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SEMIOTICS

Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language | Date: 1998

SEMIOTICS. The study and analysis of SIGNS and SYMBOLS as part of COMMUNICATION as for example in LANGUAGE, gesture, clothing, and behaviour. Present-day semiotics arises from the independent work of two linguistic researchers, one in the US, the other in Switzerland. Charles S. Peirce (1834–1914) used the term to describe the study of signs and symbolic systems from a philosophical perspective, while Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) coined semiology as part of his interest in language as a system of signs. The terms have generally been regarded as synonymous, and semiotics is better known, especially in the English-speaking world.

Almost anything can be a sign: clothes, hairstyles, type of house or car owned, accent, and body language. All send messages about such things as age, class, and politics. Sign systems, however, are not peculiar to human beings: the study of animal communication by gesture, noise, smell, dancing, etc., is termed zoosemiotics, while the study of technical systems of signals such as Morse code and traffic lights is communication theory. In semiotics, the term CODE refers loosely to any set of signs and their conventions of meaning. Language represents a rich set of such codes, both verbal (in language proper) and non-verbal (in the para-language of facial expressions, body movements, and such vocal activities as snorts and giggles). The media provide visual and aural signals in photographs, radio and television programmes, advertisements, and theatrical performances. Literature is seen as a particularly rich semiotic field with such sub-disciplines as literary and narrative semiotics. Critical attention has come to focus not only on the codes themselves, but on the process of encoding and decoding. Readers, it is argued, do not simply decode messages, but actively create meanings: that is, they re-code as they read.

Peirce and Saussure were interested in the relationship between sign and referent (what a sign refers to). Although they both stressed that this relationship was essentially arbitrary, Peirce argued that different types of sign had different degrees of both arbitrariness and motivation. What he terms an icon is a highly motivated sign, since it visually resembles what it represents: for example, a photograph or hologram. His index is partly motivated to the extent that there is a connection, usually of causality, between sign and referent: spots indexical of a disease like measles; smoke indexical of fire. Peirce's symbol is the most arbitrary kind of sign: the word in language, the formula in mathematics, or the rose representing love in literary tradition. See LINGUISTIC SIGN, SEMANTICS.


© Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998.