What is a sign?1. a token; indication.2. any object, action, event, pattern, etc., that conveys a meaning.3. a conventional or arbitrary mark, figure, or symbol used as an abbreviation for the word or words it represents.4. a motion or gesture used to express or convey an idea, command, decision, etc.: Her nod was a sign that it was time to leave. 5. a notice, bearing a name, direction, warning, or advertisement, that is displayed or posted for public view: a traffic sign; a store sign.

What are different types of common signs?

Road Signs

Sign Language (formal and informal)

Think

Make

Signs and symptoms

Baseball and Football

Advertising

What do all of these have in common?

They all are ways of communicating.

What does this sign mean? Think: Small packages = big meaning.

Everything is a signand signs reflect meaning.

Human beings love meaning.

Describe this guy – what is his meaning?

If he was here, what would this room become?

Who is this guy? Use the signs. What would he be in this room?

Semiotics• The theory and study of signs and symbols.• The study of human communication as it

pertains to signs and symbols.• “Semiotics can be defined as the study of

‘anything that is interesting.’”• The crux of semiotic analysis is, in effect, to

unravel what something means, or more accurately, represents.

• Semioticians try to decipher the meanings of even seemingly trivial things.

• Umberto Eco defined semiotics as “the discipline studying everything that can be used in order to lie, because 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.

• We use signs and symbols to tell.• Semiotics analysis include the study of ,

among other things, the study of how animals communicate, of body language, of the arts, of metaphor, of myths, of media messages – in sum, anything that makes life interesting.

C.S. Peirce stated: a sign “is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.”

TREE

T-R-E-E

A woody perennial plant having a single usually elongate main stem generally with few or no

branches on its lower part.

Umberto Eco states: “Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands for it.”

Ferdinand de Saussure

A sign is made up of a:

The signifier and the signified are INSEPARATABLE.

Types of Signs

• Symptom• Signal• Index• Icon• Symbol• Name

Symptom

• Bodily signs that are indicative of physical states or conditions.

• These are filtered culturally.• Obviously, Doctors use this to diagnose.

Signal

• A type of sign that is used to generate a response.

• A bodily emission (odor, sound) or movement (head tilt, wink).

• Biologically, signals have the primary functions of identifying the sex and species of an animal’s potential mate.

• Instinctual.

Signals

Def: Anything that serves to indicate, warn, direct, command or the like.

Index

• A sign that indicates an object, that points the eye of the observer.

• Includes not only objects, but also words like: here, there, up, down.

• Indexes indicate location and movement.

Icon

• A sign that simulates, replicates, reproduces, imitates, or resembles properties of its referrent.

Symbols

Symbolization arises from the need to give perceptible form to the imperceptible.

National

Prince Charles Canada

Conceptual