Topic
academic discipline of signs and their use or interpretation
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Semiotics is the study of signs. It is an interdisciplinary field that examines what signs are, how they form sign systems, and how individuals use signs to produce and communicate meaning. Semiotics is usually divided into syntactics, which addresses how signs are organized and combined; semantics, which addresses the relation between signs and their meanings; and pragmatics, which addresses the relation between signs and their users. Semiotics is related to linguistics but has a broader scope that includes nonlinguistic signs, such as maps and clothing.
“A symbol is always in general and, however precise its translation, an artist can restore to it only its movement: there is no word-for-word rendering. Moreover, nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.”
“Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.”
“Tokens alone do not state what is the subject of discourse; and this can, in fact, not be described in general terms; it can only be indicated. The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description. Hence the need of pronoun and indices, and the more complicated the subject the greater the need of them.”
“I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.”
“The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.”
“Not that I give a fuck about football, or about your superstitions — but if its me reading the signs, I don't send the Eagles guy whose personal motto is Excelsior to a fucking Giants game, especially when he's already in a legal situation.”
Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.
