The relation between signifier and signified is not natural, but arbitrary, part of the internal rules of a language. Having an arbitrary relation to things signified, the signs of a culture can be analyzed for how societies construct, produce, and circulate meanings and values. The form that these differences take is governed by ideology . Signification is a process, a product, and a social event, not something closed, static, or completed one and for all. All members of a society are interpreters or decoders.
Signification occurs in the encoding and decoding process.
Ability to decode and understand signification is based on competence with the sign system and with a larger cultural encyclopedia of codes and correspondences. Semiotics contributes to communication studies by providing a method for uncovering and analyzing how a whole system of signification like a movie genre, fashion images, or TV works in a culture. Semiotics, then, looks at culture broadly as a language considered as a sign system, or the ways signs and language map onto culture as a whole. . Key terms Code, communication, sign, signification.