Semiotics

Semiotics or Semiology is broadly defined as the study of the humanities that deals with the transmission of symbols, including all the sciences related to characters, signs, ciphers, ancient civilizations, and sign language. However, due to its broad scope, it did not receive much attention in the humanities in the Western world until the rise of structuralism in the second half of the twentieth century, when philosophers called on by the journal Tel Quel, in opposition to the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, cited a series of studies on the process of cultural reproduction of symbols in Russia before the ****animal revolution. Therefore, it was not until the 1960s that semiotics, as it is called today, officially appeared.

Another powerful source of modern semiotics is the teaching text of Saussure, a leading Swiss linguist at the beginning of the century -- "A Course in General Linguistics". After Saussure divided symbols into two non-subordinate parts, signifier and signified, he really established the basic theory of semiotics, which influenced the later work of Li Weiwei. After the division of symbols into Signifier and Signified, which are not subordinate to each other, Saussure really established the basic theory of semiotics, which influenced French structuralist scholars, such as Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, and was regarded as the father of modern linguistics.

[edit]Principles of the Discipline

Linguistics has a long history, since ancient Greece there has been grammar, is there not in China? That is certainly not, the Han Dynasty exegesis, the Western famous Han studies, in the national school as elementary school (literature, exegesis, phonetics), typical of our common saying, "Er Ya". As for grammar, China seems to be a bit worse. Chinese and Western linguistics are very different. Hu Shizhi once superficially mentioned that English emphasizes the use of prepositions, while China neglects virtual words and often omits them. Let's take a look at the linguists' study of semiotics, "Until Saussure found the words capable and referring, the concept of sign was ambiguous because it always tended to be confused with a single capable, which Saussure tried to avoid. After some consideration and hesitation about the words lexeme and denotation, form and idea, image and concept, Saussure chose the able and the referent, and the combination of the two constituted the sign." (3) Mr. Zhang Yuanshan's article, "The Difference between Chinese and Western Levels of Thinking and Its Implications," says, "The materialistic basis of language that Saussure ignored: 'receptive reference,' because what really constitutes what should be receptive reference with the capable reference is in fact exactly the 'name' and 'reality' that is familiar to the traditional Chinese academics. ' and 'reality'. The combination of the capable reference and the receptive reference produces the linguistic referent, and the two sources constitute the two relevant components of the referent; the source and the capable reference is the 'objective referent', i.e., the 'righteousness reference' (solidified as a dictionary interpretation); the source of the 'receptive reference' is the 'objective reference', i.e., the 'righteousness reference' (solidified as a dictionary interpretation); and the source of the 'receptive reference' is the 'objective reference'. The 'subjective referent' is the 'intentional referent' (which embodies the specific role of each slightly different from the dictionary interpretation), and their sequential relationship is 'able referent → (meaning referent → intentional referent) → receptive referent ' This can be represented by the 'Li' hexagram in the Eight Trigrams of the Zhouyi, with the first nine (yang lines) representing the able to refer, the second six (yin lines) representing the partially referred to, and the third nine (yang lines) representing the partially referred to. Just as the Chinese take the lowest (first nine) as the first line. That way, the Chinese think in exactly the opposite direction of Westerners, both 'referred to → (meaning → meaning) → able to refer'." "The Chinese have a high degree of distrust and skepticism of language and able reference." ④ According to my study of Chinese studies, I am well aware that Buddhism and Taoism distrust both language and able and receptive fingers. Chinese thinking is very different from that of Westerners, and there is a huge difference in recognizing symbols. For example, the West uses the banana to represent the genitals, China uses the lotus root. Typical Juliet in the West, Zhu Yingtai in China. As Mr. Huo Datong, an expert in psychoanalysis, said, "Men are all Jia Baoyu, women are all Lin Daiyu." Many people would say that the signage is even more internationalized. For example, if the signage of a toilet uses the images of a man and a woman, Chinese people will know it at a glance, and Westerners will know it at a glance, and there is no difference in thinking between the energy and receptive fingers of the signage. Not all, when westerners demonstrate "eight", they open their eight fingers. But Chinese people only need to stretch out their thumb and index finger to show it. This is where the difference in thinking comes into play. Westerners end up using the receptive finger (the object) to represent it, while the Chinese use the receptive finger (the name) to represent it, and these two symbols are certainly different. When there is a difference between our energy and receptivity and the Western energy and receptivity, how can we do the instruction design? First of all, according to different regional thinking characteristics, such as ethnic minorities with a certain totem symbols to represent their own national identity. If I do the indication design with internationality and difference, I tend to do it with the symbols of national characteristics. In the era of multiculturalism, the symbol of difference is also international. If I use a dragon pattern, the whole world will know that it is "China", and the dragon pattern is indicative and national. There is no difference in the international indicative signs, often using *** literacy symbols, such as the bolt model of the global common, if the design is to do the instructions is much easier.

