Semiotics...
Four Candles, Fork Handles.
Fredinand De Saussure defined semiology, a study of sign systems.
Semiotics is a form of meta-language, a language about language.
The 'signified' is whatever you imagine the word or sign to mean. The 'referent' is what the sign or word actually means.
Systems and structures (the context of the sign) dictate the reading to some extent.
For example, green signifies, Grass, Go, Nature etc.
Blue signifies, Water, cold etc.
If you add crisps to this the green and blue signify cheese and onion and salt and vinegar.
There is no literal relation between these colours and the flavour, there is a system of semiotics in place that tells us this.
Suassure tells us that meaning is established by differentiation.
Connotations and Denotation- gives us levels or orders of signification. Not everything works on the same literal levels.
Myths are signs that are culturally informed. There is no literal or logical meaning but time has made it 'known'.
Red wine is associated with class and intellectuals, it is not logical to make this association.
Milk is associated with wholesomeness and strength, it is something that is not related.
Syntagm and Paradigm
Syntagm, a series or collection of signifiers within a 'text', for example a paragraph.
Paradigm, signifiers that relate to each other through function or relative meaning.
Metaphor and Metonym
Metaphor, one sign is replaced with another, non-litteral form of signification.
Metonym is where you use a related signifier to descrobe a sign, like calling your car your 'Wheels'.
Rhetoric, the act of persuasion using words. Photojournalists for example will pick particularly emotive rhetoric for a war photograph. It will explain that 'war is bad' making it simple to understand, however the problem will be much much more complex.
Structuralism - With Roland Barthes
Is the term used for the broad application of semiotics/ semiology to a range of sign systems.
Further than the application solely to linguistics.
Structuralism emphasises structures or systems in signs...
Post Structuralism
Like post-modernism.
It is about scepticism of any assumed rules of signifying system.
Being aware that milk isn't wholesome, priests aren't holy etc.
Intertextuality
'every text is from the outlet under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it' Kristeva.
Simulacra
Jean Buadrillare, introduces the idea of hyper-reality in representation, a copy without an original.
Most of our experience of the world is through images and representation rather than experience. There is real connection between what we see and our reality.
1. The image is a clear counterfeit of the original (post modern)
2. Distincion betwwen the copy and the real are broken down (modern)
3. The copy is precedes the original, like Disneyland, a copy of the original. That teaches opinion on the actual.We see the news and form opinion on a culture for example before experiencing in reality.
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