- "Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning-making."
The investigation of how signs and symbols are used to communicate meaning, and how these meanings are interpreted within cultural contexts.
Signs and Symbols: The study of semiotics involves the analysis of signs and symbols that communicate meaning. It is essential to understand the different types of signs and symbols, their cultural and historical significance, and how they are interpreted by different individuals and communities.
Language and Communication: Semiotics considers the ways language and communication shape our understanding of the world around us. It investigates how language is used to convey meaning, how meanings change over time, and how individuals interpret language differently based on their cultural and social context.
Culture and Society: Semiotics examines how cultural beliefs and social practices influence the meanings we assign to signs and symbols. It considers the mechanisms that shape cultural values, norms, and expectations and how these are communicated through signs and symbols in society.
Meaning and Interpretation: Semiotics explores the process of creating meaning and interpreting signs and symbols. It analyzes how different people construct meaning based on their cultural background, personal experiences, and social context.
Mythology and Folklore: Semiotics often draws on mythological and folkloric narratives to explore the meanings that individuals assign to certain symbols and signs. It investigates the stories, motifs, and archetypes that have endured across time and cultures and how they shape our understanding of reality.
Visual Culture: Semiotics studies the role of visual media in society, including advertisements, artworks, films, and other forms of visual culture. It considers the semiotic systems that determine the meaning of visual images and the ways in which they influence societal values and norms.
Textual Analysis: Semiotics analyzes written and spoken texts to understand how they convey meaning. It considers the structure of texts, the literary devices used to convey meaning, and the cultural and social context in which they are produced and consumed.
Semiotic Theory: Finally, semiotics itself has its own theoretical framework that underlies its analysis of signs and symbols. It involves the development and application of tools and methodologies to analyze the ways meaning is constructed and interpreted in different contexts.
Syntactics: Syntactics refers to the relationship between symbols in the system of language, specifically the rules of syntax and grammar that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences.
Semantics: Semantics looks at the meaning of symbols, whether they are words or images, and how they relate to their referents in the world.
Pragmatics: Pragmatics studies how context influences the interpretation of language and communication, such as how social and cultural factors shape speech acts and nonverbal signals.
Discourse Analysis: Discourse analysis focuses on larger units of language, such as conversations, narratives, and texts, and how they create meaning in cultural contexts.
Cognitive Semiotics: A more recent area of study that examines how meaning is constructed in the brain and how cognitive processes shape language and communication.
Iconography: Iconography is the study of symbols and images within cultural traditions, and their meanings within specific contexts, both historical and present-day.
Symbolic Interactionism: Symbolic interactionism is a sociological framework that explains how people create and interpret symbols, and how they use these symbols to communicate and negotiate reality in interaction with others.
Ethnosemiotics: Ethnosemiotics combines semiotics with ethnography, and looks at the symbols and signs of specific cultures and how they are used to create meaning and communicate within a community.
- "Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter."
- "Signs can also communicate feelings (which are usually not considered meanings) and may communicate internally (through thought itself) or through any of the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory (taste)."
- "Contemporary semiotics is a branch of science that studies meaning-making and various types of knowledge."
- "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."
- "Some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science, while others explore the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications."
- "The Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco proposed that every cultural phenomenon may be studied as communication."
- "They examine areas also belonging to the life sciences—such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world."
- "Fundamental semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study."
- "Applied semiotics analyzes cultures and cultural artifacts according to the ways they construct meaning through their being signs."
- "The communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics (including zoosemiotics and phytosemiotics)."
- "Semiotics is not to be confused with the Saussurean tradition called semiology, which is a subset of semiotics."