Ferdinand Saussure Calls the Science of Signs Semiology. What Is Meant by This and How Useful Is This Science to English and Media Studies?

Some semioticians see semiology as Arthur Asa Berger phases it “as the queen of the interpretive sciences, the key that unlocks the meanings of all things great and small.” (1998, p 4). Although this could arguably be something of an over statement, in relation to the study of English and media studies it is crucial , for it deals with how we as readers generate meaning from texts. In this essay, I hope to explain how the study of semiotics has evolved, and how and to what effect it can be applied to linguistics.

Semiology, as it is known today, did not truly come be until the 19th Century, with the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce coined the word semiotics to describe his system, which was concerned with three different forms of signs - iconic, indexical, and the symbolic. Where as in his book A Course in General Linguistics, Saussure, identified the relationship between the stimulus or object, which he called the signifer and the concept or our association with this stimulus, calling it the signified. He also recognised that this relationship is arbitrary; it was this realisation that opened the way for development of the science, for:

‘A science that studies the life of signs with society is conceivable; it would be a part of a social psychology and consequently of general psychology… (it) would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them.’ (Saussure 1966, p16)

Meaning that all types of media could be studied as “sign systems”.

Saussure also recognized the fact that concepts or signifieds, have meaning because the relationship between the signifiers is one of binary opposites. For example if you say the word ‘up’ people automatically know you do not mean down. Neither word can exist with out the other, as Berger states:

‘Finding meaning without discerning polar oppositions is like listening to the sound of one hand clapping.’ (1998, p22)

It is this idea of there can be no presence of one thing without the absence of its opposite, that