Dept. of Communication Design, Cabe, Knust: DR Kofi Amoako-Agyeman 05/2021
Dept. of Communication Design, Cabe, Knust: DR Kofi Amoako-Agyeman 05/2021
Dept. of Communication Design, Cabe, Knust: DR Kofi Amoako-Agyeman 05/2021
DR KOFI AMOAKO-AGYEMAN
05/2021
SEMIOLOGY: definition
Etymology: from "semeion" (Greek, "sign")
It is the study of signs; what constitutes signs; what law governs them
All images are signs, and the discipline that must investigate them is not the
psychology of perception, but semiotics, the science of signs (Gombrich, 2000)
It is the study of how signs make meaning: something that represents or stands for
something (an object or concept) else to someone in some capacity
The field of research that studies signs as an essential part of cultural life and
communication; perceived/perceivable aspect of communication.
Essentially all of the ways in which information can be processed into a codified form
and communicated as a message by any sentient, reasoning mind to another.
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.
Every message is made of signs subject to interpretations.
SEMIOLOGY: definition
Signs are not just words, but also include images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures,
an action sounds: anything that communicates a meaning (understanding) through
any of the senses: visual, auditory (auditive: the sound or image conveyed by TV,
radio, telephone), tactile (perception by the sense of touch), olfactory, or gustatory.
These signs may also include… elements such as the title… the fonts used, the
layout, the colours… the language adopted, the content of the articles…, and each of
these signs… generate a meaning; the mediators to the world.
Reading and interpreting signs is a fundamental cultural activity.
Every cultural pattern and every single act of social behaviour involves communication
in either an explicit or implicit sense.
Communication is culture, culture is communication
Analysis of systems of communication: language, gestures, clothing
According to semiotics, we can only know culture (and reality) by means of signs,
through the processes of signification (sense-making).
SEMIOLOGY: goal
• Focus: the analysis of the communication process, the mechanisms to be
examined and de-constructed.
• Using methodologies developed by semiotics in its various movements
(structural, interpretative, generative), paying special attention to communication
and visual texts, including non-verbal communication elements.
• The ways in which the communication process functions, the ability to create
meaning, talking to the mind, feelings, and emotions at the same time.
• The goal is to gain basic skills and learn the ways in which a graphic sign, a
drawing, a billboard, a trailer, or a video-clip can convey values and tell a story.
SEMIOLOGY: brief history
• Ancient Greece: Hippocrates (460-377 BC) establishes semiotics (σημειωτικός) as a
branch of medicine history; Aristotle (384-322 BC) establishes a 3-part model of
semiotics
• Early modern: Henry Stubbes (1670) as defining the branch of medical science
relating to the interpretation of signs/ symptoms;
• John Locke (1690) in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding proposes
importing semiotics into philosophy as a tool for allowing philosophers to understand
the relationship between representation and knowledge
• Modern semiotic analysis begun with two major founders:
• Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and
• American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914).
• Both Saussure and Peirce developed their conceptions of the sign at the same time
but independently, and both have been adopted and utilised in subsequent semiotic
studies by others.
SEMIOLOGY: brief history
• Important work was done in Prague and Russia early in the 20th century, and
semiotics is now well established in France and Italy (Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco,
etc.).
• According to many there never was an image that looked like nature; all images are
based on conventions, similar to language or the characters of our scripts.
• Images are collections signs
• A sign stands for an object or concept.
• The "stands for" process is the point where meaning is created both through encoding
(by the source) and decoding (by the receiver--or "reader" in semiotic analysis).
• The magazine is a complex collection of signs that can be extensively decoded and
analysed by its reader… (Bignell 1997).
SEMIOLOGY: sub-divisions
• The science of the signs: the emphasis of semiotic research lies in philosophy
and linguistics; In general semiotics is subdivided into three
• 1. Syntactics (visual syntax): The sign in relation to how it stands in context with
other signs (the relation of the signs).
• It deals with how visual rules are observed in compositions.
• This can be applied to the visual ‘text’, visual syntax explores how colour, lines,
shadows as part of the grammar of the visual.
