Studies of meaning evolve from semiotics, a philosophical approach that seeks to interpret messages in terms of signs and patterns of symbolism. Contemporary semiotics consists of two branches originating contemporaneously in late 19th century France and the United States. Originating in literary and linguistic contexts, one branch (referred to as semiology) originated from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure. The second branch expands on the work of American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
A sign can be a word, sound, a touch or visual image. Saussure divides a sign into two components: the signifier, which is the sound, image, or word, and the signified, which is the concept or meaning the signifier represents. For Saussure, the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and conventional. In other words, signs can mean anything we agree that they mean, as well as mean different things to different people.
Peircean semiotics works from a different notion of what a sign is. A sign is something that stands for something else (the sign's object) to a receptive mind. The effect the sign has on the receiving mind is called the interpretant. Note that the interpretant may not be identical to the sign's object (something we call a "mis-understanding") but we are eternally prevented from assurance of this match or mismatch because the only way we have of verifying the match is to use additional signs.
In Peircean semiotics, signs that have an arbitrary or conventional relation to their objects are called symbols. But there are two other kinds of sign-object relations which are not completely arbitrary: icons are signs that resemble their objects, and indexes are signs that relate to their objects by some actual contact or environmental contiguity.
Groupe μ
The Mu Group μ in 1991: J.-M. Klinkenberg, P. Minguet, F. Edeline.
The Belgian Groupe μ ("Mu Group"), founded in 1967, developed a structural, cognition-based study of visual semiotics and visual rhetoric.[1]
Most signs operate on several levels—iconic as well as symbolic and/or indexical. This suggests that visual semiotic analysis may be addressing a hierarchy of meaning in addition to categories and components of meaning. As Umberto Eco explains, "what is commonly called a 'message' is in fact a text whose content is a multilevel discourse".[2]
Whether the analyst works from a Saussurean or a Peircean perspective, semiotic analysis of visual texts involves taking apart the various levels of visual signs to understand how the parts contribute to the meaning of the whole.
The broadening concept of text and discourse encourages additional research into how visual communication operates to create meaning. Deely explains that "at the heart of semiotics is the realization that the whole of human experience, without exception, is an interpretive structure mediated and sustained by signs".[3]Semiotics now considers a variety of texts, using Eco's terms, to investigate such diverse areas as movies, art, advertisements, and fashion, as well as visuals. In other words, as Berger explains, "the essential breakthrough of semiology is to take linguistics as a model and apply linguistic concepts to other phenomena--texts--and not just to language itself." Anthropologists like Grant McCracken and marketing experts like Sydney Levy have even used semiotic interpretations to analyze the rich cultural meanings of products and consumer consumption behaviors as texts.
Visual texts are an important area of analysis for semioticians and particularly for scholars working with visually intensive forms such as advertising and television because images are such a central part of our mass communication sign system. Linda Scott has deconstructed the images in perfume advertising as well as in Apple's "1984" commercial using close readings of the various messages that can be interpreted from the ads. Shay Sayre has also looked at perfume advertising images and the visual rhetoric in Hungary's first free election television advertisements using semiotic analysis. Also using semiotics, Arthur Asa Berger has deconstructed the meaning of the "1984" commercial as well as programs such as Cheers and films such as Murder on the Orient Express.
Systems of meaning, Culler and Berger tells us, are analyzed by looking at cultural and communication products and events as signs and then by analysing the relationship between these signs. The categories of signs and the relationships between them create a system. Barthes, for example, has analyzed the "fashion system," and classified the system of communication through fashion into two categories: image clothing and descriptive clothing. Likewise, an advertisement has its own system of meaning. We expect an appeal to purchase, either directly or implied, to be made and a product to be shown, for example, as part of the advertising system.[4]
In their book Discourses in Place: Language in the material world, Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon note that visual semiotics has to do with turning "from the spoken, face-to-face discourses to the representations of that interaction order in images and signs" (82). Interaction order involves the various social interactions that takes place in any setting, such as being alone, being with a companion, at a meeting, watching a show etc., and it "is almost always complex", with various interactions occurring at once (83). When it comes to images, says Scollon and Wong, there are also multiple relationships. These include the relationships between the components of a visual image, the relationships between the producers of the visual image, the relationships between the producers and the components, as well as the relationships between the components of an image and those who are viewing it. That's are the main point.
