Semiotics

Sign:

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols. It is also known as, semiotic studies. It also includes the study of meaning-making, the study of sign processes and meaningful communication.

Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. As different from linguistics, however, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems.

Language is a “structured system of signs”. Language is the primary model of a signifying system that creates rather than simply expresses meaning.in so doing, it produces our conceptual categories. It is said that human being are in a “prison house of language” and rather than fully controlling language, we are “spoken by it”.

Humans are homo-significans i.e. meaning makers. Distinctively, we make meanings through our creation and interpretation of ‘signs’. According to Pierce:

          “We think only in signs.”

Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavors, acts and objects,but such things have no intrinsic meaning and becomes signs only when we invest them with meaning. Pierce said;

     “Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign.”

Anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as “signifying” something referring “to or standing for something other than itself.” Sign is the smallest unit that stands for something else in order to communicate.

Saussure proposed a dyadic model of a sign:

      A sign is a recognizable combination of a “significant” (signifier) with a “signifie`(signified).

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Signifier:

A signifier is the form or a sound image of a signified (concept).

 Signified:

A signified is the mental image, a concept or psychological reality of a signifier (form).

If we take a linguistic example, the word 'Open' (when it is invested with meaning by someone who encounters it on a shop doorway) is a sign consisting of:

• A signifier: the word open;
• A signified concept: that the shop is open for business.

There is no intrinsic, direct, inevitable or necessary relationship between the signifier and the signified. Saussure stressed the “arbitrariness” of the sign. He says;

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