• The visual will not have a meaning if the visual syntax is broken.
• This may lead to losing its informative value, the message will not getting
delivered the visual ‘reader’ or worse, ‘psychotic’ effect.
• This family portrait is an example of an image that breaks the visual syntax.
• It has broken the rule of colour – it’s hard to tell which one is the background because of the
larger area has conspicuous colour.
• The subjects are drowned in the background and thus, losing its focus.
• The first picture loses its informative value. Instead of it being a family portrait, it could have
been the picture of a museum section with a bunch of people in the middle.
SEMIOLOGY: sub-divisions
• Semantics: The sign in relation to what it means (the relation between the significant and
the sign); meaning that is conventional or “coded” in a given language.
• Semantics applies to the meaning of signs. It is concerned with how you read the visual
information in the image and your interpretation of it.
• Semantics mainly deals with the connotations (second level of analysis) of the sign. For
example, we take the issue of colours because it is a sign that has many meanings.
• Pink is a fun, tender, flamboyant and calming colour. It is often associated with femininity,
the hello kitty brand is clearly in support of this idea because its products predominantly
use the colour pink.
• But what if a man wears pink?
• Often whenever a man wears pink people start to question his sexuality and labelled him
as being gay.
• Take a look at the pictures of the male celebrities above wearing pink.
• Chris Brown, Lil Wayne and Kanye west.
• These celebrities are notorious for their “bad boy” behaviour, Chris Brown with
domestic violence, Lil Wayne with multiple legal charges and Kanye West who “bullied”
sweet young girl Taylor Swift.
SEMIOLOGY: sub-divisions
• Pragmatics: The sign in relation to its origin, the effect it has on the viewer, the use
one makes of it (the relation between the significant, the sign and the user); the
ways in which context contributes to meaning, any pre-existing knowledge about
those involved; the inferred intent of the speaker; the ways in which context
contributes to meaning
• Pragmatics deals with the context of the sign and how it may change its meanings
in different ‘situations’.
• In FHM, she is seen as a
sex symbol, wearing minimal
clothing and a striking a
feeble pose that says “get in
bed with me”.
• In contradictory to the
Cosmopolitan magazine,
she is seen as this sexy
fashionista, with a confident
pose of hand on hips to
suggest a strong
independent woman.
• Here we can see that the
‘sign’ of Megan Fox adapting
Megan Fox in FHM or ‘For her meaning to the medium Cosmopolitan is women’s
Him Magazine’ is an that she is on. magazine in which its contents is
international monthly men’s about women lifestyle, fashion,
lifestyle magazine. women’s health and so on.
SEMIOLOGY: social
• Social semiotics is a branch of the field of semiotics.
• Lemke notes that social semiotics is a synthesis of several modern approaches to the
study of social meaning and social action. One of them, obviously is semiotics itself: the
study of our social resources for communicating meanings.. . . Formal semiotics is
mainly interested in the systematic study of the systems of signs themselves. Social
semiotics includes formal semiotics and goes on to ask how people use signs to
construct the life of a community (1990, p. 183)
• Because every community is different, the signs used by one community may be
different from those used by another, For example, the colour red indicates mourning for
people in Ghana, whereas, in contrast, it represents procreation and life for people in
India.
• Social semioticians apply three important principles when analyzing a semiotic system
such as language or imagery, principles that have significance for professional
communicators.
SEMIOLOGY: social
• 1. Semioticians believe all people see the world through signs.
• Chandler explains, Although things may exist independently of signs we know them
only through the mediation of signs. We see only what our sign systems allow us to
see. . . . Semioticians argue that signs are related to the signifieds by social
conventions which we learn. We become so used to such conventions in our use of
various media that they seem “natural,” and it can be difficult for us to realize the
conventional nature of such relationships (2001)
• 2. The meaning of signs is created by people and does not exist separately from them
and the life of their social/cultural community
• 3. Semiotic systems provide people with a variety of resources for making meaning.
Therefore, when they make a choice to use one sign, they are not using another.
