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Lesson Plans \| Course Documents \| Links \| Citing Sources \| Writing Center \| Home Page Semiotics "The systematic study of signs, or, more precisely, of the production of meanings from sign-systems, linguistic or non-linguistic. As a distinct tradition of inquiry into human communications, semiotics was founded by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) and separately by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who proposed that linguistics would form one part of a more general science of signs: ‘semiology’. Peirce’s term ‘semiotics’ is usually preferred in English, although Saussure’s principles and concepts—especially the distinctions between signifier and signified and between langue and parole—have been more influential as the basis of structuralism and its approach to literature. Semiotics is concerned not with the relations between signs and things but with the interrelationships between signs themselves, within their structured systems or codes of signification (see paradigm, syntagm). The semiotic approach to literary works stresses the production of literary meanings from shared conventions and codes; but the scope of semiotics goes beyond spoken or written language to other kinds of communicative systems such as cinema, advertising, clothing, gesture, and cuisine. A practitioner of semiotics is a semiotician. The term semiosis is sometimes used to refer to the process of signifying." Baldick, Chris. "semiotics." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press, 2015. Oxford Reference. 2015. Web. 25 Jan. 2016. "The science of signs, as one of the founders of the field Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure famously put it. There are two main schools of semiotics, Saussurean and Peircean, the latter referring to the work of American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. The two semiotic models, which were constructed independently of one another, differ in one important respect: whereas Saussure's model of the sign is binary, Peirce's is triple. As a result there has been little cross-fertilization between the two schools of thought. Saussure's key insight, on which semiotics as a whole is built, is that the sound of a word is arbitrary with respect to both its meaning and the thing to which it ultimately refers: there is no intrinsic reason, for example, that a cow should be called a ‘cow’ and that the word should be sounded in the way it is (that different languages have different words for the same thing may be taken as proof of this latter point). On Saussure's view of things, the word ‘cow’ is more usefully understood as a sign consisting of a signifier (the sound of the word) and a signified (the concept we associate with that sound) and he extends this idea to the whole of language. More than five decades after Saussure died, in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly (but not exclusively) in France, linguists, literary theorists, cultural critics, and psychoanalysts, like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Christian Metz, and Jacques Lacan, began to experiment with Saussure's notion of the sign and found that it could be extended to a great range of meaning-making activities, including the non-linguistic realms of everyday life. This led to a veritable explosion of interest in semiotics and for a number of years it was the dominant mode of analysis in the humanities, particularly in Cultural Studies which saw semiotics as a means of theorizing how ideology works. The pioneer in this respect was Roland Barthes, whose work on myth, showed that even the most ordinary of objects, such as soap bubbles, convey significance beyond mere utility (they can be a sign of purity, joy, cleanliness, childhood fun, and so on). As critics have since pointed out, however, the price of this has been to treat every cultural activity as being ‘like a language’ and while this has been a powerfully effective model to follow it does have drawbacks, inasmuch that not every cultural activity performs like a language. Since its heyday in the 1960s, semiotics has become a specialist and highly sophisticated area of study which has found a new audience amongst artificial intelligence researchers." Buchanan, Ian. "semiotics." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Web 25 Jan. 2016

Dr. Bordelon's Graphic Novel Course

Semiotics

"The systematic study of signs, or, more precisely, of the production of meanings from sign-systems, linguistic or non-linguistic. As a distinct tradition of inquiry into human communications, semiotics was founded by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) and separately by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who proposed that linguistics would form one part of a more general science of signs: ‘semiology’. Peirce’s term ‘semiotics’ is usually preferred in English, although Saussure’s principles and concepts—especially the distinctions between signifier and signified and between langue and parole—have been more influential as the basis of structuralism and its approach to literature. Semiotics is concerned not with the relations between signs and things but with the interrelationships between signs themselves, within their structured systems or codes of signification (see paradigm, syntagm). The semiotic approach to literary works stresses the production of literary meanings from shared conventions and codes; but the scope of semiotics goes beyond spoken or written language to other kinds of communicative systems such as cinema, advertising, clothing, gesture, and cuisine. A practitioner of semiotics is a semiotician. The term semiosis is sometimes used to refer to the process of signifying."

Baldick, Chris. "semiotics." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press, 2015. Oxford Reference. 2015. Web. 25 Jan. 2016.

"The science of signs, as one of the founders of the field Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure famously put it. There are two main schools of semiotics, Saussurean and Peircean, the latter referring to the work of American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. The two semiotic models, which were constructed independently of one another, differ in one important respect: whereas Saussure's model of the sign is binary, Peirce's is triple. As a result there has been little cross-fertilization between the two schools of thought. Saussure's key insight, on which semiotics as a whole is built, is that the sound of a word is arbitrary with respect to both its meaning and the thing to which it ultimately refers: there is no intrinsic reason, for example, that a cow should be called a ‘cow’ and that the word should be sounded in the way it is (that different languages have different words for the same thing may be taken as proof of this latter point). On Saussure's view of things, the word ‘cow’ is more usefully understood as a sign consisting of a signifier (the sound of the word) and a signified (the concept we associate with that sound) and he extends this idea to the whole of language. More than five decades after Saussure died, in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly (but not exclusively) in France, linguists, literary theorists, cultural critics, and psychoanalysts, like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Christian Metz, and Jacques Lacan, began to experiment with Saussure's notion of the sign and found that it could be extended to a great range of meaning-making activities, including the non-linguistic realms of everyday life. This led to a veritable explosion of interest in semiotics and for a number of years it was the dominant mode of analysis in the humanities, particularly in Cultural Studies which saw semiotics as a means of theorizing how ideology works. The pioneer in this respect was Roland Barthes, whose work on myth, showed that even the most ordinary of objects, such as soap bubbles, convey significance beyond mere utility (they can be a sign of purity, joy, cleanliness, childhood fun, and so on). As critics have since pointed out, however, the price of this has been to treat every cultural activity as being ‘like a language’ and while this has been a powerfully effective model to follow it does have drawbacks, inasmuch that not every cultural activity performs like a language. Since its heyday in the 1960s, semiotics has become a specialist and highly sophisticated area of study which has found a new audience amongst artificial intelligence researchers."

Buchanan, Ian. "semiotics." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Web 25 Jan. 2016