Semiotics

Semiotics

Semiotics

Cat

Cat

Semiotics came from linguistics.

From structuralism to post-structuralism till now, semiotics is still a popular method to code and decode signs (linguistic sign and images).

Communication

Personal experiences Personal experiences

Communication

semiotics

•  The science of signs. •  Something which stands to somebody for

something in some respect or capacity. –  Charles Sanders Peirce

•  Anything that can be used to lie. –  Umberto Eco

•  A broad approach to understanding the nature of meaning, cognition, culture, behavior, and life itself.

–  Smith-Shank, 1995

Semiotics •  the pivotal branch of the integrated science of

communication, is concerned with the formulation and encoding of messages by sources, the transmission of these messages through channels, the decoding and interpretation of these messages by destinations, and their signification. The entire transaction, or semiosis, takes place within a context to which the system is highly sensitive and which the system, in turn, affects. Any living entity, or its products, can be either message sources or destinations.

Semiosis

•  Essentially we are wayfaring interpretants from beginning to end. We endlessly analyse concepts, signs, objects and symbols. Every time you interpret a symbol you add new meanings and sometimes knowledge (which may be false) but always you enlarge the meaning of the concept. We live in an interpretive world and we are interpretive beings.

–  1992

Models of signs

•  Signifier and Signified •  Denotation and Connotation •  Icon, index, and symbol •  Metaphor •  Myth

Signifier and Signified

•  Signifier and signified. – Signifier is a sign, a sound, or a written

character that we can see. – Signified is the concept of the sign in our mind

•  Saussure, “A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept (signified) and a sound pattern (signifier)”

Denotation and Connotation

•  Denotation and Connotation – Denotation is the object that we can see in an

image (text). – Connotation means what the object means

and the metaphors of the object

Icon, index, and symbol

•  Icon, index, and symbol –  Icon is an image which resembling or imitating

the meaning. –  index is an image which does not arbitrary but

directly connected to the meaning. – symbol is an image which does not directly

represent the meaning, but it fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional.

Metaphor

•  Metaphor – Metaphor is something not essentially

represents something else; however, we use this image to represent the meaning we want to represent.

Myth

•  “Myths can be seen as extended metaphors; myths help us to mark sense of our experience within a culture” (Chandler, 2004, p. 145).