Theory and Methodology of Semiotics

The Tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure

Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos, Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110616309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The book is an in-depth presentation of the European branch of semiotic theory, originating in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. It has four parts: a historical introduction, the analysis of langue, narrative theory and communication theory.

Part I briefly presents all the semiotic schools and their main points of reference. Although this material is accessible in many other Anglophone publications, the presentation is marked by specific choices aiming to display similarities and differences.

The analysis of langue in Part II is also available in Anglophone bibliography, but the book presents Saussurean theory according to a new theoretical rationale and enriched with later developments. In addition, it is orientated so as to offer the foundation for the part that follows.

Part III is a presentation of Greimasian narrative theory, well documented in Francophone bibliography but poorly represented in Anglophone publications. The presentation extends the theory in both a qualitative and a new quantitative direction, and includes a great number of examples and two extended textual analyses to help the reader understand and apply it.

Part IV, communication theory, combines an extension of Greimasian sociosemiotics with other schools of thought. This original theoretical section discusses fourteen consecutive communication models, the synthesis of which results in a holistic, social semiotic theory of communication.

Part I: The field of semiotics

Chapter 1 Introduction: What is semiotics?

Semiotics studies the processes of semiosis. This means that it studies meaning, and the specific perspective that defines and constitutes its domain is meaning – sens in French – but more strictly, in both languages, signification. All cultural systems – language, literature, art, cinema, music, architecture, dress, etc. – are vehicles of signification. But such phenomena are virtually omnipresent. Is it possible to bring all these separate phenomena under one and the same umbrella? And what is the relation of semiotics to sociology, social or cultural anthropology, philosophy or psychology?

All semiotic systems have a material vehicle, though this vehicle may be more or less obvious. Oral speech seems to be immaterial, but linguists know that its sounds are carried by sound waves. Literature seems to consist only of meaning, but it too needs a material vehicle, whether in the form of paper and ink or marks on a computer screen (or even traces carved in stone). Painting needs a canvas and colours. In all these cases, the material seems insignificant in comparison to the meaning, though it is always present. But in other cases, the material vehicle overshadows the meaning. An automobile, for example, is constructed with metal and a building with concrete and bricks or steel and glass, and these objects as such are not made by meaning, but they can still be vehicles of meaning.

The difference between the semiotic and the non-semiotic or extra-semiotic aspects of cultural objects and phenomena is clarified by Umberto Eco. He writes that it is possible to study all social phenomena “sub specie communicationis”, that is, from the viewpoint of semiotics, which is why he considers semiotics as a “general theory of culture” (Eco [1968] 1972: 28, 1976: 26–27). However, he adds that social phenomena cannot be reduced only to their semiotic aspect, and that studying them from the semiotic perspective does not imply the reduction of material life to the life of the mind (which would be philosophical idealism).

Consider, for example, the clothes that we wear. If you ask a tailor, he can give you an exact description of how to make a suit. The description presupposes an empirical descriptive geometry, most notably in respect to the tantalising area of the shoulder. A salesperson in a men’s clothing store probably cannot tell you how to make a suit, but they will be able to inform you about the texture, the quality and the properties of the cloth, for example if it is wool or cotton, or if it is impermeable. The cloth has physical properties (texture, impermeability, endurance, thermal capability) and chemical properties (organic or chemical origin), and the suit itself has a price. All these are not objects for semiotics, no more than the construction of a car or a building. But clothes and cars and buildings are also vehicles of meaning and, from this point of view, they are objects for semiotics.

Clothes become an object for semiotics from the moment we approach them not as a material substance, but as a vehicle of meaning. This is not a revelation, given that we all have experience of the meaning of dress. For example, we dress more formally when going to the office and more casually on the weekends. We dress in sportswear in order to project an “athletic” style and maybe feel a bit like real athletes. For a night out we “dress up”, conveying to ourselves and others that this is a special occasion. If we showed up at a formal reception wearing combat boots, it would mean either that we are ignorant of the “appropriate” dress for receptions or that we are being deliberately provocative, and the other guests would probably either feel insulted or dismiss us as ignorant and impolite. Traditional folk costume is a product of history and culture; each part of it had a meaning and marked the identity of the people who made it, and who in wearing it experienced this identity.

