Week Four: Semiotics

The shortest, simplest definition of semiotics is the study of signs. It does not, however, cover only the conventional meanings of the word, what one would normally think of upon hearing or reading "sign": road signs, neon signs that advertise businesses, restaurants, and places of entertainment, the signs of everyday life. Semiotics also studies the signs represented by and through drawings, paintings, photographs, words, sounds, and body language, even flavors, acts and objects, all of which vary in meaning between countries and cultures. Semiotics, closely related to and at times considered to be a subgroup of the field of linguistics, can be further broken down into three branches: semantics (the relationship between signs and the people, objects or ideas which the signs refer to), syntactics (the relationship between signs in formal structures, such as language or mathematics), and pragmatics (the relationship between signs and the effects that they have on the people who use them). Obviously, semiotics covers a lot of ground, including ground shared between it and linguistics, mathematics, cultural diversities, and countless other fields of study.

Articles:

• Masks and the Semiotics of Identity
  Donald Pollock
  The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
  Vol. 1, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 581-597
  Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
  Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3034576
  
  This article discusses the relationships between one's identity and masks (literal masks, not figurative ones), the meanings associated with masks, and how, not why, people tend to see masks in certain ways. It provides cultural examples of how specific masks relate to a person's overall identity, and how the meanings of masks broaden through the connections that people associate masks with, so that masks transcend traditional and stereotypical definitions of the word.
• Experimental Music Semiotics
  

  Morag Josephine Grant
  International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music
  Vol. 34, No. 2 (Dec., 2003), pp. 173-191

  Published by: Croatian Musicological Society

  Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30032129
• Men, Dogs, Guns, and Cars: The Semiotics of Rugged Individualism
  

  Elizabeth C. Hirschman
  Journal of Advertising
  Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 2003), pp. 9-22

  Published by: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.

  Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4622146

Additional Information:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
  
  The Wikipedia article dedicated to semiotics.
• http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/
  
  An online version of Daniel Chandler's Semiotics for Beginners.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEgxTKUP_WI
  
  An animated Youtube video about semiotics.

• http://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/semiotics_and_ads/terminology.html
  
  A list of definitions, including that of semiotics as well as the words related to the study of semiotics.

• http://semioticon.com/
  
  An open semiotics resource center that provides definitions, articles, journals, reference tools, connections to semioticians, and much more.