Semiotics

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What do words, visual ads, art performances, make-up, uniforms, and pictures have in common? They all are signs—"something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity," to use the words of Charles Sanders Peirce. They all mean something to someone; for example, the word "house" may stand for "a building that serves as living quarters for one or more families," uniforms may represent certain occupations, and so on. What signs mean, how meaning is generated and interpreted, and how signs are used are all issues that are studied in the field of "semiotics" (from the Greek word semeion, or "sign"). Sometimes, the study of signs is referred to as "semiology," but the term "semiotics" is much more common.

People have been interested in signs for many centuries. In fact, the first definition of "sign" was given by Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.E.), who treated it as a medical symptom (e.g., sore throat standing for a cold). After that, signs have been studied through the ages by such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. However, it was only toward the end of the nineteenth century that semiotics was developed as a separate field, thanks to the works of Peirce, an American philosopher, and Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist.

The range of semiotics is very broad, but there are a number of concepts that are central to thefield, including sign, code, medium, types of signs, and dimensions of signs.

There are two main conceptions of sign: dyadic, developed by de Saussure, and triadic, developed by Peirce. In the dyadic conception, sign is an arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified. Signifier is an image of the world that people experience through the senses; signified is the concept people connect with their experiences. For example, an advertisement (sign) combines the signifier (acoustic or visual image) and the signified (corresponding concept). In the triadic conception, sign combines representatum that stands for its object and generates interpretant (its meaning). It is important to note that, in both conceptions, signs have meanings only because the experience and the concept are connected by people (i.e., signs generate meanings only within sociocultural frameworks).

Signs are organized into codes, or coding systems, for example, spoken/written language, dance, clothing, dating rituals, body language, and Morse code. Codes are normative since they present a set of rules of how (not) to act; in this sense, codes can be broken deliberately or through incompetence (e.g., offending someone by using inappropriate gestures that one knows will cause offense or offending someone by using inappropriate gestures without knowing they will cause offense). Codes are used for designing and interpreting messages.

One and the same message can be designed in more than one medium, that is, involve different senses (e.g., visual, auditory, tactile, etc.). The medium presupposes the use of certain code/s (e.g., the phonemic code presupposes the auditory medium). Each medium has its own sense ratio, depending on how much information can be processed during a certain time interval. For example, in most situations the visual medium is more dominant. In all cases, the medium is not something separate from information. In that respect, signs do not simply transmit meanings; they constitute a medium in which meanings are constructed. To use the famous expression of Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is the message."

The most well-known classification of signs is the one developed by Peirce, who identified three types of signs, based on how they represent the objects of the world. Icons signify the world through resemblance so that people can recognize the object (e.g., a photograph visually looks like its object; the word "cock-a-doodle-do" resembles the sounds made by a rooster). Indexes signify the world through indication so that people can figure out this causal relationship (e.g., smoke indicating fire; pointing finger indicating where an object is located in space). Symbols signify the world through convention so that people must learn the relationship between the sign and its object (e.g., most verbal signs). Signs are considered genuine, that is, generating most meanings, if the connection between the representatum and the object is conventional.

According to Charles Morris, a famous American semiotician, all signs have three main dimensions: syntactic (signs in relation to other signs within the same system), semantic (signs in relation to the objects they represent), and pragmatic (signs in relation to their users, i.e., people who produce and interpret signs). For example, syntactically, the sign "cow" is made up of three letters in a certain order; semantically, the sign denotes "mature female of cattle"; and, pragmatically, this sign may generate different responses (e.g., in India a cow is viewed as a sacred animal).

The scope of semiotic studies is very broad. Among the objects of semiotic analysis are literary works, clothing, advertisements, music, architecture, urban planning, human-computer interaction, sports and games, law, and so on. All these objects are regarded as "texts." When people interpret these semiotic objects, they gain an access to the world and make it meaningful. They always try to capture the most immediate (the most "real") meanings; however, these meanings are presented in an indirect way (i.e., mediated). Thus, signs as texts are forms of mediation; in this sense, different communication situations are characterized by different degrees of mediation (e.g., theatrical performance is less mediated than television). With the development of new information technologies, the line between the natural world taken for granted and the constructed world becomes more and more blurred. This could have certain advantages (e.g., the use of "virtual reality" for educational purposes) and possible disadvantages (e.g., increase of violence, especially among youths, due to the influence of mass media).

Semiotics is applied to the study of both the structural organization of texts ("structural semi-otics") and the different social meanings these texts may generate ("social semiotics"). Thus, semiotics moves from language to all modes of representation employed in production and interpretation of texts. Semiotics can reveal the signifying practices behind ideology, power, gender, and so on. Semiotics emphasizes the role of signs in the construction of reality and demonstrates how the "real world" can be challenged and changed. Ultimately, semiotics can help people to understand how they construct their identities, that is, make sense of themselves.

Advertising Effects; Human-Computer Interaction; Language Acquisition; Language and Communication; Language Structure; Mcluhan, Herbert Marshall; Peirce, Charles Sanders.

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