The Relationship Between Semantics and Semiotics

The Relationship between Semantics and Semiotics

INTRODUCTION

Semantics is the study of meaning. The term is one of a group of English words formed from the various derivatives of the Greek verb s?main? ("to mean" or "to signify"). The noun semantics and the adjective semantic are derived from s?mantikos ("significant"); semiotics (adjective and noun) comes from s?mei?tikos ("pertaining to signs"); semiology from s?ma ("sign") + logos ("account"); and semasiology from s?masia ("signification") + logos. It is difficult to formulate a distinct definition for each of these terms because their use largely overlaps in literature despite individual preferences. Historically, semantics was one of the precursors of modern semiotics. Today it is a branch of both semiotics and linguistics. This paper deals with trends in and directions of semantics, in particular their relationship to general semiotics.

SEMIOTICS AND SEMANTICS

SEMIOTICS

Semiotics is the study of signs and sign-using behaviour. It was defined by one of its founders, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of "the life of signs within society." Although the word was used in this sense in the 17th century by the English philosopher John Locke, the idea of semiotics as an interdisciplinary mode for examining phenomena in different fields emerged only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the independent work of Saussure and of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Peirce's seminal work in the field was anchored in pragmatism and logic. He defined a sign as "something which stands to somebody for something," and one of his major contributions to semiotics was the categorization of signs into three main types: (1) an icon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign for falling rocks); (2) an index, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is a sign of fire); and (3) a symbol, which is related to its referent only by convention (as with words or traffic signals). Peirce also demonstrated that a sign can never have a definite meaning, for the meaning must be continuously qualified.

Saussure treated language as a sign-system, and his work in linguistics has supplied the concepts and methods that semioticians apply to sign-systems other than language. One such basic semiotic concept is Saussure's distinction between the two inseparable components of a sign: the signifier, which in language is a set of speech sounds or marks on a page, and the signified, which is the concept or idea behind the sign. Saussure also distinguished parole, or actual individual utterances, from langue, the underlying system of conventions that makes such utterances understandable; it is this underlying langue that most interests semioticians.

This interest in the structure behind the use of particular signs links semiotics with the methods of structuralism, which seeks to analyze these relations. Saussure's theories are thus also considered fundamental to structuralism (especially structural linguistics) and to poststructuralism.

Modern semioticians have applied Peirce and Saussure's principles to a variety of fields, including aesthetics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, communications, and semantics.

SEMANTICS

The study of meaning, usually in a language is called semantics. Linguists have approached it in a variety of ways. Members of the school of interpretive semantics study the structures of language independent of their conditions of use. In contrast, the advocates of generative semantics insist that the meaning of sentences is a function of their use. Still another group maintains that semantics will not advance until theorists take into account the psychological questions of how people form concepts and how these relate to word meanings.

Linguistic meaning has been a topic of philosophical interest since ancient times. In the first decades of the 20th century, it became one of the central concerns of philosophy in the English-speaking world. This development can be attributed to an interaction of several trends in various disciplines. From the middle of the 19th century onward, logic, the formal study of reasoning, underwent a period of growth unparalleled since the time of Aristotle (384–322 bce). Although the main motivation for the renewed interest in logic was a search for the epistemological foundations of mathematics, the chief protagonists of this effort—notably the German mathematician Gottlob Frege and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell—extended their inquiry into the domain of the natural languages, which are the original media of human reasoning. The influence