Basics of Semiotics
Ole Togeby
Scandinavian Institute
Aarhus University
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Semiotics
 also called Semiology, the study of signs and sign-using
behaviour. It was defined by one of its founders, the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of “the life of
signs within society.” Although the word was used in this
sense in the 17th century by the English philosopher John
Locke, the idea of semiotics as an interdisciplinary mode for
examining phenomena in different fields emerged only in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries with the independent work
of Saussure and of the American philosopher Charles Sanders
Peirce.
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I. Sign definitions
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Structuralist concept of sign
Expression form
Expression
substance
Content
Substance
Content form
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Peirce’s definition of a sign
 "A sign is something which stands to somebody for
something in some respect or capacity. It addresses
somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person
an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign.
That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the
first sign. The sign stands for something, its object.
 [A sign] stands for [its] object, not in all respects, but
in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes
called the ground of the [sign].
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Peirce on signs
 A Sign is a Cognizable that, on the one hand, is so
determined (i.e., specialized, bestimmt) by something
other than itself, called its Object [...], while, on the
other hand, it so determines some actual or potential
Mind, the determination whereof I term the
Interpretant created by the Sign, that that Interpreting
Mind is therein determined mediately by the Object."
(A Letter to William James, EP 2:492, 1909)
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Objects determine their signs
 Just as Peirce thought signs could be classified
according to whether their sign-vehicles function in
virtue of qualities, existential facts, or conventions
and laws, he thought signs were similarly classifiable
according to how their object functioned in
signification. Recall that, for Peirce, objects
"determine" their signs. That is to say, the nature of
the object constrains the nature of the sign in terms of
what successful signification requires.
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Icon, index and symbol
 Peirce's categorization of signs into three main types:
 (1) an icon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign
for falling rocks);
 (2) an index, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is
a sign of fire); and
 (3) a symbol, which is related to its referent only by
convention (as with words or traffic signals).
 Peirce also demonstrated that a sign can never have a definite
meaning, for the meaning must be continuously qualified.
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Qualitative, physical and conventional







Again, Peirce thought the nature of these constraints fell into three broad classes:
qualitative,
existential or physical,
conventional and law-like.
If the constraints of successful signification require that the sign reflect qualitative
features of the object, then the sign is an icon.
If the constraints of successful signification require that the sign utilize some
existential or physical connection between it and its object, then the sign is an
index.
If successful signification of the object requires that the sign utilize some
convention, habit, or social rule or law that connects it with its object, then the sign
is a symbol.
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Representamen, interpretant, object, ground




"A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something
in some respect or capacity.
It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign,
or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant
of the first sign.
The sign stands for something, its object.
It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I
have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. "Idea" is here to be
understood in a sort of Platonic sense, very familiar in everyday talk; I mean in that
sense in which we say that one man catches another man's idea, in which we say
that when a man recalls what he was thinking of at some previous time, he recalls
the same idea, and in which when a man continues to think anything, say for a tenth
of a second, in so far as the thought continues to agree with itself during that time,
that is to have a like content, it is the same idea, and is not at each instant of the
interval a new idea. (A Fragment, CP 2.228, c. 1897)
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A model of Peirce’s sign
indirect determination
equivalent with
Determines
stands for
in that respect
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Traffic light

Lad os tage et bedragerisk let eksempel: trafiklyset viser rødt: Det røde lys er repræsentamen, objektet det
henviser til, er muligheden for at der kommer biler på tværs, interpretanten er det nye tegn der danner sig i
mig, bilisten, og som lyder: “Jeg må hellere bremse” - og tegnets grund er det forhold, at der henvises til de
andre biler alene i den egenskab at de kunne køre på tværs nu og her, ikke til deres mærke, farve, ejere,
stand osv.,der kunne være genstand for et andet tegn (Peirce 1994, 17).
 The traffic light shows red.: The red light is representamen, the
object that it refers to, is the possibillity of crossing cars, the
interpretant is the new sign which is formed in me, the car
driver, and which says: ”I have to stop” – and the ground of
the sign is the fact that the other cars are only referred to with
respect to their crossing my lane right now, not to their colour,
owners or condition etc.
