Semiology is an attempt to crate a science of the study of sign systems and their role in the construction and reconstruction of meaning in the media texts.
Semiology is philosophical theory of the studies and symbols. The analysis of anything that stands for something else. Semiotics is divided into three sections.
Semantics.
Syntactics.
Pragmatics.
Key theorists:
Roland Barthes
Ferdinand de Saussure
Charles Peirce.
- Roland was influenced by the structuralist work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand, who first promoted the idea of semiology in his book.
- Charles Peirce took Saussure's ideas and expanded them to include not just language but other 'social constructs'.
Sign
A sign is anything that makes meaning.
- Sign is divided into two aspects -> Signifier and Signified.
The signified is the concept that a signifier refers to.
Signifier -> Denotation
Signified -> Connotation
Ferdinand de Saussure:
- Born 26 November 1857 in Geneva
- Died 22 February 1913
He was a Swiss linguist, he is one of the founding fathers of semiotics and he studied Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and a variety of courses at the University of Geneva
Saussure published a book entitled (Dissertation on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages).
He famously said: "Language is no longer regarded as peripheral to our grasp of the world we live in, but as central to it. Words are not mere vocal labels or communicational adjuncts superimposed upon an already given order of things. They are collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human beings constitute and articulate their world. This typically twentieth-century view of language has profoundly influenced developments throughout the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology".
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically.
Saussure is one of the founding fathers of linguistics but also of what is now more usually referred to as semiotics. His concept of the sign/signifier/signified/referent forms the core of the field. Equally crucial, although often overlooked or misapplied, is the dimension of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis of linguistic description.
Charles Peirce:
- Born on September 10th 1839
- Died April 19th 1914
His most important work was in maths, he worked in linear algebra, geometries, applied maths in economics and probability and statistics. He was educated as a chemist and was employed as a scientist for 30 years. He has been called “the most original and versatile of American philosophers and Americans greatest logician.
Logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) began writing on semeiotic, semiotics, or the theory of sign relations in the 1860s. He eventually defined semiosis as an "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs".
Charles Peirce took Ferdinand de Sausse idea and expanded on it, he defined that a sign being composed of:
Signifier – the form which the sign takes.
Signified – the concept which it represents.
Peirce said that there are three basic elements in sign action which is semiotics:
A sign - represents something as saying something about something.
An object – this is a subject matter which can be anything thinkable , a quality or an occurrence.
An interpretant – a sign of an object.
Roland Barthes:
He was born on 12th November 1915 and he was born in Cherbourg.
He was a French literary theorist, critic, semiotician and a philosopher.
He died on 25th march 1980 in Paris, the cause of his demise was due to “pulmonary complications” due to the accident he had from after coming out of the lunch. He was unconscious and his nose was bleeding so he was taken to the Salpêtrière hospital, where it took so many hours to establish who he was.
Barthes explored a range of fields and he influenced them such as semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism. Barthes mythologies (1957) interrogated certain specific cultural materials to expose how bourgeois society which shows the values through it. In the French society the representation of wine is a healthy and strong habit however wine is considered to be unhealthy and make you weak however this is how he discovered semiotics.
The key principles of the theory is that when you see something you interpret different meanings for example when a wine bottle is presented in front of you with a wine glass then you know that this is for the wine whereas when you see a beer glass near the wine bottle then you know that this is not right.
He has explored a variety of signs in his life and made his interpretation of signs an founded the semiotic theory.
