Semiotics is the study of sign processes and sign systems. It explores how meaning is constructed and communicated through signs like words, images, sounds, and behaviors. There are two main traditions in semiotics - the Saussurean tradition which views a sign as consisting of a signifier and signified, and the Peircean tradition which views a sign as having three components: the representamen, object, and interpretant. Semiotics has roots in structuralism and includes the study of semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics. It is applicable to understanding various forms of communication beyond just language.

1. FUNDAMENTALS OF
VISUAL COMMUNICATION
Unit IV

2. semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the study of sign processes
(semiosis), which are any activity, conduct, or process that
involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates
a meaning that is not the sign itself to the sign's interpreter. The
meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific
meaning, or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a
particular medical condition. Signs can communicate through any of
the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory (taste).
The semiotic tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a
significant part of communications. Unlike linguistics, semiotics also
studies non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics includes the study of signs
and sign processes, indication, designation,
likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism,
signification, and communication.

3. Semiotics Concept
Semiotics is a well-established approach to the study of language
and other forms of communication which are socially and culturally
meaningful. Its fundamental premise is that we use signs – words
(both spoken and written), images, clothing, gesture – to communicate
meaning. Much of semiotics has its roots in Formalism, developed in
the early twentieth century, which saw language not just in terms of its
constituent parts but in terms of how its individual elements are
related. Formalism focused on the form and structure of language, the
message for its own sake, and evolved into structuralism in the 1920s
and 1930s. A semiotic framework is applicable to language, images,
photographs, diagrams – any aspect of the text which can be seen to
carry meaning. Semiotics also helps to account for meaning created
by letterforms, typeface and page layout – often highly creative
elements of the text which lie outside what linguists often admit as
‘language’

4. Semiotics History
semiotics, also called semiology, the study of signs and sign-using
behaviour. It was defined by one of its founders, the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of “the life of signs within
society.” Although the word was used in this sense in the 17th century
by the English philosopher John Locke, the idea of semiotics as an
interdisciplinary field of study emerged only in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries with the independent work of Saussure and of
the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
Ferdinand de Saussure

5. Peirce’s seminal work in the field was anchored
in pragmatism and logic. He defined a sign as “something which
stands to somebody for something,” and one of his major contributions
to semiotics was the categorization of signs into three main types:
(1) an icon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign for
falling rocks);
(2) an index, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is a sign
of fire); and
(3) a symbol, which is related to its referent only by convention (as
with words or traffic signals). Peirce also demonstrated that a sign
can never have a definite meaning, for the meaning must be
continuously qualified.

6. Saussure treated language as a sign-system, and his work
in linguistics supplied the concepts and methods that semioticians
applied to sign-systems other than language. One such basic semiotic
concept is Saussure’s distinction between the two inseparable
components of a sign: the signifier, which in language is a set
of speech sounds or marks on a page, and the signified, which is the
concept or idea behind the sign. Saussure also distinguished parole, or
actual individual utterances, from langue, the underlying system of
conventions that makes such utterances understandable; it is this
underlying langue that most interests semioticians.
This interest in the structure behind the use of particular signs linked
semiotics with the methods of structuralism, which sought to analyze
such relations. Saussure’s theories were thus also considered
fundamental to structuralism (especially structural linguistics) and
to poststructuralism.

7. Pictogram
Pictograms are forms of images that portray a single object,
situations, or other forms of image depiction. Words don't have to be
spelled out, but denoted by certain symbolic representations that
give the meaning all at once. Pictograms were common during the
stone ages, where cavemen used two kinds of imagery to
communicate with one another, namely petroglyphs and petrographs.

8. Phonogram
Phonograms are the letter symbols that comprise a
sound. Phonograms may be made up of one letter
or letter teams. For example, the /b/ in the word
'boy' is made up of a single letter 'b. ' However,
the /ch/ in the word 'chip' is comprised of a letter
team 'ch' that come together to make a single sound

9. Ancient Greek & Roman Alphabets
The Greeks adopted their alphabetical system from
the Phoenician alphabet, which later served as the
basis for scripts in the Middle East and Europe. The
Romans then tweaked the Etruscan alphabet, further
modifying it and turning it into Latin script

10. Ideogram or Ideograph is a graphical symbol that
represents an idea, rather than a group of letters arranged
according to the phonemes of a spoken language, as is done in
alphabetic languages. Examples of ideograms include wayfinding
signage, such as in airports and other environments where many
people may not be familiar with the language of the place they are
in, as well as Arabic numerals and mathematical notation, which are
used worldwide regardless of how they are pronounced in different
languages. The term "ideogram" is commonly used to describe
logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and
Chinese characters.

