semiotics is a discipline for studying everything which can be used in order to lie
Umberto Eco

Title: Semiotics: Language and Culture
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/semiotics_este.html

Modern Semiotics
There are two major traditions in modern semiotic theory.
One branch is grounded in a European tradition and was led by the Swiss-French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913).
The other branch emerged out of American pragmatic philosophy by its primary founder, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).

Saussure sought to explain how all elements of a language are taken as components of a larger system of language in use. This led to a formal discipline which he called semiology.
Peirce's interest in logical reasoning led him to investigate different categories of signs and the manner by which we extract meaning from them.
Independently, Saussure and Peirce worked to better understand the triadic relationship between physical signs, the objects to which they refer, and the human interpreter.

Saussure laid the foundation for the structuralist school in linguistics and social theory.
A structuralist looks at the units of a system and the rules of logic that are applied to the system, without regard to any specific content.
The units of human language are comprised of a limited set of sounds called phonemes, and these comprise an unlimited set of words and sentences, which are put together according to a set of simple rules called grammar. From simple units we derive more complex units that are applied to new rules to form more complex structures (themes, characters, stories, genres, style, etc.). The human mind organizes this structure into cognitive understanding.

The smallest unit of analysis in Saussure's semiology is the sign made up of a signifier or sensory pattern, and a signified, the concept that is elicited in the mind by the signifier.
Saussure emphasized that the signifier does not constitute a sign until it is interpreted.
Like Plato, Saussure recognized the arbitrary association between a word and what it stands for.
Word selection becomes a matter, not of identity, but of difference. Differences carry signification. A sign is what all other signs are not (Saussure, 1916/1959: 118).

Charles Sanders Peirce shared the Saussurian observation that most signs are symbolic and arbitrary, but he called attention to iconic signs that physically resemble their referent and indexical signs that possess a logical connection to their referent

Barthes's role as France's supreme social critic has fallen to a contemporary French writer, Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929). The cultural theorist argues that postmodern culture with its rich, exotic media is a world of signs that have made a fundamental break from reality. Our contemporary mass culture experiences a world of simulation having lost the capacity to comprehend an unmediated world. Baudrillard coined the term simulacra to describe a system of objects in a consumer society distinguished by the existence of multiple copies with no original. We experience manufactured realities: carefully edited war footage, meaningless acts of terrorism, and the destruction of cultural values (Baudrillard, 1988:166).

In an age of corporate consolidation where popular culture is influenced by an elite few with very powerful voices, semiotic analysis is deemed essential for information consumers. Semiotics informs us about a text, its underlying assumptions and its various dimensions of interpretation. Semiotics offers us a lens into human communication. It sharpens the consumer's own consciousness surrounding a given text. It informs us about the cultural structures and human motivations that underlie perceptual representations. It rejects the possibility that we can represent the world in a neutral fashion. It unmasks the deep-seated rhetorical forms and underlying codes that fundamentally shape our realities. Semiotic analysis is a critical skill for media literacy in a postmodern world.

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