Semiotics+and+Semiotic+Systems

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

Semiotics is the study of how things make meaning. Human beings frequently represent ideas using various sense-related means. For example, we might represent the idea of sadness through talking about it verbally, through writing about it, through creating a piece of music about it, through choreographing a dance about it, through painting a picture about it.

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The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe

Each of these ways of making meaning carries a different set of nuances. For example, if I use language, I can be specific about what is making me sad, but I might have a hard time expressing the depth of my sadness. If I use music, on the other hand, you might not know what is making me sad but in listening you might feel my sadness more completely. I hope I'm not depressing anyone reading this...

Language is actually a unique semiotic system in that it is not an analog to that which it purports to represent. In other words, as Saussure would point out (look at the link at the beginning of this chapter for any theorist I happen to mention), the word "tree" in English is no more connected to that particular plant than the word "arbre" in French or in any other language for that matter. In contrast, an F# written on a page of music refers to a sound and there is a logical connection between the pictorial depiction of music and music itself. The picture of the man and guitar refer to a man and a guitar and there is a logical relationship between a real man with a guitar and this representation. There are obviously cultural influences on analogical representation. For example, perspective in painting was developed in western Europe and it is a set of conventions for representing space in a two-dimensional frame: In contrast, artworks from other eras do not represent three dimensions using the same set of practices:

However, Charles Sanders Peirce divided signs into types and he would call either of these paintings icons because of the relationships between the image and "the real thing."

Why is it important to make such a distinction between analog or iconic representations and linguistic ones (we could call this digital, I guess)? We don't really think about language as we are using it, but it functions a lot like the digitization of music in order to create an mp3 file or a signal that can be picked up by HD tv. If you think about how a digital signal breaks up on tv (into squares) and how analog breaks up (snow), then you realize that digital takes a messy set of information and divides it into discrete numbers that can be broadcast. Reality actually falls between those numbers, the same way "blue" or "bent" notes fall between the discrete notes of the piano keyboard. What this means is that language creates an artificial sense of difference because of how it is constructed. For example, when we label some people as "normal" and some people as "abnormal," we are artificially dividing people into two basic camps. In fact, there are many continua between "normal" and "abnormal," along the lines of psychology, intelligence, social skills, educational attainment, culture, neurology, musical ability, and so forth. Our words, "normal" and "abnormal" "digitize" the concept of insiders and outlyers in a way that implies more difference than what really exists. In contrast, a photograph or other analogous form of representation is less likely to misrepresent the subject in this particular way.

There are many implications of semiotic theory for teachers, particularly anyone wanting to teach reading, writing, speaking, and listening--language use.

First: it is a lot more effective to use multiple semiotic systems to get a point across. Not everyone is proficient in language or the English language in particular and not everyone uses language for thinking, believe it or not: http://www.templegrandin.com/templegrandinart.html Temple Grandin has autism and she discusses in one of her books how her brain works. She thinks in pictures and images instead of in language. She has to translate these pictures into language in order to communicate--but the translation process is an extra step she goes through that logocentric people (those who think in words primarily) do not have to do.

Given the fact that language is as distorting to what it represents as any other form of representation, then we must give students nonlinguistic means for representation.

Secondly: school is a gigantic exercise in moving from one semiotic system to another, which can be enormously frustrating for some people and a piece of cake for others.

=Changing Semiotic Systems= The significance of this occurred to me as I was watching some of my students giving a presentation about books for very young children.

Consider the children's classic, Pat the Bunny: http://www.randomhouse.com/golden/patthebunny/story.html The book consists of pictures that have a small piece of realia, such as sandpaper for daddy's scratchy face and an actual mirror for looking in the mirror. Part of literacy consists of the ability to connect a combination of linear text and two-dimensional pictures to imagined reality. Pat the Bunny and all the other books for very young children (e.g., those that teach nouns, colors, etc.) is a scaffold for this process. Jeff Zacks discusses how the brain experiences things that are read: The process of reading is a process of translating the letters of the alphabet into the virtual reality that Zacks describes.

School asks us to encode our complex ideas and activities into linear text (writing), to translate the music we here into notes on a staff, to create a 2 dimensional map of a three-dimensional world we experience (drawing), to translate experiences with the manipulation of amounts of things into the abstract language of math.

We cannot continue to take this complex process of translation for granted because our technological culture requires that people be proficient in this and yet because this process has been largely invisible to us, we have not paid attention to it, broken it down, or figured out how to teach and scaffold people in doing this.

The purpose of this page has been to introduce people to the concepts of semiotic systems and what it means to move from one semiotic system to another. This set of ideas forms a framework which can inform how we understand what our students are doing, where their struggles are, and the methods by which we can address their educational needs.