Semiotics

Semiotics - This is known as the study of signs and sign systems - the social production of meaning by sign systems, how things come to have significance and meaning.

Signifier + signified = sign

There are two parts of a sign:

• Signifier: Ant symbol, image, or word that can be seen or read. 
• Signified: The particular meaning or meanings of the signifier in a particular context or situation.

There are three types of a signifier:

• Iconic: These signifiers always resemble what they signify - 'a window on the world'.
• Indexical: These signifiers act as evidence - Smoke means fire, sweat is proof of effort etc. 
• Symbolic: These are the visual signs that are arbitrarily linked to referents. The diamond hats of monarchs, crowns, symbolise monarchy. 

Denotation: signs signify or 'denote' different aspects of our experience of the world. They are the work of that part of the sign (the signifier), which is immediately recognisable to the reader and which has a direct relationship to a real world entity or referent. The colour red for example we know as a colour in the light spectrum, different from blue or pink.

Connotation: These are the meanings interpreted from a sign, which link other values to it. For example: the colour red brings up notions of love, blood, stop signs, danger, hot, roses etc.

Semiotic terms:

• Binary oppositions: sets of opposite values said to reveal the structure of media texts. These define through their opposite and chose a lesser and greater position. E.g: man/women, weak/strong.  
• Conventions: 'un-written rules' in the production of mainstream texts. Conventions are the dominants codings in any media. 
• Anchoring: written text used to control or select a specific reading of an image. 
• Mise-en-scene: literally 'putting together the scene' how we read the actions of the creative personnel in a film crew who visualise. Everything on screen.
• Mode of address: How a text 'speaks' to its audience. How the audience is positioned in relation to text.  
• Polysemic: literally 'many signed' an image in which there are several possible meanings depending on the ways in which its constituent signs are read. 
• Metonemy: literally 'substitute naming' possible meanings depending on the ways in which its constituent signs are read. 
• Index: Measures a quality not because it is identical to it but has an inherent relationship to it. 
• Symbol: an arbitrary sign in which the signifier has neither a direct nor an indexical relationship to the signified, but rather represents it through conventions.  
• Synecdoche: The idea that 'part' of a person, an object, a machine, etc can be used to represent the 'whole', and work as an emotive or suggestive shorthand for the viewer, who invests the 'part' with symbolic associations.
• Icon: A sign in which the signifer represents the signified mainly by its similarity to it, its likeness.