Semiotics and How It Applies In The World

Sign

In our everyday lives, semiotics, or signs, surround us.  Signs can be words, images, sounds, actions or objects as long as they have meaning.  However, meaning does not necessarily mean a clear definition.  Meaning can be one’s interpretation to that sign.  Human beings have emotions and essentially are our own stories.  By saying this, I simply mean that each individual responds to signs differently.  For example, someone can bring up global warming.  Global warming can either be something that does not bother people or can get people in heated debates.  However, I do believe that there are the universal signs that everyone understands and does without thinking.  For example, an arrow on the road, you as the driver follow that arrow whether it is in a drive-threw line or to the car wash without questioning it.  Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce break down semiotics even more so by developing their own semiotic models.

Saussure has signs broken down into the signified and the signifier while the sign is the result between the two.  For example, the signifier could be the word door.  The signified is that the door opens and leads to another room or area.  Peirce’s semiotic model contrasts Saussure’s model by containing three important components in his model opposed to just two.  Peirce believed that there was a representamen, which is the form the sign takes; the interpretant, which is not an interpreter but instead the sense made of the sign; lastly, the object for which the sign refers to.  Respresentamen is similar to the signifier and interpretant is similar to the signified.  All of which leads to a sign and how we interpret it.  However, code is important to understand signs.

Semiotic Breakdown

Code is the fundamental component in sign.  Linguistic structuralist, Roman Jakobson, stressed upon the fact that it depends on the presentation of text that then depends on the code and how one communicates it.  How I, and others can agree, interprets the emotional content, or tone of the word, is how we interpret the sign.  That alone is the code of the sign.  It can also include color.  It can also be included in art or photography.  How one decodes the picture is how we then interpret the sign.  This in turn can tie into developing semiotic analysis.  By breaking down a word or whatever the sign may be, we can understand multiple interpretations of signs and how the world interprets them personally.  It is what connects us, and by having a better understanding of semiotics and the breakdown, we as humans gain knowledge and have a greater appreciation of the world as a whole.