[edit]School of contention

Semiotics (semiotics, semiologie, semiotic) is the 20th century after the 1960s by France and Italy as the center of the re-emergence of European countries, its source is no more than the Husserl's phenomenology, Saussure's structuralism and Pierce's pragmatism. According to the theoretical form, it can be divided into: firstly, Cassirian philosophical semiotics (neo-Kantianism) and Pierce philosophical semiotics; secondly, the linguistic structuralist semiotics of Laurent Barthes under the influence of Saussure; and subdivided into: firstly, Saussure's statement that "Linguistics is only a part of semiotics", and secondly, Barthes's statement that "Semiotics is only a part of semiotics in the broader sense". "The semiotics is only a part of the broader linguistics", which is the linguistics of expanded meaning, more accurately said "meta-linguistics" theory; Third, the Soviet scholar Lautman's historical semiotics, which is exactly Saussure *** when the research of the opposition, and so on 1). According to Li Youzhang, "Today there are four most popular general semiotic theoretical systems: the American Pierce theoretical system, the Swiss Saussure theoretical system, the French Greimas theoretical system, and the Italian Eco general semiotics." ② Semiotics, as a discipline that spans the methods of disciplinary research, is certainly less revolutionary in thought and scholarship. Postmodern thinking, the country is more likely to accept Barth and so on. However, I have been studying Chinese studies for many years, and my sense of following trends has long faded. Meditatively, those who are the Western learning, the national unthinking appropriation, and even advocate, but early to make me tired. We must understand that the authority in the Western academic community, may be in our context is the wrong extreme, semiotics has its own characteristics, so I hope to find a more reasonable research methodology, my article is only a crude attempt.

Taking culture as the scope of research is the characteristic of modern semiotics, which includes

Folklore Analysis

Anthropology

Narratology

Discourse Analysis

Mythological Analysis Seminar

Mythological Analysis

Semiological Analysis

Semiotics of Myth

Semiotics of Art

Additionally, more recent applications include Semiotics of Cinema, Semiotics of Architecture, and Semiotics of Architecture, which should be divided into the following periods. The following issues:

Major schools of thought

Swiss Saussure Semiotics (1906)

Ferdinand de Saussure

Saussure is a Swiss linguist who pioneered modern linguistics, and he has no works of his own, but the famous Course of General Linguistics is Saussure's lectures, which were edited by a combination of two students. The currently famous Course of General Linguistics is a collection of Saussure's lectures, edited by two students. The etymology of the term Semiology or Semiotics is also a derivation of Saussure's Greek word for "sign". Semiotics was established by Saussure as a science to study the laws of the use of symbols in human society. Unlike traditional philology, which is a diachronic study of the historical evolution of language, modern linguistics focuses on the laws of reference within language in the present time and space, and this kind of synchronic study was pioneered by Saussure. The study of diachronicity is a pioneering idea of Saussure, which later influenced the French structuralist linguistics, the British philosopher Wigenstein, and the American derivative linguist Noam Chomsky, among others.

