What is Semiotics?

Three months ago, I thought about yo-yos, which launched an avalanche of thoughts about something I called “constrained universes of expression”. Most of my posts in the latter half of July, August, and September were about this.

Then Håkan Kjellerstrand suggested I’d look into semiotics, so I did. I read Challis Hodge’s Semiotics: A Primer for Designers, but I can’t say it made me wiser. Then I read the introduction of Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics for Beginners, and there were lots of things he said that I liked, and which I quoted here, but I only got a vague feeling of what semiotics is.

Then I borrowed Jurij Lotman’s excellent Semiotics of Cinema from the library, and that’s what I’ve been reading the last three weeks. I’ve quoted a lot from it over in my Swedish weblog (see the archives for September and October).

So what have I learned?

Semiotics sees things as communicative systems, or languages. Everything can convey information. When something conveys information, semiotics calls it a sign. Semiotics is the science of signs.

I remember reading the following sentence in Challis Hodge’s article:

Semantics focuses on what words mean while semiotics is concerned with how signs mean.

I thought this was a typo. Then I read Daniel Chandler’s introduction and saw the exact same sentence (attributed to John Sturrock, from his book Structuralism), but with “what” and “how” emphasized—but I still didn’t understand what it meant.

Now I do.

Semiotics analyzes things and identifies the signs involved in acts of communication. Signs can either be conventional or figurative. Conventional signs are those that are agreed upon, whose meaning you must learn in order to understand. Figurative signs convey their meaning because they resemble the objects they refer to. (This is what Lotman says; as I googled around, I found several pages classifying signs as either iconic, indexical, or symbolic—perhaps this is more common now?)

I’ll have to get back to this.