 Peirce, Ch.S. 1994: Semiotik og pragmatisme, på dansk ved Lars Andersen, udg. af Anne
Marie Dinesen og Frederik Stjernfelt, København: Samlerens Bogklub
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Trafic light 2
 Alternative explanation (OT):
 The red light (representamen) for the car driver stands for the
thought processes’I have to stop’ (interpretant) because ’it is
necessary to stop’ (to prevents collision) (the object), grounded
on the fact that it is placed at a crossroads (the ground).
 If the red light had been placed in the window of a brothel, it
would have had the object ’The brothel is open’, and if it had
been placed at a theater, it would have meant (had the object)
’house full’. It is only with respect to cars approaching a
crossroads that the red light means ’STOP!’
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Semiosis
 "It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All
dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or
psychical, either takes place between two subjects (whether
they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the
other patient, entirely or partially) or at any rate is a resultant
of such actions between pairs. But by "semiosis" I mean, on
the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a
coöperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its
interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way
resolvable into actions between pairs." ('Pragmatism', EP
2:411, 1907)
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Semiosis
It is necessary to
stop
Red light
I have to stop
: - determines
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Continous semiosis
stopping prevents
red light
collision
I have
the car
other cars
to stop
stops
crossing
External sign for the other
external
internal
Sign
sign
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II. An alternative view
 Definition:
 A sign is an external representation of something.
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Communication defined
 1. Linguistic communication is defined as an event in time in
which the individual, manifest, linguistic acts of one person
count as common latent thoughts of all the participants in a
focussed gathering in a speech community. The act is
individual, manifest and divisible, the the thoughts are
common, latent and indivisible
 The rules of language are rules for the count-as-relation
between act (form) and thought (meaning) on a background.
 How can actions in a sequence count as approximately the
same thoughts for all the participants? That is the topic of
linguistic investigation.
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Dretske’s definition of representation
 A representation is something that for someone indicates something other
than it self, something which it is designed to indicate. Dretske 1995 side 2-3.
 Representations can be
 external representations, which are produced signs
 intenal representations, which are not manifest, but latent mental models
 but in both cases designed, signs by a designer, thoughts by evolution.
 Mental representations can be devided into
 perceptual representations [PR]
 cognitive representation [CR]
 A sign is an external representation of something
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External representations = signs
 External representations = signs
 are characterized by (what is sometimes called
intentionality):
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


salience
attention
meaning
collectivity
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Salience
(5) En blankslebet granitvæg
No salience no sign
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(6) Tegn på en blankslebet granitvæg
salient marks = signs
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Attention
 Communication is defined as an event in time in which the
individual, manifest acts of one person (or traces thereof)
count as common latent thoughts of all the participants in a
focussed gathering in a community. The form (manifest act) is
individual, manifest and divisible, the meaning (the thoughts)
is common, latent and indivisible.
 Communication only takes place when the manifest acts are
perceived by the audience in a focussed gathering, i.e. all
parties focus on the same element in the situation, both
auditory and visually.
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Meaning
 Meaning is the thoughts that sign acts give rise to,
and which can be misleading because they are
regulated by common rules.
 Meaning of signs is latent, individual, but ”the same”
in two or more minds, indivisible, and directed
towards something other than it self. Meaning is the
essential part of what is called intentionality.
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Collectivity
 In my view all these efforts to reduce collective
intentionality to individual intentionality fail.
Collective intentionality is a biological primitive
phenomenon that cannot be reduced to or eliminated
in favor of something else. Every attempt at reducing
”We intentionality” to “I intentionality” that I have
seen is subject to counterexamples.
 John R. Searle (1995) 1996: The Construction of Social Reality, London:
Penguin Books p. 24.
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Collectivity
 Abstract: We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition
and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in
collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared
intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially
powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique
motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of
representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is
species-unique forms of cultural cognition and evolution, enabling
everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the
construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of
social institutions.

Michal Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Josep nCall, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll: “Understanding
and sharing intentions: The origin of cultural cognition” in Bahavioral and Brain Sciences (2005) 28,
675-735.
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Peirce’s indexes are not signs
 If a sign are defined as an external representation, Peirce’s
inxes are not signs, but only causal events interpreted by an
observer. Signs have to ”stand for” approximately the same
each time, and for each observer.
 The index a column of smoke can one day mean ’fire’, the next
’the direction of the wind’, the next again ’Now it is time for
dinner’.