Because Saussure's division of linguistic symbols into two parts provided a systematic analytical methodology for scholars studying cultural symbols or ideologies, semiotics flourished in European and American cultural criticism during the 1980s and 1990s. To date, many academically trained cultural critics around the world still use semiotic methods to analyze the structure of cultural phenomena.

Saussure's semiotics is characterized

by the division of the single sign (sign) into two parts: the signifier and the signified. Signifier is the phonetic image of the sign; Signified is the conceptual part of the sign. A whole composed of the two parts is called a sign.

The relationship between Signifier and Signified is arbitrariness, not necessarily related. For example, the English word "tree", which is a combination of sounds and strings, has been referred to by convention as the concept of "a leafy plant with woody branches".

Russian Semiotics (Pre 1917)

Vladimir Propp

M.M. Bakhtin

Roman Jacobson

N. S. Trubetzkoy

Russian Formalism

Soviet Semiotics (1960)

Yury Mikhailovich Lotman

French Structuralist Semiotics (1960)

Claude Levi-Strauss

Roland Barthes

Gerard Genette

Tzvetan Todorov

Julia Kristeva

American semiotics

C. S. Peirce

Italian semiotics

Umberto Eco

[edit]Usage details

Use in logo design

In Pearce's view, it is more a matter of images, signs and symbols. So far, the trend of reading the map, indicating the design is also the refining of the reference, or perhaps that the logo is on behalf of some kind of object or recognizable object (can refer to) characteristic symbols. Once the reference no longer exists, the sign will lose its symbolic nature, and the characteristics will follow the object or object, just as "the significance of the sign is appropriate to the sign only when it is related to the subject who uses the sign - 'the sign itself does not have its own absolute significance, which is to say that the subject is not abandoned in it'". is not abandoned in it', the subject is always the immediate existent, the sign has its existence in relation to other existents." ⑤ Also in the same vein as Cahill: "The idea of relation depends on the idea of the sign." (6) Since the symbol system is used to recognize the signifier or the object that makes the sign visible, it is particularly important to grasp the reference (concept) of the signifier. In order to grasp the referent, it is necessary to understand that "we cannot think without images, nor can we intuit without concepts (referents). 'Concept without intuition is empty, intuition without concept is blind'" (7). According to Foucault, "The form of the relation between the sign and its referent is through the interplay between the three: fitness, imitation, and especially empathy." Also said: "in order for the symbol to become what it is, the symbol in the presentation of their own reference to the object at the same time, but also must be presented as the object of recognition." (8) Indicative signage design should do more to recognize the object, otherwise, the symbolic nature of the indicative sign will be lost. As Barth's view: symbols first have the ability to convey signals, at the same time with the code (code) ability, otherwise it is impossible to distinguish between language and non-language mark (sign), marking system, meaning relationship. If it is Cahill, then the distinction between reality and possibility becomes indeterminate and is no longer clearly perceived in the particular case where the function of symbolic thought is impeded or obstructed. ⑩ If you don't believe me, who can't decipher what you're saying if you're shouting nonsense in the street? Another factor that contributes to design dissonance is the neglect of the arbitrariness of the sign, according to Saussure: "The connection between the energy and the reference is arbitrary, or, since by sign we mean the whole resulting from the association of the energy and the reference." Therefore, symbols are arbitrary, and arbitrary symbols will definitely increase the difficulty of designing our directional signs. It is more important to refine and summarize the reference. Therefore, a design to read the order of thinking table, for the reference of learners.

Greimas view: "can refer to the visual class includes facial expressions, gestures, text, physical paintings, sculpture, traffic signals, etc.". According to Dharma-phase materialism, the first five of the eight senses (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body) are systems that receive energetic references, and if the color and phase components in the eye-sense are the first perceptual adjudication of the symbols, the symbols in the indicative signs are the adjudication once again. This adjudication will produce the three common types of ****perceptual symbols.

