Definitions

  • Roland Barthes (his ideas of dominant signs / dominant ideology)-
    Was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic and semiotician
    His Ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology, and post-structuralism
  • C. S. Pierce (and his categories of sign)
    Was a America philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist.
    he categorized into three distinct categories
    An iconic sign ,An indexical sign, A symbolic sign
  • Ferdinand de Saussure (the separation of object and meaning)
  • Semiotics– The study of signs and symbols
  • Sign- An object or event in relation to something.
  • Signifier- A signs physical form,
  • Signified-the meaning expressed by a sign
  • an iconic sign– Look like their signified, making the relationships between the two very straightforward and obvious eg a photograph of a person
  • an indexical sign- signs where the signifier is caused by the signified, e.g., smoke signifies fire.
  • a symbolic sign– A symbol is a mark, sign or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. … Symbols take the form of words, sounds, gestures, ideas or visual images and are used to convey other ideas and beliefs, eg. red octagon means stop.
  • Code– a system of words , letters or symbols used to represented others.
  • Dominant Signifier, the concept that a signifier refers symbolic (arbitrary) signs.
  • Anchorage– Anchorage is when a piece of media uses another piece of media to reduce the amount of connotations in the first, therefore allowing the audience to interpret it much more easily.
  • Ideology– An ideology is a world view, a system of values, attitudes and beliefs which an individual, group or society holds to be true or important; these are shared by a culture or society about how that society should function.
  • Paradigm– a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitutes legitimate contributions to a field.
  • Syntagm– where signs occur in sequence or parallel and operate together to create meaning.For example, the letters in a word have syntagmatic relationship with one another,
  • Denotation– Denotation is the first level of analysis: what the audience can visually see on a page. Denotation often refers to something literal, and avoids being a metaphor.
  • Connotation-an idea or feeling which a word invokes for a person in addition to its literal or primary meaning.
  • myth-A story that is believed but had no evidence of truth
  • A radical text-texts that challenge the dominant ideology
  • A reactionary text– that supports the dominant ideology