Semiotics is the study of signs and how they are interpreted. It examines anything that conveys meaning, including words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. Semiotics has its origins in linguistics but has been applied more broadly to help understand communication, culture and cognition. Key concepts in semiotics include the signifier and signified, denotation and connotation, icons, indexes and symbols, metaphor and myth.

1. Semiotics

2. Semiotics
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3. Semiotics came from
linguistics.
From structuralism to
post-structuralism till now,
semiotics is still a
popular method to code
and decode signs
(linguistic sign and
images).
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4. Communication
Communication
Personal experiences Personal experiences

5. semiotics
• The science of signs.
• Something which stands to somebody for
something in some respect or capacity.
– Charles Sanders Peirce
• Anything that can be used to lie.
– Umberto Eco
• A broad approach to understanding the
nature of meaning, cognition, culture,
behavior, and life itself.
– Smith-Shank, 1995

6. Semiotics
• the pivotal branch of the integrated science of
communication, is concerned with the
formulation and encoding of messages by
sources, the transmission of these messages
through channels, the decoding and
interpretation of these messages by
destinations, and their signification. The entire
transaction, or semiosis, takes place within a
context to which the system is highly sensitive
and which the system, in turn, affects. Any living
entity, or its products, can be either message
sources or destinations.

7. Semiosis
• Essentially we are wayfaring interpretants
from beginning to end. We endlessly
analyse concepts, signs, objects and
symbols. Every time you interpret a
symbol you add new meanings and
sometimes knowledge (which may be
false) but always you enlarge the meaning
of the concept. We live in an interpretive
world and we are interpretive beings.

8. Models of signs
• Signifier and Signified
• Denotation and Connotation
• Icon, index, and symbol
• Metaphor
• Myth

9. Signifier and Signified
• Signifier and signified.
– Signifier is a sign, a sound, or a written
character that we can see.
– Signified is the concept of the sign in our mind
• Saussure, “A linguistic sign is not a link
between a thing and a name, but between
a concept (signified) and a sound pattern
(signifier)”

10. Denotation and Connotation
• Denotation and Connotation
– Denotation is the object that we can see in an
image (text).
– Connotation means what the object means
and the metaphors of the object

11. Icon, index, and symbol
• Icon, index, and symbol
– Icon is an image which resembling or imitating
the meaning.
– index is an image which does not arbitrary but
directly connected to the meaning.
– symbol is an image which does not directly
represent the meaning, but it fundamentally
arbitrary or purely conventional.

12. Metaphor
• Metaphor
– Metaphor is something not essentially
represents something else; however, we use
this image to represent the meaning we want
to represent.

13. Myth
• “Myths can be seen as extended
metaphors; myths help us to mark sense
of our experience within a
culture” (Chandler, 2004, p. 145).