 That is not a sign, but just indvidual thought processes.
 But a weathercock is a sign, because it is designed to represent the wind
direction.
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Divisibility of the external sign
 The external sign can always
be divided into parts either in
time (verbal texts), or in space
(pictures).
 The interpretation, the internal
representation, is always one
indivisible Gestalt.
Forsiden på Klaus Rifbjerg 1963: Portræt
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Divisibility of the linguistic act
 2. The form is divisible
 The linguistic form (the individual manifest actions)
is as all physical processes divisible:
 A: - Do you come now? We shall eat.
 B: - I’m trying to!
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Indivisibility of consciousness
 3. Consciousness is indivisible
 The meaning (the common thoughts in the individual minds) is indivisible.
Thoughts make up one unit, both across sense modalities and time. Sense
impressions from all the senses: visual, auditive, olfactory and tactile
impressions form together one united consciousness, a so called Gestalt of
the actual situation. One of the features of consciousness is the feeling of
being a self, the same self from the earliest days one can remember to the
present day.
 Thoughts are always experienced as a figure on a ground which is seen in
this example of “Rubins vase” (Gade 1997, 178); you can see two black
profiles facing each other on a white background, or you can see a white
vase on a black background; you can skip in the twinkling of an eye from
one to the other, but you cannot se both of them at the same time.
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Figure and ground

What comes from reality to the mind as a
category, and what remains background when a
human being perceives a situation? In reality
there are countless differences; which differences
form the borderline between figure and ground,
and which differences do not? With a concise
formulation: only the differences that make a
difference come from the landscape to the map
(Bateson 1970) ) that means the differences
associated with interests, needs and desires of a
living organism. In their consciousness human
beings organize the single parts of their
impressions according to their function in the
whole, the figure of which is associated with
their needs and desires. You see the duck if you
are going to feed ducks, and the rabbit if you
trade in fur.
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To see something as something

On this picture from Wittgenstein
(Wittgenstein 1958 , II - XI ) you see the
figure either as a duck looking to the left, or
as a rabbit looking to the right, you can skip
between them, but you cannot see them both
at the same time. Physically it is nothing but
printing ink on a piece of paper; it is only in
my mind, and in your mind that the drawn
line is recognised as a rabbit or a duck. The
same hold for real ducks and rabbits. In the
real world they are individuals, only in the
mind of someone (a human being or some
other animal) they belong the categories of
ducks and rabbits. By the category or
concept we synthesize all the sense
impressions into one mental unit. Some
categories synthesize parts or traits separated
in time, categories like ‘situation’, ‘event’
and ‘life’.
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A taxonomy of signs
External phenomena
(indexes)
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Elements in the picture sign situation
Portræt malet 1719 af Balthasar
Denner. Det hænger nu på
Frederiksborgmuseet. Maleriet
er siden 1882 reproduceret på
tændstiksæskerne fra H.E.Gosh
& Co.
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Pictures and verbal texts
• Pictures are interpreted as sign
units.
• (1) Pictures are interpreted
functionally, i.e. top down.
• (2) Pictures are designed to have
resemblance with their object
• (3) Pictures are sense specific
(vision).
• (4) Pictures are expositions in
space.
• (5) Pictures have semantic
likeness with their object.
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• Texts are interpreted as articulated
signs.
• (1) Texts are interpreted both
compositionally, i.e. bottom up,
and functionally, i.e. top down.
• (2) Texts are conventionally
different from their objects
• (3) Texts are not sense specific,
but conceptual.
• (4) Texts are statements about
time.
• (5) Texts have syntactic truth
value in relation to their object.
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Functionality
Top down interpretation
• Here are two
strokes
But as part of a whole
it is two eyes
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Functionality
Top down interpretation
• And if the
whole changes,
the eyes
changes from
beeing glad to
being sour.
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Compositionality and functionality
• Meningen med teksten ”PAS
PÅ – BØRN” er bestemt ved
kompositionalitet (summen
af meningen med delene og
måden de er kombineret på):
passe på means ’be carefull
with’ eller ’ be on one's
guard against’, bydeformen
betyder ’at det er noget
du’et skal gøre’, og barn
betyder ’person under 13
år’. Sætningen kan derfor
betyde ’vær vagtsom over
for personer under 13’.
