Semiotics - is the study of signs

science of signs

Semiotics could be anywhere by Chandler D.

Ferdinand de Saussure
● 'semiology' was 'a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life'
● basic fabric of culture
● mechanism by which meaning is created

Linguistic unit as sign

“The linguistic unit is a double entity, one formed by the association of two terms”
“Both terms involved in the linguistic sign are psychological and are united in the brain by an
associative bond”

Two Terms
1. Sound Image
- is not the material sound, a purely physical thing,
- but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses
- sound-image is sensory
2. Concept
- generally more abstract

Example:
Concept - idea of a dog (signified)
Sound-image - bark or /d/o/g/ (signifier)

Signified - associations, dependent on context, on language, on culture

Signifier - auditory, fixed
Sign - outcome or meaning gained
ARBITRARY NATURE
“The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.”

arbitrary = random, no natural connection

“linguistic sign is arbitrary”

The association of the signifier and signified is arbitrary.

Ideas and Sounds
“without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction
between two ideas”
“without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and
nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.”

Language – as a series of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of
jumbled ideas (A) and the equally vague plane of sounds (B).
Contiguous – touching, shared border

“role of language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for
expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound”

Organized thought coupled with sounds

- Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition.
- ‘thought-sound’ implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape
between two shapeless masses.
- Language might be called the domain of articulations, using the word as it was defined earlier.
Each linguistic term is a member, an articulus in which an idea is fixed in a sound and a sound
becomes the sign of an idea.

Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely
from the simultaneous presence of the others.
Charles Peirce
● 'a sign is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or
capacity'
● stands for something to the idea which it produces or modifies.
● vehicle conveying into the mind something from without
● which it stands for is called its object;
that which its conveys, its meaning;
and the idea to which it gives rise, its interpretant.

Peircean Model
● The representamen: the form which the sign takes (not necessarily material, though
usually interpreted as such) –called by some theorists the ‘sign vehicle’.
● An interpretant: not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the sign.
● An object: something beyond the sign to which it refers(a referent) (which it stands)

Example:
Representamen - box
Object - loob o laman ng box
Interpretant - ano yung tinutukoy sa loob ng
box.

Three Kinds of Signs

1. Icon
picture (however conventional its method) is essentially a representation of that kind or the
direct presentation.
2. Index
man with rolling gait.
3. Symbol
words, sentences, books and other conventional signs are Symbols.
‘man’ only a replica, or embodiment of the word that is pronounced or written.
(may malalim na kahulugan)
Umberto Eco
● ‘semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign'
● semiotics can be conceived of either as a unified theoretical approach to the great
variety of systems of signification and communication, or as a description of those
various systems insisting on their mutual differences.

Theater
Since theater is, among the various arts, the one in which the whole human experience is co-
involved, the very place in which complete “son et lumiere” events take place, in which human
bodies, artifacts, music, literary expressions and therefore literature, painting, music,
architecture and so on are in play at the same moment? Tadeusz Kowzan, one of the leading
theater semioticians of the present time.

Tadeusz Kowzan, one of the leading theater semioticians of the present time (the author of
Literature et spectacle, Mouton, 1975) has isolated thirteen sign systems at work in a theatrical
performance: words, voice inflection, facial mimicry, gesture, body movement, makeup,
headdress, costume, accessory, stage design, lighting, music, and noise

Mise - en - scene
● Arrangement of actors and scenery on a stage for a theatrical production
● Physical setting

Recommends
● “Start with passively naïve attitude”
● “elementary model of mise-en-scene”

Sign
now a sign. A sign, according to Peirce, is something that stands to somebody for something
else in some respect or capacity, a physical presence referring back to something absent.

Ostension
ostension is one of the various ways of signifying, consisting in de-realizing a given object in
order to make it stand for an entire class. But ostension is, at the same time, the most basic
instance of performance.
Example:
“Like this more or less”
-tie
-referential, phatic, imperative, emotive, esthetic (Jakobsonian)
Example:
“More or less”
- de-realize

It is not necessary that he have specific face, a specific eye color, a moustache or a beard, a
jacket or a sweater. It is, however, necessary (or at least I think so) that his nose be red or
violet; his eyes dimmed by a liquid obtuseness; his hair, his moustache or his beard ruffled and
dirty; his clothes splashed with mud, sagging and worn-out.

The list of these characteristics is established by a social code, a sort of iconographic convention

Nevertheless, there is something that distinguishes our drunkard from a word. A word is a sign,
but it does not conceal its sign-quality. We conventionally accept that through words someone
speaks about reality, but we do not confuse words with things (except in cases of mental
illness).

In the case of our elementary model of mise-en-scene, the drunk is a sign, but he is a sign that
pretends not to be such.

Square Semiosis
In theater, there is a “square semiosis”. With words, a phonic object stands for the objects
made with different stuff. In the mise-en-scene an object, first recognized as a real object, is
then assumed as a sign in order to refer back to another object (or to a class of objects) whose
constitutive stuff is the same as that of the representing object.

Natural and Artificial Signs

The semiotic approach of Peirce is, in my view, the most powerful because it proposes a unified
set of definitions able to take into account both species of signs. Both are instances of
something standing for something else on the basis of previous learning or convention, and I
agree with Charles Morris when he says that.
something is a sign only because it is interpreted as a sign of something by some
sdada interpreter. Semiotic then is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of
aas object but with ordinary objects insofar as they participate in semiosis.
The very moment the audience accepts the convention of the mise-en-scene, every element of
that portion of the world that has been framed (put upon the platform) becomes significant.
Sociopsychological frame - Erving Goffman
Goffman imagines two situations, both concerning a mirror and a lady. First situation: The
mirror is in a beauty parlor and the lady, instead of using it to adjust her hairdressing. Inspects
the quality of its frame. That seems irregular. Second situation: The mirror is exhibited in the
shop of an antiquary and the lady, instead of considering the quality of the frame, mirrors
herself and adjusts her hair. That seems irregular. The difference in the mode of framing has
changed the meaning of the actions of the characters in play.

Framing as Object
purport to the frame as object. In both cases, however, there is a framing an ideal platforming
or staging, that imposes and prescribes the semiotic pertinence both of the objects and of the
actions, even though they are not intentional behavior nor non-artificial items.

Speech Acts
In a certain sense every dramatic performance is composed by two speech acts. The first one is
performed by the actor who is making a performative statement – “I am acting”. By this implicit
statement the actor tells the truth since he announces that from that moment on he will lie.

The second one is represented by a pseudo-statement where the subject of the statement is
already the character, not the actor.

Once the methodological standpoint that both fiction and reportage are instances of mise-en-
scene-it remains to ask, "How does a character speak who acts as an element of a mise-en-
scene?" Do his words have a univocal meaning? Do they mean one thing only and nothing else?

Connotative Power
In 1938, the Soviet folklorist Bogatyrev, in a fundamental paper on signs in theater, pointed out
that signs in theater are not signs of an object but signs of a sign of an object. He meant that
beyond their immediate denotation, all the objects' behavior and words used in theater have
an additional connotative power.

Ideological Statements
A semiotics of the mise-en-scene is constitutively a semiotics of the production of ideologies.