Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. We can explore how systems of signs work to make meaning, through the use of words and images and how we communicate both visually and verbally. Semiotics is about understanding the relationship between messages and meanings.

Semiotics is fundamental to an understanding of how words and images are used to make sense of the world along with be manipulated to the benefit of the message. Also how visual communications work and how design choices affects/transform the message being communicated. Good ideas or aesthetics may fall down in the absence of effective communication of the idea through the aesthetic. This is where semiotics comes in, understanding this can ensure we're communicating messages effectively.

Signs can be represented as spoken/written language, images, pictures, objects, gestures, codes, symbols and sounds. All which can have an emotional impact, or mean different things to different people depending on individual experiences, cultural differences, expectations and context.

Grammar Stage: Above the waterline: Making real observations, questioning 'Who? What? Where? When?

Logic: Below the waterline: Evaluating and analyzing the message, questioning 'What is the text saying to me?'

Rhetoric: Below the waterline: Formulating an interpretive position; generating claims; drawing conclusions, questioning 'What do I say about the text?'

Semiotics analysis asks how we make sense of the world through words, images, experience and interpretation. Your brain is wired to make sense of an image in milliseconds, compare that with the rate of at which people talk, or your reading speed. Semiotics started out as an academic investigation of the meaning of words (linguistics), then about examining people's behaviour, which then evolved to become an enquiry into culture and society. Recently, semiotics became a methodology for reaseching and analysing consumer behaviour and brand communications. 

Colours can express certain coded information that makes the viewer understand a specific message, or feel a certain emotion. The commercial world takes full advantage of our ability to associate colours with certain meanings.

"Reality is divided up into arbitrary categories by every language...The conceptual world with which each of us is familiar could have been divided up very differently. Indeed, no two languages categorise reality in the same way.’"- Daniel Chandler

Ferdinand de Saussure - Semiology 

Phonemes are the distinct units of sound in a specific language that distinguishes one word from another. For example, c-a-t, the word 'cat' is the signifier, the object is the cat which is signified. The two together is a sign. Phonemes (sounds) are signifiers which form words, which are then turned into signifiers (words). Signifier are the forms of a sign, the from could be a sound, word, photograph, facial expression, painting, etc. Signified is the concept or object that's represented.

Saussure noted that linguistic signs are inherently arbitrary. Words are different across different languages, which underlines that fact that neither sound nor written form bears any resemblance to the object, regarding that meaning is purely subjective. Arbitrariness is the quality of being determined by chance or impulse and not by reason or principle. 

Charles Sanders Peirce defined three categories of signs:

Symbol- No resemblance between the signifier and the signified. The connection between them are culturally learned, such as numbers and alphabets. There's nothing inherent in numbers to indicate what it represents. 

Icon- Has a physical resemblance to the sign (photograph, onomatopoeic words), likeness (signified) 

Index- Direct link between the sign and object, a good example is using an image of smoke to indicate fire.

Codes and conventions.

Codes are systems of signs, which create meaning. These codes can be divided into categories – technical,verbal and symbolic. Technical codes are which equipment is used to tell the story in a media text, such as camera angles and framing. Verbal are the spoken and written language. Symbolic codes represent what is beneath the surface of what we see, such as facial expressions to show have a character is feeling. Conventions are the generally accepted ways of doing something.

Moving signifiers 

"Animated television narratives function as indexical signs; however, their representations are extensively mediated and fully conventionalised. A sign system, like a cartoon, cannot function without some direction toward the appearance of being real. The Simpsons, being a narrative cartoon, functions with the conflict between our recognition of the signifiers as being unrealistic and extensively mediated". (Mark Irwin 2001, 259)

Once you understand semiotics, you can play with how words and images communicate, subvert conventions and question how it works. Semiotics plays a key role in humour and enable us to explain why and how clever used of text and image work.

Non arbitrary signifiers- 

Onomatopeia - words which sound like the thing to which they refer.

Visual onomatopoeia- 

Anchorage and Relay (Roland Barthes) 

There are two kinds of relationships between text. and image: anchorage and relay. Anchorage is text which anchors or constrains how the signifier is/image is read. The reader is directed through a floating chain of signifiers, hinting through visual clues. Where the image is complex, it helps underline a relationship between text and image, for example adverts and narrated documentaries on TV. The image below is a Heinz Ketchup advert, which shows a plate of cardboard food, without the text and the product below it, the viewer would question the meaning behind this piece. The anchorage below suggests that food is tasteless or dry without Heinz Ketchup.

Relay is where the words and images tell a story equally, they stand in a complementary relationship. This is where the text supplies meanings and not found in the images alone. Comic books are an example of relay, as each image is portrayed by the action presented, with the help of words, they further illustrate the action of the scene for the reader.