Role of Semiotics in Linguistics

Semiotics is the study of signs. Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning. ‘Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign,’ declares Peirce (Peirce, 1931). The two dominant models of a sign are the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. This paper attempts to study the role of semiotics in linguistics. How signs play an important role in studying the language? Index: Semioticstheory of signs and symbols Semanticsstudy of sentences Denotataan actual object referred to by a linguistic expression Divergentmove apart in different directions Linguisticsscientific study of language --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Introduction: Semiotics or semiology is the study of sign processes or signification and communication, signs and symbols. It is divided into the three following branches:  Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata  Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures  Pragmatics: Relation between signs and their effects on people who use them Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols. It deals with the rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences. According to Charles Morris “semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designate and the objects which they may or do denote” (Foundations of the theory of science, 1938); and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs. The term, which was spelled semeiotics was first used in English by Henry Stubbes in a very precise sense to denote the branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs. Semiotics is not widely institutionalized as an academic discipline. It is a field of study involving many different theoretical stances and methodological tools. One of the broadest definitions is that of Umberto Eco, who states that ‘semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign’ (A Theory of Semiotics, 1979). Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as ‘signs’ in everyday speech, but of anything which ‘stands for’ something else. In a semiotic sense, signs take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. Whilst for the linguist Saussure, ‘semiology’ was ‘a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life’, (Nature of the linguistics sign, 1916) for the philosopher Charles Pierce ‘semiotic’ was the ‘formal doctrine of signs’ which was closely related to logic. For him, ‘a sign... is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’. He declared that ‘every thought is a sign.’ Literature review: Semiotics is often employed in the analysis of texts, although it is far more than just a mode of textual analysis. Here it should perhaps be noted that a ‘text’ can IJSER International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 6, Issue 1, January-2015 2135