development of semiotics

Other than Saussure, key figures in the early development of semiotics were the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (sic, pronounced ‘purse’) (1839-1914) and later Charles William Morris (1901-1979), who developed a behaviourist semiotics. Leading modern semiotic theorists include Roland Barthes (1915-1980), Algirdas Greimas (1917-1992), Yuri Lotman (1922-1993), Christian Metz (1931-1993), Umberto Eco (b 1932) and Julia Kristeva (b 1941). A number of linguists other than Saussure have worked within a semiotic framework, such as Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1966) and Roman Jakobson (1896-1982). Semiotics began to become a major approach to cultural studies in the late 1960s, partly as a result of the work of Roland Barthes. Writing in 1967, Barthes declared that “Semiology aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all of these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification”7 For C W Morris semiotics embraced semantics, along with the other traditional branches of linguistics: semantics: the relationship of signs to what they stand for; syntactics (osyntax): the formal or structural relations between signs; pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters.8Semiotics is not widely institutionalized as an academic discipline. It is a field of study involving many different theoretical stances and methodological tools. One of the broadest definitions is that of Umberto Eco, who states that “semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign”9 Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as ‘signs’ in everyday speech, but of anything which ‘stands for’ something else. In a semiotic sense, signs take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. To sum up then Semiotics is the study of signification, or the ways signs are used to interpret events.  It makes a sharp separation between a medium and its content.  Content matters a great deal and depends on the reading given to it by the producer or consumer.  Semiotics focuses on the ways producers create signs and the ways audiences understand those signs.  We will take up some of these points as we go on.