One, likeness symbols, are symbols whose external form and internal structure resemble the thing they are replacing. Drawing a God in the doorway can stand in for a church; drawing five five-pointed stars represents five stars; putting an "x" on the head of a drawn cigarette indicates that smoking is prohibited. The list goes on and on. Some are conventions, such as "x"; some are similar, such as stars and cigarette butts. If they are exactly the same, are they still symbols? Certainly not. A star in the sky is definitely not a pentagon, and a cigarette butt is not a photograph. Symbols convey information at a glance, and must not be ambiguous and elusive.

The second, related symbols, refers to a variety of symbols associated with the phenomenon replaced. Such as the car before the turn of the signpost, the wind flag indicates the direction of the wind, the thermometer's mercury column indicates the temperature and so on. Some experts, such as Pierce in the United States, call it indexical symbols. The so-called indexical symbols is to infer the information of the symbols through the relevant connections without explanation. The use of masks in European theaters is a vivid example of this, and these must be conventions.

Third, the statute symbols, refers to no connection with the message conveyed by the symbols, only by convention. For example, red and yellow are used in transportation as a metaphor for warning. In mathematics, "+", "-", "=" and so on. Another example is the communication code, crosswalk, and so on, which is still most used in the field of transportation. Peirce named it as a symbol, some experts also called the finger sign symbol.

In a word, the more similar or closer to the object of the symbol is easy to identify, where the more abstract or national cultural symbols to identify the more difficult. For example, Europeans often wrap snakes around cups to refer to medicine, which is difficult for Orientals to recognize. Those that can be used universally around the world are best recognized by using symbols that resemble or are closer to the object***. If it is a cultural type, do it according to the thinking that can refer or be referred to. If neither is possible, mandatory statute symbols must be used. However, do not need to be so strict design, use skillfully is very much in need of inspiration, the more you know the greater the chance of generating inspiration, so knowledge is to create the touch point of inspiration.

[Edit Paragraph]Introduction

Into the field of semiotics

Nowadays, our readers can say that the term "semiotics" is no longer strange. But to say that it has a more comprehensive and systematic understanding, perhaps not yet to this extent. Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences Publishing House published this set of "semiotics translation series", focusing on the introduction of French semiotics research results, for the development of semiotics research in our country and in the semiotic analysis of readers interested in providing the original reference.

I

Semiology in France was born in the first half of the twentieth century, but its real development took place in the 1960s and later. It owes its development to the major advances made by a variety of disciplines in the twentieth century.

First of all, modern linguistics was the main basis on which semiotics gained its theoretical framework and research methods. It was the Swiss linguist F. Saussure (1857-1913) who first proposed the study of signs as a new discipline. He predicted the emergence of a discipline specializing in the study of "symbolic systems" in his "Course of General Linguistics", which had a profound impact on modern linguistics, and made the initial theoretical preparations for it. His successor, the Danish linguist Yermslev (1899-1956), laid the epistemological foundation for the establishment of structural semantics through his two books, Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Collected Essays on Language. French linguist Benveniste's (1902-1976) research results on "statement activity linguistics" made it possible for semiotics to grasp the meaning with the help of the statement of the subject of the narration, thus forming the concept and research method of discourse semiotics, and thus bringing semiotics closer to the actual situation of speech activity.

