Semiotics
By: Shannon Abbuhl, Mike Mattler and Kathleen O'Boyle
Semiotics and semiology was first coined by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 1900's. He referred to semiology as "a potential science that might investigate the nature of signs, study their impact on society, and state the laws that govern them" (Griffin 111). Saussure's semiology was later adapted by Roland Barthes, a French writer who concentrated on nonverbal visual signs that he said were waiting to be read.
By Barthes' definition, a sign is the combination of a signifier and a signified. So in this perspective, a sign can not stand alone. By this I mean that even when we just see one sign, there are numerous other signs that unconsciously go with these signs. Since a sign is the combination of these two components, then you might ask what is a signified and a signifier. A signifier is the actual material element that we can observe such as a red stop light. The signified then is the meaning that people in society attribute to that signifier. In this case, the signified would be the understanding to stop when the light is red. Together, the signified and the signifier create what we know as the stop light. This theory can be used to understand the meaning of a yellow and green light as well. The yellow and green lights are the unconscious signs that I spoke of earlier.
Mike, Kathleen and I will research, critique and apply this theory to further explain Barthes and Saussure's ideas about semiotics.
Mike's Research on Semiotics
The Grand Syntagmatique