The semiotics of dress, and other empirical everyday semiotics (such as the semiotics of “good manners”), are inextricable parts of our culture, of ourselves and the image we want to present to others – and, of course, to ourselves. Literature and the visual arts take it for granted that we know how to interpret the meaning of dress. Below is a passage from a popular novel (Child [1999] 2011: 44–45), in which Chester Stone III, a businessman facing bankruptcy, is preparing for a humiliating visit to the office of Victor Truman “Hook” Hobie at nine o’clock in the morning to ask for a loan of 1.1 million dollars:

He shaved and spent his shower time thinking about what to wear and how to act. Truth was he would be approaching this guy practically on his knees. … Not on his knees. …

A white shirt, for sure, and a quiet tie. But which suit? The Italians were maybe too flashy. Not the Armani. He had to look like a serious man. Rich enough to buy a dozen Armanis, for sure, but somehow too serious to consider doing that. Too serious and too preoccupied with weighty affairs to spend time shopping on Madison Avenue. He decided heritage was the feature to promote. An unbroken three-generation heritage of business success, maybe reflected in a dynastic approach to dressing. Like his grandfather had taken his father to his tailor and introduced him, then his father had taken him in turn. Then he thought about his Brooks Brothers suit. Old, but nice, a quiet check, vented, slightly warm for June. Would Brooks Brothers be a clever double bluff? Like saying, I’m so rich and successful it really doesn’t matter to me what I wear? Or would he look like a loser?

He pulled it off the rack and held it against his body. Classic, but dowdy. He looked like a loser. He put it back. Tried the gray Savile Row from London. Perfect. It made him look like a gentleman of substance. Wise, tasteful, infinitely trustworthy. He selected a tie with just a hint of pattern and a pair of solid black shoes. Put it all on and twisted left and right in front of the mirror. Couldn’t be better. Looking like that, he might almost trust himself.

Lee Child‘s hero is here engaging in some intensive empirical semiotics. He knows that what he wears conveys meaning, and he is very concerned that it should be exactly the right meaning, the image of himself that he wants to project for this important meeting. Clearly there is, in our culture, an approach to dress for which dress has meaning, and when considered from this point of view dress becomes an object of semiotics, whether everyday empirical semiotics or theoretical study.

Child‘s hero is concerned not simply with his suit as a signifying object, but specifically with what it will communicate to the person he is meeting. As Eco explains, any act of communication presupposes the existence of a system of signification, and thus the semiotics of communication and the semiotics of signification are indissolubly connected in the framework of cultural processes (Eco 1972: 25–30 and 1976: 6–9, 26–27, 158).

We can now define more clearly what semiotics is. Our culture (any culture) is made up of a multitude of systems of signification and communication, which we use in a practical way as part of our cultural competence, the knowledge that we have as members of this culture. These are our empirical semiotic systems. The theoretical domain of semiotics studies the various empirical semiotics of a culture. Every meaningful whole to be analysed, every empirical semiotics, is an object-semiotics. We analyse this whole using general semiotic theory (Greimas and Courtés 1979: Sémiotique), which studies the structure of signification systems and their function and use in communication. Theoretical semiotics is in a position to advance much further in its understanding than empirical semiotics, because it has the tools and the ability to analyse its object in depth in ways that go beyond what everyday experience is able to do. Semiotics is an instrument of revelation, and for this reason it can be a powerful political tool for the study of ideology.

There is a general belief, repeated by our students during all our decades of teaching, that semiotics is difficult. In fact, as attractive as it has proved to be, it also inspires a kind of awe.

The understanding of semiotics does not demand more of Hercule Poirot’s “little gray cells” than the understanding of any other specific scientific field. It is true that a certain amount of intellectual effort is required to familiarise oneself with it beyond the elementary level. It is an autonomous area of knowledge, which as all scientific fields has a systematic theory, and its concepts constitute a strongly coherent system: they are strictly defined (though there may be divergences in their definition), they explicitly fall under superior concepts and are also explicitly subdivided into more analytical concepts, and elements of the same level are connected with explicit relationships.

The present book is not intended as a general introduction or overview, and we do not have the ambition to cover the whole field. There are many introductions to semiotics available on the market, and several very helpful standard reference works that aim to cover the whole domain, such as Thomas A. Sebeok‘s ([1986] 1994) two-volume dictionary, the Handbook of semiotics edited by Roland Posner, Klaus Robering and Thomas A. Sebeok (1998) or the four-volume anthology of texts edited by Mark Gottdiener and ourselves (2003). There is also a large bibliography of specialised literature in English. A part of this bibliography deals with the general presentation of semiotic theory, sometimes with philosophical extensions. Another part is oriented towards the presentation of one or both of the main trends of semiotics, Saussurean and Peircean, with an orientation to theory rather than methodology. A third part discusses different semiotic systems and sub-fields or specific cultural codes. Finally, we also find works treating the relation of semiotics with adjacent fields, such as psychoanalysis.

