- Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist who broke down the definition of a "sign" into two parts: the signifier (the form the sign takes) and the signified (the concept it represents). - Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher who broke down the sign into three parts: the representamen (the form of expression of the sign), the object (the thing the sign refers to), and the interpretant (its sense or interpretation). - Both Saussure and Peirce made important contributions to the field of semiotics, the study of signs and how meaning is derived from things in the world. Saussure focused on the linguistic aspects of signs