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Meningen med teksten er også
bestemt ved funktionalitet; når
det er et vejskilt, er betydningen
af pas på nok snarere ’vær
forsigtig’, og børn er nok snarere
en nominalsætning end et objekt,
og betyder: ’der leger måske børn
på vejen’.
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Types of signs
PHENO
MENA
extern materiel perceptibility:
informativity
intern attention: intentionality
(meaning and representativity)
natural
non-natural
marks (indices)
sign
unit
phenomena
omens, symptoms,
tracks, trails and
traces, (flush,
smile, laughter)
pictures and images
- gestures (wave
one’s hand, point,
handshake)
arti- single
culated
doubble
music
matematics, musical konceptuelle
notation
tanker,
diskursiv
verbal text (oral and tænkning,
written)
forståelse
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natural
mental
representations
perceptuel
impressions,
senseimpressions
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Linguistic meaning
 4. Linguistic meaning is shared meaning
 Like other forms of consciousness linguistic meaning is indivisible,
organized with a figure on a ground, a figure under aspectual shape. But
while consciousness normally is a gestalt which represents the things and
events in the world that cause the sense impressions, linguistic meaning is
representating something totally different from the events in the world that
cause the impressions.
 The fundamental fact about language is that it is a means by which people
share their thoughts with each other. (The word transfer is not the proper
word in this connection; when I transfer money to you, I’ll not have the
money any more, but when I share my thoughts with you, I’ll still have my
thoughts, even after you have understood them.) To learn language is to
learn how to mean. So language is also a means to mean, a medium for
thoughts.
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 The situation of communication (Sc) causes (physically and biologically)
(notation: ' →’) a thought in the mind of the interlocutors; they perceive
the situation and take the utterance of the speaker (U) as the figure against
the background of the participants, and the whole setting. This utterance act
counts as (notation =>) a thought (T) directed towards (intentionally
referring to and designating) (notation: ←) the situation referred to (Sr),
because it has the linguistic community and the situation of communication
as common background (notation '[ ... ]B’ ). It can be stated in one formula
(Togeby 2003, § 10):
 Sc → [U => (T ← Sr )]B.
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Sc → [U => (T ← Sr )]B.
 Sc → [U => (T ← Sr )]B.
 The relation of intentional reference and designation has a
notation (←), which is the mirror image of notation of
causation (→) because the thought that the utterance counts as,
has as its referent an event that could have caused the same
thought by sense impressions. When the witch tells the soldier
about the dog on the chest he gets the same image in his head,
as he gets when he later in fact climbs down in the tree, opens
the door and stands face to face with the dog. It is what Searle
calls causal reflexivity (Searle 1983).
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The logical layers of communication
 An utterance functions in many levels simultaneously, a theory originally
formulated by Austin in his book How To Do Things With Words (1975).
The fact that the witch convinces the soldier that he can get rid of the dog
by setting it on her apron although it is big, is called the perlocutionary act.
The fact that her utterance counts as a prediction about the future as part of
an instruction, and not as a fairy tale about monsters in the underground, is
called the illocutionary act. The fact that she is able to get him understand
and imagine the propositional content of the true sentence, viz. that down
in the tree in the possible future he will see that big dog sitting on the chest
in the first room, is called the rhetic act, and her designating a 'chest’ and
a 'dog’, and her predicating that the latter sits on the former, is called the
phatic act. The rhetic and phatic acts are possible only because she
performs the phonetic acts of pronouncing sounds that are identified as
linguistic phonemes.
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The logical layers of communication

On all five levels we see this mechanism that a physical token counts as a
timeless type: a phone counts as a phoneme, a morph counts as a
morpheme, a sentence counts as a proposition, a set of connected sentences
counts as a text or a speech act, and speech acts count as moves in a social
interaction.
 Normally phonology is not part of sentence grammar. In functional
grammar the sentence is thus described as having four different functions or
types of meaning: the conceptual meaning on the phatic level, the
propositional meaning on the rhetic level, the textual function on the
illocutionary level, and the interactional function on the perlocutionary
level.
