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Soc (2014) 51:2226DOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9731-4
SYMPOSIUM: SIGNS, SYMBOLS, AND SEMIOTICS
Semiotics and Society
Arthur Asa Berger
Published online: 22 November 2013# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract This essay introduces some of the basic concepts that can be used in applied semiotic analysis and discusses the work of some prominent semioticians, such as Ferdinande de Saussure, Charles Sander Peirce, Umberto Eco, and Roland Barthes. Barthes book Mythologies is identified as a seminal text in applied semiotic analysis. Marshall McLuhans book The Mechanical Bride is discussed as being semiotic in nature, though he doesnt use the term. The utility of semiotics utility in studying teeth, facial expression and other aspects of people watching and communication is also dealt with.
Keywords Semiotics . Signs . Signifiers . Signifieds . Iconic . Indexical . Symbolic
Semiotics is the science of signs, a sign being anything that can be used to stand for something else. We might notice the term in articles and books we read but most people dont know very much about it. There are, it turns out, more than 11,000 books on semiotics listed on Amazon.com and I found 2,970,000 sites in my Google search on the subject. So semiotics isnt as obscure as we might imagine.
Maya Pines offers us an important insight into what semiotics is all about. She writes: Everything we do sends messages about us in a variety of codes, semiologists contend. We are also on the receiving end of innumerable messages encoded in music, gestures, foods, rituals, books, movies, or advertisements. Yet we seldom realize that we have received such messages, and would have trouble explaining the rules under which they operate. Semiotics, Pines explains, teaches us how we find meaning in all the objects and other kinds of messages to which we are exposed.
A Very Brief Primer on Semiotic Theory
There are two founding fathers of semioticsthe Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Saussures book, Course in General Linguistics, comprised of lectures compiled by two of his students, is considered to be one of the most influential books published in the twentieth century. He used the term semiology (from the Greek work for sign, smeion) but Peirces term, semiotics, has become the dominant...