Secondly, cultural anthropology provides some research objects for semiotics. Since both cultural anthropology and semiotics are concerned with the cultural practices (customs, habits, motivations that are embedded in the collective practice of speech, etc.) that influence individual speech, they intersect with each other in these aspects. The study of the regularity of the cross-cultural forms of the dominant discourse, i.e. narrative forms, has been initiated by cultural anthropologists long before the intervention of semiotics, and of course, this study has benefited first of all from the theoretical inspiration of linguistics. The French sociologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) had systematically discussed the interrelationship of value objects and wealth in the cycle of society, and from then on, "sociality becomes a system, and between the parts of this system we can see articulation, equivalence, and entailment relations " (Levi-Strauss comment). Levi-Strauss himself had a very good analytical practice in this area. In Myth and Epic, Dumezel (1898-1986) explains in similar terms the "ideology of three hierarchical functions" of the gods in Indo-European religions. Thus a general structure emerges, without regard to the individual, in which particular problems also find their precise place. The Russian formalist literary theorist Propp's (1895-1970) 1928 Morphology of the Russian Folktale, translated into French and published in France in the early 1960s, gave a great impetus to semiotic studies. Greimas (1917-1992) then built on it with an in-depth and comprehensive study of narrative grammar, proposing a complete semiotic theory that can be used for both literary and social narrative texts.

Finally, on the philosophical side, semiotics has absorbed much of its concept of signification from phenomenological research theory. The semiotic concept of the expression "manifestation of meaning" is inspired by phenomenology. This expression, within the context of sensation and in the mutually grounded relationship between the sensing subject and the sensed object, identifies the status of the signifying form as a relational space between the sensible and the intelligible, between illusion and shared belief. In Structural Semantics, Greimas writes explicitly, "We propose to identify perception as the non-linguistic site within which the understanding of the role of meaning is situated" (p. 8). Of course, semiotics cannot be seen as a branch of phenomenology. Semiotics owes much to phenomenology to the German philosopher Husserl's (1859-1938) The Dominant Idea of Phenomenology (translated into French in 1950) and the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty's (1908-1961) Phenomenology of Sensation ( 1945).

II

In French, two terms, sémiologie and sémiotique, correspond to the Chinese word "semiotics". Until the 1970s, there was no fundamental difference in the use of these two terms, and sémiologie preceded sémiotique; from the 1970s onwards, a major breakthrough occurred in the work of the researchers who used the term sémiotique, and subsequently, the content of the research covered by the two terms became quite different.

1. semiologie: This term originally referred to the study of the "phases of disease" in medical science. Saussure in the "course of general linguistics" for the first time it will be used to refer to the overall study of the "symbolic system". In the cognitive field, the term first referred to the work done in the 1960s around French structuralism (Levi-Strauss, Dumetzel, Roland Barthes, Lacan, etc.) under the influence of Saussure, Yermezlev, and the American linguist Jacobsen (1896-1982). Subsequently, some narrowly understood Saussure's definition of sémiologie (e.g., Prieto's and Mounin's studies) and confined themselves to the exploration of the sign itself, thus failing to escape from the mechanical application of the "linguistic-signifying" model. They exclude any connection with the epistemology of the other human sciences. This kind of research is included in the theory of communication and eventually becomes a subsidiary discipline of linguistics. In terms of content, sémiolo gie is not concerned with semantics; it treats the description of the referent as an ordinary interpretative activity in which natural language is the instrument. In its relation to linguistics, it does not recognize the primacy of linguistics, since it emphasizes only the specificity of the sign itself. Yet in interpreting some non-linguistic signs (pictures, paintings, architecture, etc.) it often borrows natural language as a mediator, as for example when Roland Barthes (1915-1980), in his book The System of Clothing, adopts the practice of analyzing the descriptive texts of fashion, rather than the fashion itself. In analyzing paintings, it also limited itself to analyzing the descriptive language of paintings.

