COP LECTURE 13

Semiotics 

Understanding the importance of meaning in the study of art, design and culture. Semiotics can make you a better communicator.
1917 Ferdinand De Saussure looked at how language operates which lead him to develop semiotics and the science of studying signs.

Structuralism 
the thought that everything had an underlying sense of order and rules.

Sign
Semiotics is the study/ investigation of signs. A sign = a letter, an utterance, a colour, anything that communicates something. To understand meaning we need to understand how signs work together. A sign has two sides, the signifier and the signified. Signifier an utterance Signified the experience. The signifier signifies something, the relationship between them is arbitrary.

1957 Barthes stated that signs signify on two different levels, the Denotation (literal meaning) and the connotation (cultural associations).

Saussure said that signs work in systems/codes. As designers we answer a brief in a certain way because we think about the audience. Semiotics is about understanding codes of meaning.
Codes are found in all forms of cultural practice. In order to make sense of cultural artefacts we need to learn and understand their codes. We need to acknowledge that codes rely on a shared knowledge/ understanding.

Paradigms & Syntagms 
Signs are organised into codes in two ways:
Paradigm = (CHOICES) a set of signs from which one is to be chosen
Syntagms = (STRUCTURE) the message into which the chosen signs are to be combined.

A classic Paradigm is the alphabet, every time we want to communicate we choose letters from this and arrange them syntadgmatically.

Other types of paradigms:
> the different ways of changing shot in film
> the typefaces available
> Headgear - trilby, cap, beret
> The type of car we drive
> The colour of our front door
> The swear words we choose to use
Where there is choice there is a paradigm

Once a unit has been chosen from a PARADIGM its is combined with other units. This combination is called SYNTAGM.
> A sentence is a syntagm of words
> Our clothes are a syntagm of paradigmatic choices of hates, gloves etc.
> Interior decor is a syntagm of choices from the paradigm of chairs, wallpaper and carpets etc

Syntagmatic analysis seeks to establish the surface structure of a text and the relationship between its parts.
The study of syntagmatic relations reveals the rules underlying the production and interpretation of texts.

Paradigmatic analysis = a structural technique which seeks to identify the various paradigm which underlie the surface structure of text.
If the paradigmatic choices were different what would have been said?