Friday 11 March 2011

Semiotics - The Reading Of Signs

This is, with a help from the lecture slides, my reasoning of semiotics, which having got into now, have found to be really quite interesting. I have to say when I got home I thought about the lecture and I was a little confused especially with the keywords and thus their meanings, so as the cloud of doom and despair rained on my parade I decided to revisit the slides and attempt to piece it all together.

Semiotics is relating to the visual language of sign systems, first coined by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916. 

According to de Saussure a sign has to have three elements or characteristics:
Must haves:
1) A physical form.
2) Refer to something – not itself.
3) Be used and recognised as a sign.

Signifier is the physical form
Signified is the content or concept it represents

For instance a signifier could be a rose and the signified is love. However there is a further element attached to this ‘dyadic’ or two part model. Arbitrary or Iconic.

Arbitrary – where there is no natural link or relationship between the two. However the signifier, the physical form, takes on a signified concept by agreement.

Iconic – this is where the signifier resembles or imitates the signified.

Two examples, one from above, a rose (signifier), in relation to love (signified), arbitrary or iconic; it is arbitrary, it’s just a plant; love has been attached to this plant over time. However is a crown in relationship to sovereignty arbitrary or iconic; it is iconic, though the connection could still be classed as arbitrary, this is a metonymy, as the crown actually refers to and stands for something, as in the monarch.

Denotation – The signifier and the signified together make up a ‘first order semiological chain’, the first order of signification is Denotation, the relationship of the sign to its referent. The sign is what the sign or word stands for.
Connotation – The ‘Second order of signification’ is initiated once the first order has represented is values. This is a more complex relationship between sign and concept, producing expressive shades of meaning.

So finally, signification, the first order of signification denotes or stands for the meaning of a sign. The second order connotes or implies the meaning of a sign.

For further reading
Barthes, R. (1977) Image Music Text. London : Fontana Press.
Benjamin, W. (1936) The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London : Penguin Books

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