Semiotics
of Roland Barthes
What does each of these signs or symbols mean to you?
What kind of emotions, if any, do they invoke?
Semiology, or Semiotics, as it is referred to in the United
States, is a theory about interpreting signs. It is concerned
with anything that can stand for something else. This is, in fact,
how semiologists define a sign.
The field of Semiology was first developed by Ferdinand de Saussure
in the early 1900s. He saw Semiology as a potential science, but in
fact,it is a very humanistic field of study. That means that it is
a lot more touchy-feely than most of us consider science.
According to the theory of semiotics a sign actually includes two separate parts.
SIGNIFIER
+
SIGNIFIED
=
SIGN
The signifier is something that we sense. It can be an odor,
a sound, a touch of some sort, a visual image, or even a taste.
This image represents a concept, which is the signified.
For example, the sour taste is a signifier that the milk has expired. The milk being expired is the signified.
The signified cannot exist apart from the signifier and vice versa. They work
together to make a unified sign.
This is just a brief explanantion, but if you want to read more check
out these sites:
Lindsay has an
APPLICATION of Semiotics,
and I read some stuff on Semiotics and wrote a bit on what I thought of it.
STUFF I READ, and
Chuck has a
CRITIQUE of Semiotics.
This theory is similar to a theory called symbolic interactionism. Another group
from our class made a site about this theory. Click
here to see their site.