Definitions

  1. Roland Barthes:
    French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician.
  2. C. S. Pierce:
    American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as “the father of pragmatism”
  3. Ferdinand de Saussure:
    Swiss linguist and semiotician. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiology in the 20th century.
  4. Semiotics:
    The study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.
  5. Sign: An object or action used to signify something.
  6. Signifier:
    a sign’s physical form (such as a sound, printed word, or image) as distinct from its meaning. (Saussure)
  7. Signified:
    the meaning or idea expressed by a sign, as distinct from the physical form in which it is expressed. (Saussure)
  8. an iconic sign:
    Always bear some resemblance to their referent ie. a photo
  9. an indexical sign: Signs where the signifier is caused by the signified, e.g., smoke signifies fire
  10. a symbolic sign: Represents / stands for something.
  11. Code: Letters / Symbols
  12. Dominant Signifier:
    Main sign 
  13. Anchorage: Meaning of an sign
  14. Paradigm: a group of similar things
  15. Syntagm: A sign within a sequence, changing it’s meaning
  16. Signifcation: To have meaning
  17. Denotation: The object (Barthes)
  18. Connotation: idea / meaning of the object
  19. Myth: A story that is believed but had no evidence of truth
  20. Dominant Ideology,
  21. A radical text: Challenges society
  22. A reactionary text: supports society
  23. Ideology – a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.

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