Reading Assignment 5 - Chapter 4
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE: THE BIRTH OF SEMIOTICS
Semiotics: The study of life of "signs."
-Ferdinad de Saussure: His study was the approach to the study of language focused on the exchange of meaning between individuals and on the commonalities across languages, rather than on the eccentricities arising from their specific cultural origins. He thought that language should be viewed not only in terms or its parts (words) and their histories, but also in terms of the relationship between those parts.
-Signified and the Signifier:
- The Signified: is the person, thing, event, place, or concept called forth by the stimulation of the signifier. The signifier is the sound or word (or image, in the case of graphic design) that recalls in our mind the signified, even in the absence of the real thing.
- The Signifier: The designation of the Signifier as a discrete component of language makes it possible to discuss writing as different from speech, visual signs as different from verbal signs and, consequently, form itself as a critical contributor to meaning.
LANGUE AND PAROLE
-Langue: is the set of abstract rules within the language system that governs the combinations of signs; a group of general linguistic conventions adopted by a particular social or cultural group that allows them to construct exchange meaning among their members.
-Parole: is the individual utterance made by a single member of the linguistic group in a specific, concrete situation - an individual act of discourse among many of infinite variety.
THE ASSAULT ON SYNTAX
-If the conventional correspondences between meaning and form were arbitrary to begin with, as the early writings in semiotics professed, then they were subject to recognition. And that renegotiation could take place through the visual media of art and design.
DESIGN PAROLE
-Paradigmatic or Associative Axis: (in this case Synchronic) All of the possible word choices are available to us simultaneously and we interpret the meaning of the sentence, not only by focusing on the on chosen word, but also by knowing what other choices were available and not chosen.
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE: A PRAGMATIST'S APPROACH:
He believed that Signification, or the consumption of signs, is essentially a mental process, and that meaning resides in the mind, not in the objects themselves. Peirce called this process Semiosis.
(A sign (representamen) stands for something (object) to somebody (interpretant) in some respect (ground).
Peirce's four conditions of design: 1) Sign must represent and object. 2) Must represent something in some sense or capacity. 3) Interpretative condition, sign must have an interpretation. 4) Must have a fundamental relationship between them, one that cannot be reduced to any simpler form.
A TAXONOMY OF SIGNS
-Describes natural groupings of signs that behave in analogous ways, and their classification, in terms of different relationships between the signifier (the reprsentamen) and the object for which it stands.
-An index points to something or describes a casual relationship.
ROLAND BARHES: A BRIDGE TO POST-STRUCTURALISM
-Barthes professed that no form of writing is a free expression only of the writer's subjectivity, but is the product of larger social and ideological values. H viewed writings as all style and never free of ideology; each literary work signifies literature in general, in addition to whatever content is contained within its text.
