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"Yeo Jing Yee" is my name
seventeen is my age
Nanyang Polytechic is my school
Motion Graphic & Broadcast Design is my full-time diploma course
Graphic design is my interest
Typography is my favourite design style
Saturday, May 10, 2008
7:31 AM
What is semiotics?
Semiotics is the study of signs and signifying practices, is largely the creation of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Independently, they worked to better understand how certain structures were able to produce meaning rather than work on the traditional matter of meaning itself.
Saussure's work on semiotics is better known, and he argued that there was no necessary relationship between which carries the meaning (the signifier, usually a word or symbol) and the actual meaning which is carried (the signified). For example, the word "dog" is not actually a dog - the meaning of dog could be carried by any random string of letters. It just so happens that, in English, that meaning is carried by the letter d-o-g.
Peirce's ideas about semiotics distinguished between three types of signs: icon, index and symbol. Whether a sign belongs in one category or another is dependent upon the nature of its relationship between the sign itself (which he called the referent) and the actual meaning. 
An icon is a meaning which is based upon similarity or appearance (for example, similarity in shape).
This photograph of the dog, the icon, most closly resembles the actual dog.
According to Pierce, icons are "the only means of directly communicating an idea."An index is a meaning based upon some cause and effect relationship :"Because the indexical sign is understood to be connected to the real object, it is capable of making that object conceptually present."
A wagging tail is an index of a dog.
Finally, a symbol carries meaning is a purely arbitrary way - this is the way natural language carries meaning. Dog bone is a symbol of the dog.
Saussure's system is appropriate to language and texts, for the most part, but Pierce's has a wider application, including not just language but also the visual arts.