Semiology

Semiotics, Semiology (1960)
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Article contributed by

Paul Cobley, London Metropolitan University



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Semiotics is the study of signs and is concerned with interrogating semiosis, the actions of signs. Generally, signs are conceived only as inanimate objects that are used for sending messages. However, semiosis occurs in many different ways and in places where signs are not normally apparent to humans, for example in the transmission of information inside biological cells by DNA and other chemical transmitters. The sign in human semiosis, although frequently treated as an inanimate entity, is strictly the sign for someone. Put another way, signs only exist because an organism, or part of an organism, perceives them as significant. As Morris famously declared, semiosis is a “process in which something is a sign to some organism” (1938: 366). As long as something acts as a sign, then it is a sign. So, among the many different signs that may be produced, a poetic trope should be considered as part of the same broad category of phenomena as message-sending from the human retina to the brain, click-language between dolphins, and every other kind of communication of messages and reading of sensory data, at whatever level and among whatever organisms.

It is worth noting these facts before considering the meaning of the term semiotics, for it is easy to assume that human signs, especially those in literary or artistic production, are somehow unique in their formation and action. This issue also bears directly on the formulation of semiotics as a term relating to sign study and its occasional conflation with semiology. The reason that semiotics tends to be used to refer to all sign study today is twofold: because it is the most accurate term in the circumstances and because it has been institutionalised. Semiotics, as opposed to semiology, is the study of all signs; the term itself is derived from a Greek root, seme, and was taken up by the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce (1831-1913), who sought to classify all types of signs in the universe. Semiotics therefore constitutes the major tradition of sign-study ultimately derived from the ancient semioticians such as the medical physicians Hippocrates of Cos (460-377 BCE) and Galen of Pergamon (129-c.200) who developed a science of symptomatology (Sebeok 2001a). However, in Europe especially, it was the immense success and fashionable ascent of semiology which initially brought the broad notion of sign study to the attention of the public and the academy in the latter half of the twentieth century. Semiology was inspired by the work of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), whose Cours de linguistique générale (1916) predicted the growth of a general science of signs that might be possible if his principles were followed. In the Francophone world, Saussure’s call was later taken up by semiologists such as Roland Barthes (1915-80) and Pierre Guiraud, both o


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Published 10 December 2004

Citation: Cobley, Paul. "Semiotics, Semiology". The Literary Encyclopedia. 10 December 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1001, accessed 24 April 2009.]

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