Semiotics

Semiotics includes the study of indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.

In his personal library were two editions of Scapula's 1579 abridgement of Henricus Stephanus' Thesaurus Graecae Linguae, which listed σημειωτική as the name for 'diagnostics',[9] the branch of medicine concerned with interpreting symptoms of disease ("symptomatology").

21),[11][b] in which he explains how science may be divided into three parts:[12]: 174 All that can fall within the compass of human understanding, being either, first, the nature of things, as they are in themselves, their relations, and their manner of operation: or, secondly, that which man himself ought to do, as a rational and voluntary agent, for the attainment of any end, especially happiness: or, thirdly, the ways and means whereby the knowledge of both the one and the other of these is attained and communicated; I think science may be divided properly into these three sorts.Locke then elaborates on the nature of this third category, naming it Σημειωτική (Semeiotike), and explaining it as "the doctrine of signs" in the following terms:[12]: 175 Thirdly, the third branch [of sciences] may be termed σημειωτικὴ, or the doctrine of signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also Λογικὴ, logic; the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others.Juri Lotman introduced Eastern Europe to semiotics and adopted Locke's coinage (Σημειωτική) as the name to subtitle his founding at the University of Tartu in Estonia in 1964 of the first semiotics journal, Sign Systems Studies.

Thomas Sebeok[c] would assimilate semiology to semiotics as a part to a whole, and was involved in choosing the name Semiotica for the first international journal devoted to the study of signs.

[17] Peircean scholar and editor Max H. Fisch (1978)[d] would claim that "semeiotic" was Peirce's own preferred rendering of Locke's σημιωτική.

Such would initially be based on the work of Martin Krampen,[23] but takes advantage of Peirce's point that an interpretant, as the third item within a sign relation, "need not be mental".

[27] Peirce's "interpretant" notion opened the way to understanding an action of signs beyond the realm of animal life (study of phytosemiosis + zoösemiosis + anthroposemiosis = biosemiotics), which was his first advance beyond Latin Age semiotics.

Semiotics is the theory of symbols and falls in three parts; Max Black argued that the work of Bertrand Russell was seminal in the field.

This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual sounds or letters that humans use to form words, the body movements they make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear.

Hence, communication theorists construct models based on codes, media, and contexts to explain the biology, psychology, and mechanics involved.

A more extreme view is offered by Jean-Jacques Nattiez who, as a musicologist, considered the theoretical study of communication irrelevant to his application of semiotics.

Philosophy of language also bears connections to linguistics, while semiotics might appear closer to some of the humanities (including literary theory) and to cultural anthropology.

Amongst the prominent cognitive semioticians are Per Aage Brandt, Svend Østergaard, Peer Bundgård, Frederik Stjernfelt, Mikkel Wallentin, Kristian Tylén, Riccardo Fusaroli, and Jordan Zlatev.

Zlatev later in co-operation with Göran Sonesson established CCS (Center for Cognitive Semiotics) at Lund University, Sweden.

Its central move is to place the finiteness of thought at the root of semiotics and the sign as a secondary but fundamental analytical construct.

The theory contends that the levels of reproduction that technology is bringing to human environments demands this reprioritisation if semiotics is to remain relevant in the face of effectively infinite signs.

Some influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, structuralist, and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology and sociology.

[45] Mistranslations may lead to instances of "Engrish" or "Chinglish" terms for unintentionally humorous cross-cultural slogans intended to be understood in English.

In contrast, Disneyland Paris failed when it launched as Euro Disney because the company did not research the codes underlying European culture.

Its storybook retelling of European folktales was taken as elitist and insulting, and the strict appearance standards that it had for employees resulted in discrimination lawsuits in France.

Sigmund Freud[52] spelled out how meaning in dreams rests on a blend of images, affects, sounds, words, and kinesthetic sensations.

In order to safeguard sleep, the midbrain converts and disguises the verbal dream thought into an imagistic form, through processes he called the "dream-work."

[57] In recognizing the indicative and symbolic elements of a musical line, gesture, or occurrence, one can gain a greater understanding of aspects regarding compositional intent and identity.

Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign also has influenced later philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard.

Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts.

He used the German word Umwelt, 'environment', to describe the individual's subjective world, and he invented the concept of functional circle (funktionskreis) as a general model of sign processes.

Although he insisted that animals are not capable of language, he expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, thus raising some of the issues addressed by philosophy of mind and coining the term zoosemiotics.

Julia Kristeva (born 1941), a student of Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, Bulgarian-French semiotician, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist.

Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture.

This narrow focus may inhibit a more general study of the social and political forces shaping how different media are used and their dynamic status within modern culture.