This interaction order has four main semiotic systems, says Scollon and Wong. These include represented participants, modality, composition and interactive participants. Represented participants are elements of a visual image, and are either narrative ("present unfolding actions and events or... processes of change") or conceptual ("show abstract, comparative or generalized categories") (Scollon and Wong 86). Modality is how true to reality a visual image is, and main indicators include color saturation, color differentiation, depth, illumination and brightness, among others. With modality, it is often found "that truth, veracity, or sincerity might be expressed in very different ways from one society to another," with Western cultures favoring naturalistic representation, or as true to seeing it in person as possible (Scollon and Wong 89-90).
Composition is the way in which represented participants within a visual image are arranged in relation to one another, with the three main systems of compositions being ideal-real(top to bottom), given-new(left to right), and center-margin relationships (Scollon and Wong 92). So for example, when reading a menu at a fast food restaurant, the given information would be something such as "hamburger", and the new information would be the price, read left to right and recognized in that order. As mentioned above, interactive participants, explain Scollon and Wong, are the various relationships that occur around a visual image, such as those between the producers of the image and the represented participants in that image. In this way, these four components work together to help convey the meaning of signs and symbols.[5]
Association of Visual Semiotics
The International Association of Visual Semiotics was formed in 1989. The Association, being of an international nature, recognizes three official languages: English, French, and Spanish. The Association is in French and Spanish: Association Internationale de Sémiotique Visuelle and El Asociación Internacional de Semiótica Visual, respectively.
Congresses have been held in Blois (France) 1989, Bilbao (Spain) 1992, Berkeley (California, USA) 1994, São Paulo (Brazil) 1996, Siena (Italy) 1999, Québec (Canada) 2001, Mexico city 2003, Lyon (France) 2004, Istanbul (Turkey) 2007, Venice (Italy) 2010, and Buenos Aires (Argentina) 2012.[6]
President: José Luis Caivano (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
General Secretary: Göran Sonesson (University of Lund, Sweden).
Previous Presidents: Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (2001-2012), Paolo Fabbri (1998-2001), Ana Claudia de Oliveira (1996-1998), Jacques Fontanille (1994-1996), Fernande Saint-Martin (1990-1994), Michel Costantini (1989-1990).
Visual Semiotics are also associated with that of Film, Fashion and Advertising. it is suggested that the use of semiotics in films are used to connote a specific underlying theme like that of the nuclear bomb in Godzilla.
Semiotics is the systematic study of sign processes and the communication of meaning. In semiotics, a sign is defined as anything that communicates intentional and unintentional meaning or feelings to the sign's interpreter.
In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional, as when a word is uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, as when a symptom is taken as a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can communicate through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste.
Visual communication is the use of visual elements convey ideas and information which include signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration, industrial design, advertising, animation, and electronic resources. This style of communication relies on the way one's brain perceives the outside images. These images come together within the human brain making it as if the brain is what is actually viewing the particular image. Visual communication has been proven to be unique when compared to other verbal or written languages because of its more abstract structure. It stands out for its uniqueness, as the interpretation of signs varies on the viewer's field of experience. The brain then tries to find meaning from the interpretation. The interpretation of imagery is often compared to the set alphabets and words used in oral or written languages. Another point of difference found by scholars is that, though written or verbal languages are taught, sight does not have to be learned and therefore people of sight may lack awareness of visual communication and its influence in their everyday life. Many of the visual elements listed above are forms of visual communication that humans have been using since prehistoric times. Within modern culture, there are several types of characteristics when it comes to visual elements, they consist of objects, models, graphs, diagrams, maps, and photographs. Outside the different types of characteristics and elements, there are seven components of visual communication: color, shape, tones, texture, figure-ground, balance, and hierarchy.