11. Sign
A sign is a representation of an object that implies a connection
between itself and its object. ... A conventional sign signifies by
agreement, as a full stop signifies the end of a sentence.. The way a
sign signifies is called semiosis which is a topic of semiotics and
philosophy of language.
The definition of a sign is anything that shows a meaning, a mark
used as an abbreviation or shortening of something, or a publicly
displayed board. An example of sign is a symbol from a loved one
who has passed. An example of sign is a thumbs up for a good job.

12. Types of Sign
Iconic signs – icons are signs where meaning is based on similarity of
appearance. ...
Indexical signs – Indexical signs have a cause-and-effect
relationship between the sign and the meaning of the sign. ...
Symbolic signs – these signs have an arbitrary or conventional link.

13. Saussurean model of Sign
In semiotics and linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure's dyadic
model of the sign consisting of the signifier and the
signified.
dyadic tradition: the two parts of a sign consist of a ‘sign vehicle’
and its meaning
SIGNIFIED - the idea being represented
SIGNIFIER - the word doing the representing

14. A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name,
but between a concept [signified] and a sound pattern
[signifier]. The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a
sound is something physical. A sound pattern is the hearer’s
psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the
evidence of his senses. This sound pattern may be called a
‘material’ element only in that it is the representation of our
sensory impressions. The sound pattern may thus be
distinguished from the other element associated with it in a
linguistic sign. This other element is generally of a more
abstract kind: the concept.

15. Peirce Model of Sign
According to Charles Sanders Peirce, The Sign relation is
the key. He describes this sign’s relation with three basic
elements of Semiotics (signs action).
1) Sign (represents)
2) Object (semiotic subject)
3) Interpreting (interpret meaning)
Anything that stands for something else in the production of meaning
is called “Sign”. Any Sign which have subject to express the
matter is called “Object”. Signs have meaning when it translates
to get meaning is called “Interpreting”. Peirce describes it’s a
triadic relation. All three elements are depending on each other
to produce the same meaning. The sign is a subject which refers
the matter is called object at the same time without interpreting
their is no meaning for the sign.

19. Branches of Semiotics:
Semiotics are mainly divided into three
areas, they are; Syntactics, which deals
with the rules for constructing signs and
stringing them together, Semantics, which
deals with the meanings of signs and
Pragmatics, which concentrates on the
practical uses and effects of signs.

20. Semantics:
Semantics is a sub discipline of linguistics which focuses on the study
of meaning. The study of semantics includes the study of how meaning
is constructed, interpreted, clarified, obscured, illustrated, simplified
negotiated, contradicted and translated.
Symbol & Referent
Symbol A symbol is a person or a concept that represents, stands for or suggests
another idea, visual image, belief, action or material entity. Symbols take the form
of words, sounds, gestures, ideas or visual images and are used to convey other
ideas and beliefs. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP".
Communication is pre-eminently symbolic. There are two major categories of signals
people send: signs and symbols. Signs are the foundation of all communication. A
sign designates something other than itself, and meaning is the link between an
object or idea and a sign. On a map, a blue line might represent a river. Numerals
are symbols for numbers. Alphabetic letters may be symbols for sounds. Personal
names are symbols representing individuals. A red rose may symbolize love and
compassion. The variable x in a mathematical equation may symbolize the position
of a particle in space

21. Referent
A referent is a person or thing to which a linguistic expression or other symbol
refers. For example, in the sentence Mary saw me, the referent of the word Mary is
the particular person called Mary who is being spoken of, while the referent of the
word me is the person uttering the sentence. Two expressions which have the same
referent are said to be co-referential. In the sentence John had his dog with him, for
instance, the noun John and the pronoun him are coreferential, since they both refer
to the same person (John).

