Semiotics Littlejohn, pgs. 5766

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SemioticsLittlejohn, pgs. 57-66 71-75

• Presented by Maureen Duffy ltduffy_at_rpi.edugt

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Overview

• What is Semiotics?
• Semantic Theory
• Syntactic Theory
• Criticisms
• Questions

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What is Semiotics?

• The study of signs
• Consists of three branches
• Semantics
• Syntactics
• Pragmatics (not covered here)

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Syntactic and Pragmatic Codes

• Syntactic
• Low context
• Meaning in the text
• Planned-literate-explicit
• Examples?

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Syntactic and Pragmatic Codes

• Pragmatic Codes
• Highly contextual
• Meaning is assumed
• Unplanned-everyday speech-implicit meaning
• Examples?

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Semantic Theory

• Pierces Triad
• Sign (or symbol)
• Object (or referent)
• Meaning (or interpretant, or thought or
  reference)

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The Stages of Action Signs

• Perception Stage
• Manipulation Stage
• Consummation Stage
• Social Acts Individual Acts

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Discursive Symbolisms

• Concept
• Symbols
• Language

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Discursive Symbolism

• Signification
• Denotation
• Connotation

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Syntactic Theory

• Classical Syntactic Theory de Saussure
• Arbitrariness
• Importance of Differences
• Langue vs. Parole
• Synchrony vs. Diachrony

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Structural Linguistics

• Hierarchy of sentence structure
• Phone
• Phoneme
• Morpheme
• Phrases
• Clauses/sentences

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Generative Grammar

• Noam Chomsky
• Sentence generation central
• Isolate generation rules
• Transformation from deep form to surface form

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Criticisms

• Arbitrariness?
• Visual Images?
• John Stewart
• Simulation
• Low-level!

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Questions?