Summary of an article “Foundations the Theory of Signs”
In "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," Charles W. Morris explains the concept of semiotic and
semiosis. Author states that “the process in which something functions as a sign may be called
semiosis”. And this process can commonly be regarded as three factors: that which acts as a sign,
that which the sign refers to, and that effect on some interpreter in virtue of which the thing in
question is a sign to that interpreter. In simple words they may be called, respectively, the sign
vehicle, the designatum, and the interpretant.
A good example that explains this concept as author states in his work: “A dog responds by the
type of behavior (Interpretant) involved in the hunting of chipmunks (Designatum) to a certain
sound (Sign vehicle). All of these parts are relational properties which things take on by
participating in the functional process of semiosis.
While semiotic is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of object, but with ordinary
objects as they participate in semiosis. Semiotic as a science makes use of special signs to state
facts about signs. To simply put it it’s a language to talk about signs. It has three branches of
syntactics, semantics and pragmatics, dealing with the syntactical, the semantical and the
pragmatical dimensions of semiosis. Syntactics implicates an object, semantics designates and
denotes, while pragmatics expresses it.
While talking about semiotics and semiosis author states that language here takes an important role:
“a language, then, as a system of interconnected signs has a syntactical structure of such a sort that
among its permissible sign combinations some can function as statements, and sign vehicles of
such a sort that they can be common to a number of interpreters”. It should be noted that
characterization of language is considered to be semiotical, because it involves all three
dimensions: syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. Therefore, these three branches mean language
when combined altogether.
Languages may be of various degrees of richness in the complexity of their structure, the range of
things they designate and the purposes for which they are supposed to be. For example, languages
like English, French, German, etc., are considered to be the richest languages and have been called
universal languages, since everything can be represented in them.
To conclude my summary, I would like to say, that author stresses the men’s place in semiotics
much in his article. He thinks that men “are the dominant sign-using animals”. He studies signs and
science as an interconnected subject. And made a research about semiotics and semiosis.