Course in General Linguistics is a book compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from notes on lectures given by historical-comparative linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911. It was published in 1916, after Saussure's death, and is generally regarded as the starting point of structural linguistics, an approach to linguistics that was established in the first half of the 20th century by the Prague linguistic circle. One of Saussure's translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussure's contribution to linguistics and the study of language in the following way:
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.
In semiotics, the value of a sign depends on its position and relations in the system of signification and upon the particular codes being used.
In semiotics, a modality is a particular way in which information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i.e. to the type of sign and to the status of reality ascribed to or claimed by a sign, text, or genre. It is more closely associated with the semiotics of Charles Peirce (1839–1914) than Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) because meaning is conceived as an effect of a set of signs. In the Peircean model, a reference is made to an object when the sign is interpreted recursively by another sign, a conception of meaning that does in fact imply a classification of sign types.
In the broadest sense, a code is a correspondence or rule between patterns. It can be an arrangement of physical matter, including the electromagnetic spectrum, that stores the potential to convey meaning. For instance, the pattern of vibration we call 'sound' when activated within the mind, triggers an image; say the word "cat". Also, seeing the shapes we call 'letters' forming the word makes one think of or visualize a cat. The words upon the screen were conceived in the human mind, and then translated into computer code.
In semiotics, the commutation test is used to analyze a signifying system. The test identifies signifiers as well as their signifieds, value and significance.
In semiotics, denotation is the surface or the literal meaning, the definition most likely to appear in a dictionary.
In semiotics, connotation arises when the denotative relationship between a signifier and its signified is inadequate to serve the needs of the community. A second level of meanings is termed connotative. These meanings are not objective representations of the thing, but new usages produced by the language group.
Representation is the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else. It is through representation that people organize the world and reality through the act of naming its elements. Signs are arranged in order to form semantic constructions and express relations.
In semiotics, the study of sign processes (semiosis), the meaning of a sign is its place in a sign relation, in other words, the set of roles that the sign occupies within a given sign relation.
Charles Sanders Peirce began writing on semiotics, which he also called semeiotics, meaning the philosophical study of signs, in the 1860s, around the time that he devised his system of three categories. During the 20th century, the term "semiotics" was adopted to cover all tendencies of sign researches, including Ferdinand de Saussure's semiology, which began in linguistics as a completely separate tradition.
Social semiotics is a branch of the field of semiotics which investigates human signifying practices in specific social and cultural circumstances, and which tries to explain meaning-making as a social practice. Semiotics, as originally defined by Ferdinand de Saussure, is "the science of the life of signs in society". Social semiotics expands on Saussure's founding insights by exploring the implications of the fact that the "codes" of language and communication are formed by social processes. The crucial implication here is that meanings and semiotic systems are shaped by relations of power, and that as power shifts in society, our languages and other systems of socially accepted meanings can and do change.
Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, which define units syntactically and lexically, respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena, the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data, the priority of linguistic form over meaning, the marginalization of written language, and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social, behavioral, or cognitive phenomena.
The semiotic square, also known as the Greimas square, is a tool used in structural analysis of the relationships between semiotic signs through the opposition of concepts, such as feminine-masculine or beautiful-ugly, and of extending the relevant ontology.
The semiotics of social networking discusses the images, symbols and signs used in systems that allow users to communicate and share experiences with each other. Examples of social networking systems include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Semiotics of music videos is the observation of symbolism used within music videos.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to semiotics:
In semiotics, signified and signifier are the two main components of a sign, where signified is what the sign represents or refers to, known as the "plane of content", and signifier which is the "plane of expression" or the observable aspects of the sign itself. The idea was first proposed in the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the two founders of semiotics.
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