Our own book, as is clear from its title, focuses specifically on the Saussurean tradition, and includes only some introductory references to other semiotic tendencies (chapter 2). It does not even cover every possible aspect of the Saussurean tradition, but focuses on systematic theory and methodology and techniques for textual analysis. Our aim is operational: to show the reader how we can apply semiotics in concrete analysis. We present examples from different semiotic systems in order to illustrate various ways the theory can be applied. The discussion of the semiotics of langue framework emphasises the radical conception of the system implicit in Ferdinand de Saussure. We also extend the theory of isotopies by bringing quantitative analysis into the qualitative paradigm commonly used in semiotics and showing how to articulate quantity with quality. The chapter on the semiotics of communication presents fourteen models of communication, starting from the simplest one described by Saussure and leading up to a discussion of both sociosemiotics and what we call social semiotics, the articulation of semiotics with social structure.

We referred above to Eco‘s view that semiotics is a theory of culture. This view is much older than Eco and is central to several semiotic trends. Semiotics is not the only theory of culture, but we believe that it is the most elaborated and sophisticated among cultural theories. Semiotics is far from a unified field and is crossed by a variety of trends, many comparable, some essentially incompatible. Even poststructuralism, and hence postmodernism, are clearly semiotic trends, but they do not present any interest for the present book, since they reject as a matter of principle that which is our main aim, the use of precise instruments for textual analysis. The main scientific approach we chose for narrative theory, the School of Paris, has separated into different directions and we shall refer to some of these developments, but they are still tentative and have not yet crystallised into a definitive theory accepted more widely. For this reason, we have elected to remain with the standard theory.

Semiotics is not fashionable nowadays, partially because of its astonishing success. Its logic has been diffused in all the social and cultural sciences and its concepts absorbed by them each in its own way, which in a sense has rendered semiotics invisible as an autonomous theory. Still, it surfaces systematically in all books on cultural studies. What is lost from these traces is its great power for the operational analysis of texts, a power that we shall try to bring back. We believe that anyone who is interested in cultural phenomena, not only the semiotician but the literary scholar, the linguist, the anthropologist, the sociologist, the archaeologist, the artist, will find in the following pages a valuable instrument for studying them. While it is addressed to a wide public of students, scholars, specialists and other interested persons, the book is not designed for casual reading. Our hope is that it will be an initiation into a world which, for us, remains magical.

Chapter 2 A brief history of semiotics

1 The beginnings of modern semiotics

It is a ritual in textbooks and introductory courses in semiotics to refer to two founders of the discipline, the francophone Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and the North American philosopher (trained as a chemist) Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), since they were contemporaries and both developed theories of the sign. However, this habit disguises fundamental differences between them. Saussure was a linguist and was interested in the study of natural language and, by extension, of cultural systems; hence, his concept of the sign refers exclusively to these systems. Peirce worked in the philosophy of knowledge and his “sign” is of a very general nature, appertaining to a theory of logic. The two approaches also had very different historical developments.

Saussure is generally acknowledged as the father of modern linguistics. His work became known through the book Cours de linguistique générale (published in English as Course in general linguistics), edited by two of his students on the basis of his lectures during the 1907–1911 period and first published in 1916. It is here that he introduced the idea of a “science which studies the life of signs as part of social life” and which he called “semiology” (1971: 33). His theory spread rapidly throughout Europe and had a very significant impact, not only on linguistics but also on the social sciences and the humanities. This material was completed much later, in the 1990s, when his lectures were published in three volumes, once more on the basis of the notes of his students. At the same time, a hitherto unknown manuscript by Saussure for a manual on general linguistics was discovered in the orangery of the Saussure family estate in Geneva; this unfinished manuscript was published in 2002 under the title Écrits de linguistique générale and offers an important complement to his linguistic theory.

In the case of Peirce, the publication of the Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce in 1931 was a landmark in making his views on what he calls “semiotic” more widely known. In 1938, the philosopher Charles W. Morris elaborated on Peirce‘s ideas with his Foundations of the theory of signs (included in Morris 1971: 17–71)...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part I: The field of semiotics
• Part II: The semiotics of langue
• Part III: The semiotics of parole (textual semiotics)
• Part IV: The semiotics of communication
• Index