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The logical layers of communication
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Types of meaning
 In the mind of the communicators the conceptual
meaning is the figure against the background of
propositional meaning; the propositional meaning has
the textual (informational) message as its background,
and the message has the interaction as its setting. So
the meaning of a text uttered in a situation is like a
Chinese nest of boxes with one type of meaning as
the figure against the background of the next type of
meaning:
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Types of meaning
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Types of meaning
 In the mind of the communicators the conceptual
meaning is the figure against the background of
propositional meaning; the propositional meaning has
the textual (informational) message as its background,
and the message has the interaction as its setting. So
the meaning of a text uttered in a situation is like a
Chinese nest of boxes with one type of meaning as
the figure against the background of the next type of
meaning:
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 7. The count-as mechanism
 The count-as mechanism ( [ U => T]B makes raw, individual physical
behaviour into intentional common thought (i.e. directed towards the same
situation talked about). Intentional phenomena, such as beliefs and desires,
are representations of something external to the mind in which they occur,
representations that are common for many minds in the sense that they refer
to the same things outside the minds, provided that the bearers of the minds
belong to the same speech community. So the count-as mechanism (Searle
1995) only works against the background of a situation of joint activities
and a speech community (shaded areas):
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Count as-mechanism
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Count as-mechanism
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Types of meaning
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Inferential text interpretation
 Regular text interpretation is a process of building a
mental model of the situation talked about in the text
and relate it to the model of the current situation.
 The mental model is build by the hearers by
 1) determining what is said from what is pronounced,
 and is related to the current situation by
 2) determining what is communicated by what is said
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Inferential text interpretation
 If we take the oral situation as basic, we can thus
distinguish between:
 1) what is pronounced (known as what is explicit) in
uttering a text,
 2) what is said by what is pronounced (called the
explicature or the coded meaning), and
 3) what is implicitly communicated by what is said (both
presupposition and implicature).
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Theoretical framework:
A model of the interpretation process
What is communicated
to infere what is implicated
to integrate what is presupposed
Inferential
Accessible
Optional
What is said – what is said
Unconscous
Involuntary
obligatory
to acknowledge the logical proposition
to construe the conceptual configuration
to disambiguate lexical items
to recognize the references
What is pronounced–what is pronounced–what is pronounced
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Theoretical framework:
A model of interpretation process
What is communicated
to infere what is implicated
to integrate what is presupposed
pragmatics
semantics
What is said – what is said
Syntax
Semantics
Semantics
Semantics
to acknowledge the logical proposition
to construe the conceptual configuration
to disambiguate lexical items
to recognize the references
What is pronounced–what is pronounced–what is pronounced
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Inferential text interpretation
 On another dimension we can distinguish between
 a) information that the speaker indicates as something that
should be taking for granted,
 b) information that the speaker states as new in order to
make the audience take it in
 It gives six type of information:
 names, predicates, what is named (the reference), what is
predicated, what is presupposed and the implicature.
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Types of information
Information
Taken for granted
Stated
What is
pronounced
Names (definite noun
phrases)
Predicates (verb phrases,
adjectives, adverbials)
What is said
in the
proposition
What is named (the recognizable reference in the
mental model)
What is predicated as
relevant to the audience
What is
What is presupposed by the
communicated utterance of the proposition
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The implicature of the
speaker’s claim of relevance
of the predicated information
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References
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Aristoteles (350 BC): Poetics
Borchmann, Simon, 2005: Funktionel tekstteori og fiktivt fortællende tekster med refleksiv funktion,
København
Bergler, Edmond 1956: Laughter and the Sense of Humor, New York
Carston, Robyn 2002: Thoughts and Utterances. The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication, Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing.
Freud, Sigmund (1906) 1979: Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, Frankfurt am Main
Grice, H.P. (1967) 1975: ”Logic and conversation” in Cole, Peter, and Jerry Morgan, 1975: Syntax and
Semantics, vol 3, Speech Acts, New York: Academic Press
Peter Harder & Christian Kock 1976: The Theory of Presupposition Failure, København: Akademisk Forlag
Kant, Immanuel (1781) 1996: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Frankfurt am Main
Koestler, Arthur 1964: The Act of Creation, London
Togeby, Ole 2003: Fungerer denne sætning? Funktionel dansk sproglære, København
Zijderveld, A. 1976: Humor und Gesellschaft. Eine Soziologie des Humors und des Lachens, Graz
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1969: On Certainty, London
Yule, George 1996: Pragmatics, Oxford
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