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Signified and signifier
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Concepts in semiotics
Not to be confused with Referent or Sense and reference.
"Signified" redirects here. For other uses, see Signify.
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A generic diagram from de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics illustrating the relationship between signified (French: signifié) and signifier (signifiant)<br>Semiotics<br>General concepts<br>Sign<br>relation
Code
Confabulation
Connotation / Denotation
Encoding / Decoding
Lexical
Modality
Representation
Salience
Semiosis
Semiosphere
Semiotic theory of Peirce
Umwelt
Value
Significs
Fields<br>Semantics
Pragmatics
Syntactics
Applications<br>Biology
Cognition
Computation
Literary criticism
Culture<br>Dress
Society
Methods<br>Commutation test
Paradigmatic analysis
Syntagmatic analysis
Semioticians<br>Charles S. Peirce
Ferdinand de Saussure
Roland Barthes
Marcel Danesi
John Deely
Umberto Eco
Paolo Fabbri
Gottlob Frege
Algirdas Julien Greimas
Félix Guattari
Stuart Hall
Louis Hjelmslev
Vyacheslav Ivanov
Roman Jakobson
Roberta Kevelson
Kalevi Kull
Juri Lotman
Charles W. Morris
Susan Petrilli
John Poinsot
Augusto Ponzio
Thomas Sebeok
Michael Silverstein
Eero Tarasti
Vladimir Toporov
Jakob von Uexküll
Victoria, Lady Welby
Related topics<br>Copenhagen–Tartu school
Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School
Philosophy of language
Structuralism<br>Post-structuralism
Deconstruction
In semiotics, signified and signifier (French: signifié and signifiant ) are the two main components of a sign, where signified is what the sign represents or refers to, known as the "plane of content", and signifier is the observable aspects of the sign itself, known as the "plane of expression". The idea was first proposed in the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the two founders of semiotics.
Concept of signs<br>[edit]
The concept of signs has been around for a long time, having been studied by many classic philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, William of Ockham, and Francis Bacon, among others.[1] The term semiotics derives from the Greek root seme, as in semeiotikos (an 'interpreter of signs').[2]: 4 It was not until the early part of the 20th century, however, that Saussure and American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce brought the term into more common use.[3]
While both Saussure and Peirce contributed greatly to the concept of signs, each differed in their approach to the study. Saussure who created the terms signifier and signified in order to break down what a sign was. He diverged from the previous studies on language as he focused on the present in relation to the act of communication, rather than the history and development of words and language over time.[3]
Succeeding these founders were numerous philosophers and linguists who defined themselves as semioticians. These semioticians have each brought their own concerns to the study of signs. Umberto Eco (1976), a distinguished Italian semiotician, came to the conclusion that "if signs can be used to tell the truth, they can also be used to lie."[2]: 14 Postmodernist social theorist Jean Baudrillard spoke of hyperreality, referring to a copy becoming more real than reality, the signifier becoming more important than the signified.[4] French semiotician Roland Barthes used signs to explain the concept of connotation—cultural meanings attached to words—and denotation—literal or explicit meanings of words.[2] Without Saussure's breakdown of signs into signified and signifier, however, these semioticians would not have had anything to base their concepts on.
Relation between signifier and signified<br>[edit]
Saussure, in his 1916 Course in General Linguistics, divides the sign into two distinct components: the signifier ('sound-image') and the signified ('concept').[2]: 2 For Saussure, the signified and signifier are purely psychological: they are form rather than substance.[5]: 22
Today, the signifier is often interpreted as the conceptual material form, i.e. something which can be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted; and the signified as the conceptual ideal form.[6]: 14 In other words, "contemporary commentators tend to describe the signifier as the form that the sign takes and the signified as the concept to which it refers."[7] The relationship between the signifier and signified is an arbitrary relationship: "there is no logical connection" between them.[2]: 9 This differs from a symbol, which is...