22. Lexemes and Word Forms By convention in each language, the
dictionary representation may be the infinitive form of the verb as in
Russian, the first person singular in Latin (which has no infinitive), the
third person singular in Arabic, or perhaps by some other form. The
entry form for nouns in normally the singular nominative case form of
the noun: Latin, Russian, English, Czech, German. A lexeme family, or
less formally a word family, is a set of lexemes that are related. They
should share some phonological properties and be related
semantically. The latter is easier said than determined. E.g. print,
printable, unprintable, printer, printability, reprint. This list is not
necessarily complete. Complex lexemes are lexemes formed with an
affix (a morpheme). E.g. ‘able’, ‘un’, ‘er’, ‘ity’, ‘re’ in the above list.
Complex lexemes must each be listed separately in a dictionary as
the meaning may differ. The various word-forms of a given lexeme
do not change the meaning of the lexeme. Which affixes that occur
with which basic lexeme is not predictable. E.g. we find in English un-
happy, un-ripe, but not *un-sad, *un red, *un-tall, and so forth.

23. Semantics is the study of meaning, but what is mean by ‘meaning’ has
been given by different definitions in the past.
Denotation: Denotation refers to the literal meaning of a word
that is, the dictionary meaning. For example, the dictionary meaning
for ‘Snake’ is ‘any of numerous scaly’, ‘legless’, ‘cylindrical body’ and
‘found mostly in tropical and temperate regions’.
Connotation: Connotation refers to the links that are connected to
a certain word or the emotional suggestions related to that word. The
connotative meanings of a word exist together with the denotative
meanings. For example, the connotations for the word ‘snake’ could
include evil or danger.
Ambiguity: Ambiguity is considered as an error in writing, many
writers use this technique to give liberty to the readers to understand
their works and use their imagination to explore meanings. Ambiguity
occurs when a language element has more than one meaning, if it is a
single word then it is lexical ambiguity and if it is a sentence then it is
a structural ambiguity.

24. Implication :
Implication has many different senses. Usually, when used in the
plural, implications are effects or consequences that may happen in
the future..eg: When you left the gate open and the dog escaped,
you were guilty by implication.
Pragmatics: Pragmatics is a systematic way of explaining language
use in context. It seeks to explain aspects of meaning which cannot be
found in the plain sense of words or structures, as explained by
semantics. For example, it can bring out different lexical meanings of
the noun ‘man’ as ‘mankind’ or ‘the human race’ or ‘an individual
person’ or ‘a male person specifically’.

25. SYNONYM
Synonym is the state or phenomenon in which the words that sound
different, but have the same or identical meaning, as another word or
phrase. Synonyms can be nouns, verbs, adverbs or adjectives, as long
as both are the same part of speech. Examples:
small - little
big – large
ANTONYM
Antonym is the state or phenomenon in which the words have the
sense relation which involve the opposite of meaning.. The word pairs
of antonym can be divided into several types Examples:
big - small
good – bad

26. HYPONYM
Is the state or phenomenon that shows the relationship between more
general term, ( lexical representation) and the more specific instances
for it. Examples: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, black is hyponym
of color. Clarinet, guitar, piano, trumpet, violin, are hyponyms of
musical instruments.
Syntax:
Syntax is basically the structure of sentences. Sentences have to
follow certain structural rules in order to make sense. Syntax is a form
of grammar. It is concerned primarily with word order in a sentence
and with the agreement of words when they are used together.
Linguists and grammarians who study syntax do not attempt to tell
people how to ‘correctly’ form a sentence, rather they look at how
people actually speak and then create rules that is grammatical or
non-grammatical.

27. Subfields in Semiotics-
Biosemiotics
Biosemiotics (bios=life & semion=sign) is an interdisciplinary science
that studies communication and signification in living systems.
Communication is the essential characteristic of life. An organism is a
message to future generations that specifies how to survive and
reproduce.

28. Cognitive Semiotics
Cognitive semiotics is a new field dedicated to the transdisciplinary
study of meaning, involving above all researchers from semiotics,
linguistics, developmental and comparative psychology, and
philosophy. A nonexhaustive survey of the field shows the following
research areas as being particularly representative: cognitive
semantics, gesture studies, (language) evolution, semiotic
development, and the embodied mind. The work of groups and
academic institutions is also briefly described. On this basis, the
following features are listed as characteristics of cognitive semiotics,
distinguishing it from other approaches studying mind and meaning:
emphasis on the conceptual–empirical loop, ontological pluralism and
methodological triangulation, influence of phenomenology, meaning
dynamism, and transdisciplinarity.

29. Music Semiotics :
The idea of musical semiotics being introversive or
extroversive—that is, musical signs within a text and
without. "Topics," or various musical conventions (such
as horn calls, dance forms, and styles), have been
treated suggestively. Example: Ambulance Siren
Sound, Ambulance Siren Sound has a many number
of information or Notifications by the sound or
Sound duration.