Key language:
Semiotics
- Sign – Something that can stand for something else.
- Code – A combination of semiotic systems.
- Convention – What signs are meaningfully organised into.
- Dominant Signifier – Main signifier that stands out.
- Anchorage – Describe how the combination of elements within a sign fit together and fix the meaning.
Ferdinand de Saussure:
- Signifier – Any material thing that signifies something.
- Signified – The concept that a signifier refers to.
- Paradigm – Collection of similar signs.
- Syntagm – Order of in which signs go and how they link with each other.
C S Pierce:
- Icon – A sign that looks like its object.
- Index – A sign that has a link to its object.
- Symbol – A sign that has an arbitrary or random link to its object.
Roland Barthes:
- Signification – Structural levels of signification, meaning or representation.
- Denotation – The most basic or literal meaning of a sign.
- Connotation – The secondary, cultural meanings of signs; or “signifying signs,” signs that are used as signifiers for a secondary meaning.
- Myth – The most obvious level of signification, but distorts meaning by validating arbitrary cultural assumptions in a way similar to the denotative sign.
- Ideology – codes that reinforce or are congruent with structures of power.
- Radical – Something that challenges dominant ideas.
- Reactionary – Something that confirms dominant ideas.
C.S. Peirce – Peirce’s seminal work in the field was anchored in pragmatism and logic. He defined a sign as “something which stands to somebody for something,” and one of his major contributions to semiotics was the categorization of signs into three main types: (1) an icon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign for falling rocks); (2) an index, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is a sign of fire); and (3) a symbol, which is related to its referent only by convention (as with words or traffic signals). Peirce also demonstrated that a sign can never have a definite meaning, for the meaning must be continuously qualified.
Ferdinand De Saussure – Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century.
Roland Barthes – French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes’ 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.
