introduction to semiotics 2010 - bdc
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Introduction to
Semiotics
Shahbaz Ali
BDC
2010
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Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria - the city is known for the Borsalino company, the maker of the famous hats. After completing his maturità classica at the Liceo Plane, Eco enrolled at theUniversity of Turin, receiving his doctoral degree in 1954. Luigi Pareyson (1918-91), who was
Eco's teacher at Turin, influenced deeply Eco's ideas on interpretation and aesthetics. Eco alsowrote a review on Pareyson's Estetica for Lettere italiane in 1955. Eco's classmate was the
hermeneutic ontologist and aesthetician Gianni Vattimo, who succeeded Pareyson as Professor of Aesthetics at Turin.
Eco's doctoral thesis dealt with the early philosopher and religious thinker St. Thomas Aquinas.Eco, who had been a militant Catholic intellectual in the early 1950s, confessed later in aninterview that he stopped believing in God after his studies. "You could say he miraculously curedme of my faith." (Time, June 13, 2005)
From 1954 to 1959 Eco worked in Milan as a cultural editor for RAI, Italian Radio-Television, also
lecturing at theU
niversity of Turin (1956-64). In 1958-59 Eco served in the army. He was auniversity teacher in Milan (1964-65) and Florence (1965-69). From 1969 to 1971 he was ateacher at Milan Polytechnic. At the early age of 39 Eco was appointed professor of semiotics atBologna University in the north of Italy. He has also taught at Harvard and Yale.
He collected more than 30 ³Honoris Causa´ Degrees from the most prestigious universitiesaround the world.
Umberto Eco
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What is Semiotics?
This is not «
Signs and their use
An example
Overview
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Semiotics (from Greek semeion = sign)studies the entire range of sign systems
and the various processes of
communication (µsemioses¶) related to
these systems.
What is Semiotics?
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Semiotics is a discipline that is concerned
with the production and interpretation of
meaning.
Meaning is made by the deployment of
acts and objects that function as ³signs´ in
relation to other signs. In general meaning
is not believed to reside within anyparticular object or text . Rather,
meaning arises during the communication
process itself.
What is Semiotics? /2
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General
One of the broadest definitions is Umberto Eco¶s
one: ³semiotics is concerned with everything that can
be taken as a sign´. Semiotics involves the study notonly of what we refer to as 'signs' in everyday
speech, but also of anything, which 'stands for'
something else.
Social
It examines semiotics practices, specific to a culture
and community, for the making of various kinds of
texts and meanings in contexts of culturally
meaningful activity
What is Semiotics? /3
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This is a famous painting by Rene Magritte called
³The Treachery of Images.´ Magritte's caption
says, (in French) ³This is not a pipe´.
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Actually, it's not a famous painting by Magritte; it's a digital
image of the painting.
Or, to be even more precise, a digital image of a photograph of
the painting
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All of which illustrates Magritte's point, which is simply that an
image or sign of a thing is not the thing itself. One could make
the same point with any number of images.
For instance«
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This is not Einstein...
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Magritte's point is a simple one, so simple that we usually don't thinkabout it. But precisely because we don't think about it, because we
forget that the signs and symbols all around us are just that, signs and
symbols, and not things themselves, we can come to take for granted,
take as "natural," aspects of life that are anything but. And this may
have important social implications. Consider...
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This is not happiness...
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This is not manhood...
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This is not
womanhood...
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This is not patriotism...
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This is not love...
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Sign is often defined as "a pattern of data which, when
perceived, brings to mind something other than itself," the
notion of the sign is central to the semiotic approach to the
study of communication. The term can refer to the relationship among the elements
of the semiotic model, or it can be used to indicate the first
of the three elements, i.e., the physical thing perceived.
All the individuals are meaning-makers. Distinctively, we
make meanings through our creation and interpretation of
³signs´. Signs take the form of different objects, but such
things have no meaning and they become signs only when
we invest them with meaning.
Sign /1
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Saussure proposed a theory of signification (a ³dyadic´ or
two-part model of the sign). He defined a sign as being
composed of:
The ³signified´ - the idea being represented
The ³signifier ́ - the word (or the image, like a picture)
doing the representing.
Thus, the sign is the whole that results from theassociation of the signifier with the signified. The
relationship between the signifier and the signified is
referred to as ³signification´.
Sign /2
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An µimage¶ of tree is the signified.
The word ³tree´ is the signifier.
Sign /3
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The Semiotic Model provides a coordinated way of talking
about how the thoughts in our minds can be expressed in
terms of the world outside of our minds. The model contains
three basic entities:
The sign: something which is perceived, but which stands for
something else,
The concept: the thoughts or images that are brought to
mind by the perception of the sign,
The object: the "something else" in the world to which thesign refers.
The model is most often represented as the semiotic
triangle .
Sign /4
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Concept Object
Sign
Perception Convention
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This version of the semiotic model is adapted from the work of the American
philosopher Charles S. Pierce. Pierce is generally acknowledged as an
important pioneer in the study of signs.
Notice that:
The sign and the concept are connected by the person's
perception,
The concept and the object are connected by the person's
experience,
The sign and the object are connected by the conventions, or the
culture, of the social group within which the person lives.
These connections are important to understand the process of
meaning-making that is present in the everyday creation and use
of signs by human beings.
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When we say something is ³arbitrary´, we mean
that there's no good reason for it (choice
randomness). If you make an ³arbitrary choice´
between two things, then you choose for no goodreason; you probably don't care which one you
choose.
By saying that signs are arbitrary, Saussure meant
that there is no good reason why we use thesequence of sounds 'sister' to mean a female
sibling. We could just as well use different sound
patterns of this word in different languages.
Sign / Arbitrariness
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In semiotics, denotation and connotation are terms describing the
relationship between the signifier and its signified, and an analytic
distinction is made between two types of signified:
a denotative signified and a connotative signified.
Meaning includes both denotation and connotation:
Denotation is the first and basic codification of cultural unit.
The basic level of coordination of meaning in order to
understand each other. The codification universally shared
and accepted in a cultural community .
Connotation is a second level of meaning, mainly based on
associations, similarities and implications
Denotation &
Connotation
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Denotation²Stop (even
without words, werecognize the meaning
from the shape and
color)
Denotative levelConnotative level
Connotation -Incident or Police
Brutality
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Applications of
Semiotics Advertising
Marketing
Literary Criticism
Art Criticism
Mass Media Studies
Philosophy of Language
Anthropology
And several others domain«
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An example
In the Reebok advertisement from
Cosmopolitan, the woman looks like she is
"hidden" under the robes and cloths, with
just her eyes being exposed. The eyes are
not scared or submissive, but confident and
strong. She is "Classic" because she is partof a long tradition, but it is her shoes that set
her apart.
'Feeling good' might refer to the gratifying
emotional state that corresponds to being
one's own and not being subservient any
longer . Her shoes may be a form of subtle
rebellion, an independence all her own.
Perhaps she is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of
envy for others.
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