SEMIOLOGY: F. de Saussure: 1857-1913
• Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)
• Saussure’s semiology differs from Peirce’s semiotics in some
respects, but both are concerned with signs.
• Saussure’s suggests the possibility of semiotic analysis: deals with
many of the concepts that can be applied to signs. He wrote, “The
linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and a
sound-image. . . . (A Course in General Linguistics, first published
posthumously in 1915).
• Dyadic signs: a sign is composed of two components/elements
• the signifier, or “sound-image”: the material that has a meaning
• the signified or “concept”: the meaning.
SEMIOLOGY: the signifier
• The signifier: the form which the sign takes; what generates meaning
• It has to be a thing and not a concept- so the spoken or the written word 'love' is a
signifier, but the concept it refers to is not a signifier.
• Often described as a 'physical object' that includes sound, image or word.
• Things you can touch like clothes or appliances, or visual marks like logos and
drawings are signifiers. It has to refer to (or signify) something other than itself.
• Signs have two levels of meaning, the one intended (denotation) and the one that is
understood (connotation).
• If all is well, denotation and connotation will be the same, but it is the idea that they
may not be that makes semiotics so fascinating and frightening.
SEMIOLOGY: the signified
A signified (signifié) is the concept a sign represents: the concept it refers to
The signified refers to the mental concept, which is said to be broadly common to all
members of the same culture, who share the same language; the meaning generated by the
individual
Finally the signifier has to be understood to refer to the signified by all those who use it to
communicate.
This is often socially or culturally specific, and signs are part of the codes that society uses to
communicate.
Anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as 'signifying' something - referring to
or standing for something other than itself.
The link between the sign, or expression, and what it stands for is understood by convention:
signs can mean anything we agree that they mean, and they can mean different things to
different people.
SEMIOLOGY: F. de Saussure: 1857-1913
Saussure’s suggests the possibility of semiotic
concept
analysis: deals with many of the concepts that can
be applied to signs. sign-image
signification
cannot be separated. signifier
representamen interpretant
SEMIOLOGY: C. S. Peirce 1839-1914
Peirce noted that 'a sign... addresses somebody: creates in the mind of that person an equivalent or
a more developed sign.
The sign which it creates he calls the interpretant of the first sign'
Peirce's model of the sign includes an object or referent - which does not feature directly in
Saussure's model.
Here is a version which is quite often encountered and which changes only the unfamiliar Peircean
terms (Nöth 1990, 89).
Sign vehicle: the form of the sign;
Sense: the sense made of the sign;
Referent: what the sign 'stands for‘,
similar in meaning to the signified
SEMIOLOGY: C. S. Peirce 1839-1914
• Triadic signs: The triadic relation between the ground, object, and interpretant of a
sign may have its own signification, which may produce another triadic relation
between the relation itself, its signfication, and the interpretation of that signification.
• Peirce's theory of the sign therefore offered a powerful analysis of the signification
system and its codes because the focus was on the cultural context rather than
linguistics which only analyses usage in slow-time whereas, in the real world, there is
an often chaotic blur of language and signal exchange during human semiotic
interaction.
• Pierce categorized patterns of meaning into 3 types of signs
• The three aspects of signs: their iconic, indexical, and symbolic dimensions
• The signs are iconic, indexical, symbolic.
SEMIOLOGY: Peirce’ Three Aspects of Signs
Icon Index Symbol
1. Explain how sensitivity and cautiousness relate to perception and how important they apply
to the designer towards effective communication?
2. The cognitive revolution in psychology was said to be a response to behaviourism, which
was the predominant school in experimental psychology at the time. Write a critical account
of the contributions of cognitive psychology on how people think, understand, and know.
3. Gestalt psychologists believe that our ability to identify objects visually and to distinguish
them from their background, is innate rather than learned. How true is the assertion and
why should the designer be interested in issues related to Gestalt psychology?
4. The knowledge of Gestalt psychology facilitates the visual system and how people perceive
visual components. Discuss and justify your response to the statement with realistic
examples.