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Per Aage Brandt
What is Semiotics?
The briefest overview ever seen
Semiotics is the study of signs , their forms of expression and contents. So what is a sign?
Maybe the best defi nition is the one that just states that signs in the non-metaphorical
sense are phenomena produced intentionally by humans and taken by humans to show the
intention of the producer, and its content. Fig. 1:
blablabla…!
gesture
(S)
(bird)
(Aha! I see…!)
S is a complex, linguistic and gestural sign. The speaker-signer shows to the listener-observer
by performing it, namely by his grammatically organized words and his accompanying
movements of fi ngers, hand, arm, trunc, and face (especially his eye movements), that he
wants to direct his addressee’s attention to an item present to his mind. This item – here
apparently including a bird – is then the content of his sign; the contentcontentcontent of the sign is the partof the sign is the part
of what is present to the speaker-signer’s mind that he wants the listener-observer’s mind to
also attend to. That part is expressed by S, which is therefore considered to be its expression.
If S only uses pictures, that is, photographs, drawings, and the like, or gestures
that ’draw’ the contours of things in the air, in order to refer to things, events and their
circumstances, then these pictorial references to the content make S only consist of icons , or
iconicaliconicaliconical subsigns. If S also uses imitations of facial expressions of affective and cognitive statessubsigns. If S also uses imitations of facial expressions of affective and cognitive states
of mind, or imitations of yawning, snoring, coughing, etc. it includes indexicalindexicalindexical subsigns.subsigns.
Such signs, indices , are intentional versions of spontaneous bodily reactions that are not signs
(but that are often called ’signs’ metaphorically: ”fever is a sign of illness”).
Furthermore, S can include gestures of politeness, paramusical sounds like claps,
clicks, small jingle-like songs, whistling, etc. to indicate modes of addressing the other; such
subsigns are metaphorically called coded, and they are probably at the origin of the stable
conventional symbolssymbolssymbols used in calculus and writing (numbers, letters) and the stable naturalused in calculus and writing (numbers, letters) and the stable natural
expressive units in spoken language (phonemes, ’signemes’ in sign language). So they can all
reasonably be considered symbolic.
In the same sense, objects can be signs or just objects. Places in space, slots in time,
the presence or absence of people, and confi gurations of situations or coincidences of
events, can all be signs (intentionally arranged) or just states of affairs (casually and causally
occurring). Writers of human history are semioticians of (mainly) collective signs that occur
through specifi ed time and space. The human world is massively semiotic, there are signs
almost everywhere anytime, and it may be tempting to therefore let semiotics be the science
or study of everything human – but let us introduce a caveat : between the world of signsworld of signsworld of signs andand
the world of thingsworld of thingsworld of things (also called Nature) surrounding the former, there is a(also called Nature) surrounding the former, there is a world of meaning
that signs have sedimented and sign users can presuppose, refer to, retrieve arguments from,
fi nd authority in, but equally be stopped or inhibited by when trying to think out or work
out new concepts, and that people therefore have felt to be a ’second Nature’, namely the
CulturalCulturalCultural realm of reality. Fig. 2:realm of reality. Fig. 2:
the universe
the world of things
the world of meanings
the world of signs
a b
c
The arrows a, b, and c in this diagram indicate different very important processes at work
simultaneously in the real ’world’ we live in:
The aaa arrow. – In the natural world, human individuals spontaneously and individuallyarrow. – In the natural world, human individuals spontaneously and individually
have intentions and cognitive experiences of representing, wondering, imagining, believing,
remembering, fearing and hoping, in short: thinking and feeling, and they (we) continuously
generate sign expressions of these contents, by which they (we) establish mental contact with
other individuals equipped with similar minds (brains and bodies). So communication and
signifi cation spontaneously pop up from Nature.
The bbb arrow. – The use of signs in interhuman contact sediments in the humanarrow. – The use of signs in interhuman contact sediments in the human
