the form of words
- Knowledge mediated by signs is indirect and inferior to immediate knowledge, and truth about things through words, even if words are excellent likeness, is inferior to knowing the truth itself
Aristotle (384-322) Definition of sign
- Written marks are symbols of spoken sounds
- Spoken sounds are (in the first place) signs and symbols of mental impressions
- Mental impressions are likeness of actual things
- While mental events and things are the same for all mankind, speech is not
The difference in the structure of sign systems is only a matter of
the expression-plane, not of the content-plane.
A name is a spoken sound significant by convention when it
becomes a symbol
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) One of the great figures in the history of semiotics
The founder of the modern theory of signs
Developed logical taxonomies of types of sign cognition, thought, and even man are semiotic in their essence
• Sign :
• “anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the later is thereby mediately determined by the former”.
• Chandler p. 29
According to Peirce, signs consist of three inter-related parts (triad relation model): • the representamen/ sign vehicle (r) the signifier, the form which the sign takes for example, a written word, an utterance, smoke as a sign for fire etc. • an interpretant (i) the understanding that we have of the sign/object relation
central to the content of the sign the sense made of the sign • an object (referent) (o) something beyond the sign whatever is signified for example, the object to which the written or uttered word attaches, or the fire signified by the smoke.
• Symbol/ symbolic A symbol has no logical meaning between it and the object, based on convention the signifier does not resemble the signified relationship: agreed, learned • Icon/ iconic A sign that resembles/ imitates something, such as photographs of people. An icon can also be illustrative or diagrammatic, for example a ‘no-
smoking’ sign.
• Index/ indexical A sign where there is a direct/casual link between the sign and the object. The majority of traffic signs are Index signs as they represent information which relates to a location (eg, a ‘slippery road surface’ sign placed on a road which is prone to flooding).
Peirce Divisions of Sign (Chandler p. 36-37)
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) Basic principles of his theory influenced the development of
structuralism
Fundamental aspects of Saussure’s theory of the sign are its bilateral structure, its mentalistic conception, the exclusion of reference, and the structural conception of meaning.
“Linguistic sign can be compared with the two sides of a sheet of a paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time.” bilateral/ dyadic
linguistic sign is two-sided psychological entity consisting a concept and a sound-image
Another important terms by Saussure:
- Language as a system or a code, and a social phenomenon
- Langue vs. Parole
Langue: language system
Parole: speech individual’s use of the social sign system in
speech acts and texts
- Synchronic vs. Diachronic
synchronic: studies of a sign system at a given point of time, irrespective of its history
diachronic : studies of the evolution of a sign system in its historical development
Louis Hjelmslev [‘jεlmsleu] (1899-1965)
- Semiotics is first and foremost a hierarchy.
- Its distinguishing feature is that it is guided by a dynamic principle by which it is split into dichotomies at all levels, yielding expression and content,system and process, denotative and non-denotative semiotics, and, within the latter, metasemiotics and connotative semiotics.