Semiotics

Looking online, I found the Open University unit on semiotics helpful.

For reading, it uses extracts from Jonathan Bignell’s ‘Signs and myths’, which states that semiotics originates mainly from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and Charles Peirce. Saussure explained that language is made up of signs (like words) which communicate meanings, and that by using the same kind of analysis, other things which communicate meanings could be studied in the same way as linguistic signs.

Saussure showed that there are two components to every sign. The ‘signifier’, which is the vehicle which expresses the sign, like the marks on paper which we read as words, or the pattern of shapes and colours which photographs use to represent an object or person. The other component is ‘signified’, which the signifier brings to mind when we perceive it. So when you perceive the sign ‘cat’ written on this page, you perceive a group of marks, the letters c, a, and t, which are the signifier. The signifier calls up the signified or concept of cat in your mind.

Charles Peirce explained that gestures, dress codes, traffic signs, advertising images, newspapers, television programmes, etc, are all kinds of media which use visual signs. As with linguistic signs, there is a material signifier, which expresses the sign, and a mental concept, a signified, which immediately accompanies it. He developed the idea of a ‘symbolic’ sign, explaining that linguistic signs can be arbitrary since there is no necessary connection between the written word, of signifier ‘cat’ and the signified concept of cat in our minds. The relationship of signifier to signified, and of sign to referent, is a convention established by the English language.

In describing an ‘iconic’ sign Pierce used the example of a photograph of a cat, in which the signifier resembles the referent. A photograph of a cat will faithfully record its different shapes and colours, which is the signifier. The signified is the concept of a cat which this signifier immediately calls up. The referent is the cat which was photographed. Iconic signs merge the signifier, signified and referent together.

In explaining an ‘indexical’ sign, he said that that they have a concrete and often causal relationship to their signified. “For instance when a cat is hungry and miaows to gain our attention, the sound made by the cat is indicating its presence nearby, asking us to notice it, and this kind of sign Peirce calls ‘indexical’”. Another example he gave was of smoke being an index of fire, a sign caused by the thing which it signifies.

He noted that certain signs have mixed symbolic, indexical and iconic features. A traffic light showing red has both indexical and symbolic components. It is an indexical sign pointing to a traffic situation (that cars here must wait), and using an arbitrary symbolic system to do this (red arbitrarily signifies danger and prohibition in this context).’

Roland Barthes noted that in media the linguistic, visual, and other kinds of sign are used not only to denote something, but can also to trigger a further range of connotations attached to the sign. He named this a ‘myth’, structured to send specific messages to the observer. So myth takes an existing sign and makes it function as a signifier on another level.

For instance, an advert for shoes which contains a photograph of someone stepping out of a Rolls Royce not only denotes the shoes and a car, but with it comes the connotation of luxury, through the sign ‘Rolls-Royce’. This connection now has an intended mythic meaning in which the shoes are part of a privileged way of life.

Open University:
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=170753

Introducing Semiotics, Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz