Sage Publication Book used by Margith Strand/January 12, 2011

Saussure’s book

posthumously in 1915, suggests the possibility of semiotic analysis.

It deals with many of the concepts that can be applied to signs and

that are explicated in this chapter. Saussure (1915/1966) wrote, “The

linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and

a sound-image. . . . I call the combination of a concept and a soundimage

a

a sound-image” (pp. 66–67). His division of the sign into two components,

the signifier (or “sound-image”) and the signified or (“concept”),

and his suggestion that the relationship between signifier and

signified is arbitrary were of crucial importance for the development

of semiotics. Peirce, on the other hand, focused on three aspects of

signs: their iconic, indexical, and symbolic dimensions (see Table 1.1).

A Course in General Linguistics, first publishedsign, but in current usage the term generally designates only

4

——TECHNIQUES OF INTERPRETATION

Table 1.1

Three Aspects of Signs

Icon Index Symbol

Signify by Resemblance Causal connection Convention

Examples Pictures, statues Fire/smoke Flags

Process Can see Can figure out Must learn

From these two points of departure a movement was born, and

semiotic analysis spread all over the globe. Important work was done

in Prague and Russia early in the 20th century, and semiotics is now

well established in France and Italy (where Roland Barthes, Umberto

Eco, and many others have done important theoretical as well as

applied work). There are also outposts of progress in England, the

United States, and many other countries.

Semiotics has been applied, with interesting results, to film, theater,

medicine, architecture, zoology, and a host of other areas that involve or

are concerned with communication and the transfer of information. In

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fact, some semioticians, perhaps carried away, suggest that

everything

can be analyzed semiotically; they see semiotics as the queen of the

interpretive sciences, the key that unlocks the meanings of all things

great and small.

Peirce argued that interpreters have to supply part of the meanings

of signs. He wrote that a sign “is something which stands to somebody

for something in some respect or capacity” (quoted in Zeman, 1977,

p. 24). This is different from Saussure’s ideas about how signs function.

Peirce considered semiotics important because, as he put it, “this

universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of

signs.” Whatever we do can be seen as a message or, as Peirce would

put it, a sign. If everything in the universe is a sign, semiotics becomes

extremely important, if not all-important (a view that semioticians

support wholeheartedly).