semiotics

SEMIOTICS AND DECODING MEANINGS:

INTRODUCTION OF SEMIOTICS:

- Semiotics is basically the study of signs and symbols.

This term refers to how signs and symbols are used to communicate and develop interpretations.

ADVANTAGES OF SEMIOTICS:

- Allows us to break down a message into its component parts and examine them separately and in relationship to one another.

- Allows us to look for patterns across different forms of communication.

-Helps us to understand how our cultural and social

conventions relate to the communication we create and consume.

-Helps us to get beyond the obvious which may not be obvious after all.

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS:

- Sign is a symbol which is understood to refer to

something other than itself - Symbol is an object that represents, stands for or suggest an idea or visual images.

This picture has been taken from the internet for a better understanding of semiotics

 FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE:

-He was a Swiss linguistic who created the term “semiotics”. He distinguished between Signifier and Signified. According to him a Sign is made up of:

Signifier 

- The image or sound that gives a meaning e.g. blue colour Signified.

-The concept or meaning that the sign refers to e.g. blue colour is often associated with sadness or the sea.

-Therefore for a sign to be considered a sign it must have a signifier and the signified.

-Saussure argues that words are verbal signifiers that are personal to whoever is interpreting them.

- A signifier can have many different representations which can turn into a different sign.

RONALD BARTHES 

He was a French literary theorist , critic and like Saussure was also interested in semiotics. His semiotic theory focuses on how signs and photographs represent different cultures and ideologies in different ways. These messages are established in two ways through: 

      -Denotation • The literal meaning of the sign.

      - Connotation • The suggested meaning of the sign and the cultural conventions associated with the sign

 

STUART HALL:

- He is a cultural theorist and sociologist.

- Hall's encoding/decoding model is a part of the reception theory that looks at how audience interpret and respond to particular medium whether it be a newspaper or television show.

- He said that the institutions encode a particular media message which creates a new form of communication and then the audience decodes this meaning using their own methods of logical interpretation.

- For Hall the denotation an connotation process is an analytical tool.

-He also argues that it is very rare for signs to signify their literal meaning in the world and most of the signs will combine both the denotative and connotative process and work simultaneously together to create meaning.

- He also argued that for those decoding readings there can be a number of unlimited readings and that the decoding process is "polysemic" meaning that one text can have a number of meanings.