What is Semiotics? (continued)

What confused me about the statement that “semiotics is concerned with how signs mean,” was that I only kind of understood what was meant by a sign. Naturally, I thought of visual signs (traffic signs, etc.), but I realized that the term was more generic than that, but I couldn’t figure out in what way.

As I said in my previous post, all things can convey information, and therefore they can be signs in semiotic systems.

For instance, when I put down a book I’m reading, I often dog-ear the page I’m on. The upper corner of the page. Recently, I’ve began dog-earing the lower corner of pages with passages I want to quote here. And when there are quoteworthy things on both sides of a page, I dog-ear it twice, so that it looks like the beginning of an origami.

Dog-ears are signs—conventional signs; meaning that the relationship between the sign and its “object” is something that is agreed upon, a social construction, part of culture. As for the lower corner and double dog-ears, I would have to tell you what they mean in my context, and perhaps it would be meaningful for you to adopt them a habit, or you could use them to signify something else.

For a figurative sign, on the other hand, the relationship to its object would theoretically be obvious the first time you saw it. However, as Lotman says in Semiotics of Cinema, most figurative signs are conventional to a certain degree. Why? Because figurative signs—for instance, an emergency exit sign showing a man running towards a door—always require some advance knowledge to be understood. Even if we, in this case, would see the sign as signifying nothing else but “a man running towards a door,” one must be able to “decode” extremely simplified 2D images.

I’ll have to look up what the definitions are of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. Some of Lotman’s terms seems to be obsolete, as I haven’t been able to find information about some of them online.