2. sémiotique: the term is derived from the English semiotic, first used by Peirce (1839-1914), the originator of American semiotics, and refers to the study of symbols as well, in the sense that it is indistinguishable from sémiologie as used by Saussure. Modern French researchers of sémiologie do not value the linguistic signifier as an already constructed object, rather than as an object to be observed. They look more to semantic studies, endeavoring to explore modes of meaning, arguing that semiotics should be a theory about systems of meaning, and that their field of study is the variety of texts that are the result of the practice of meaning. In this regard, the school of Greimas and others, which focuses on structural research, and the epistemological semiotics of Kresteva (1941- ), which is a "semantic analytic" semiotics with reference to linguistic models and psychoanalytic theories, have been formed. The former has become the mainstay of semiotics in France due to its large and fruitful body of research: this school is dominated by the members of the "Société de Recherche Fran?aise", and is commonly known as the "Parisian School of Semiotics". It can be said that the basic concepts of the Parisian school of semiotics regarding the theory of meaning have been elaborated in Greimas's Structural Semantics. According to Greimas's claim, semiotics (sémiotique) is a hierarchical analytic doctrine of the system of meaning. He divided a meaning whole into deep structure, surface structure and expressive structure, and the study of the establishment and interrelationship of these different levels has been the work and achievement of the Parisian school of semiotics.

The deep structure is the "morphological" structure of the meaning whole. Morphology is the inner world composed of "sons", and its "syntax", i.e., its organization, is the basic structure of the meaning activity. The success of Greimas et al. in the study of the deeper "syntax" lies in the introduction of the concept of the "semiotic matrix". This matrix is considered to be an organized form of meaning structure that is located in the deeper level and has a logico-syntactic character. The establishment of the semiotic matrix makes it possible to describe the semantic aggregation of the analyzed object. It is at this level that semiotics is based on the semantic study of linguistics, but with the addition of socially and culturally connected elements and methods of analysis. The surface structure refers to the patterns of action at the level of semiotics. The mode of action is a pattern of relations between the actors of a narrative text, summarized by Greimas on the basis of the 31 "functions" summarized by the Russian formalist literary theorist Propp for the Russian folktale. It consists of six actors: the sender, the receiver, the subject, the object, the helper, and the adversary, and the various ways in which they are combined constitute the syntax of the "narrative". In this context, the introduction of the actors' modes of action is also very important. Greimas first classifies the modes of action as wanting, being able, and knowing, and then determines the "modes of actuality" according to the principle of the semiotic matrix, thus establishing the narrative schema. In this way, the semiotic theory of the Parisian school of semiotics can be applied not only to literary narratives, but also to multiple categories of meaning as a whole. It is at this level that semiotics embraces communication and takes on a broader scope of study. For the Parisian school of semiotics, the plane of representation, i.e., the linguistic-symbolic layer, consisting of the energetic meanings, was not the subject of their research, but rather the phonological and grammatical study of linguistics outside of the semantic study. As it was said above, the study of sémiologie is limited to the characterization of the energetic signifier, so that it is precisely on the expressive plane that it relies on the linguistic-symbolic schema.

In fact, sémiologie researchers, starting with Roland Barthes, have also realized that "any sémiologie system is mixed with speech activity". They have gone on to consider sémiologie as the science of the meaning units of discourse. Therefore, in recent years, the study of sémiologie has also seen a certain change towards sémiotique, so that the connotations of the two terms have begun to come closer together.

French semiotics has formed a basic theoretical framework from its beginnings to the present day, contributing to the "self-reliance" of semiotics and becoming a world leader in this field of research. Therefore, it is necessary to have a deeper understanding of it.

China's semiotics research, in general, has been in the stage of "introduction" for a long time. Of course, some of the related theories of semiotics have begun to be applied in certain fields in China, and linguistics, logic, translation theory and literary studies have all drawn on semiotics to varying degrees. The publication of this series will undoubtedly contribute to our research and application. The bibliographies in the series are influential writings from different periods of French semiotic research, including the results of research conducted under the names of sémiologie and sémiotique (the latter being the majority), and are mainly by Grémas, Kristeva, and Todorov, and Mr. Zve tan TODOROV has agreed to be the honorary editor-in-chief, adding to the importance of this collection. Mr. Zve tan TODOROV himself has agreed to be the honorary editor of the series, and this adds to the authority of the series. [1]