Semiotics and linguistics

What are semiotics and linguistics and what do they study? Meaning and basic concepts of semiotics and linguistics.

The word semiotics comes from the Greek semeion which means “ sign ” and is the discipline that studies signs, their characteristics and the laws that regulate their functions and uses. In ancient times the first studies on signs were carried out by Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle ; but semiotics, understood as a real subject of study, was born in the 2nd century BC when Claudius Galen used it to indicate the study of medical symptoms.

In the Middle Ages the use of signs concerned the study of the world and in particular of language, but it began to be something homogeneous only with English and German philosophers, such as Locke and Lambert, who spoke of logic. Semiotics as a science was born between the 19th and 20th centuries with Saussure and Peirce : Saussure dealt with semiology and Peirce with semiosis. Semiotics was institutionalized in the 1960s when, following the publication of a work by the French semiologist Roland Barthes, it became a university subject. As we have already said, semiotics is the study of signs and specifically Umberto Eco defines it as a science that studies signs in terms of meaning and communication. The sign indicates something that stands for something else and semiotics studies the phenomena of meaning (relationship between signifier and meaning). When this relationship is used, the communication process is activated.

Tripartite division of semiotics in the Middle Ages :

syntactics : the study of signs in relation to other signs;
semantics : the study of signs in relation to objects;
pragmatics : the study of signs in relation to their users.

According to Umberto Eco, semiotics can be:

general : the study of signs and texts;
specification : the study of the grammar of a type of signs or texts (the language of traffic lights);
applied : interpretative and critical techniques of texts.

LINGUISTICS: PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

Phonetics is the branch of linguistics that studies the sounds produced by the vocal apparatus based on different aspects:

articular (or physiological): how sounds are produced;
acoustics : description of the physical characteristics of sound and how it propagates through air;
auditory : how sounds are perceived by the hearing system;
forensics : speaker recognition.

The sound is divided into :

voiceless or voiced . A voiceless sound occurs when the vocal cords are separated and the air passes freely, while a voiced sound occurs when the air passes and makes the vocal cords vibrate.
bilabial : role of both lips.
labiodental : opposition of the lower lip with the upper incisors.
interdental : space between the teeth.
dental : upper teeth.
alveolar : dental alveoli.
palatal or alveopalatal : palate.
velare : soft palate or soft veil.
uvular : height of the uvula.
glottidal : glottis.
laryngeal : referring to the larynx.

The sound is divided into :

occlusive : complete occlusion.
fricative : almost complete block.
affricative : short stop.
nasal : lowering of the veil.
lateral : side closure.
vibrating or monovibrating : closing by vibration
semivocalic : influence of the following vowel.

This applies to consonants, but similar work can also be applied to vowels.

Vowels are classified as voiced and, based on the place of articulation, are distinguished as front, back, high or low.

Phonology is a branch of linguistics that studies the phonemes of the world’s languages: it establishes which phonemes are characteristic of a language, how they combine with each other and how they change when they combine. Phonemes are considered as minimal units of a language that perform a contrastive function between them. They are identified through the commutation test. If two sounds placed in the same position cause the meaning of the word to change then they are considered phonic realizations of two different phonemes while if the meaning of the word does not change then they are two phonic realizations of the same phoneme and are called allophones. Phonemes are identified using minimal pairs or minimal series.

Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that studies units higher than phonemes. The first thing to consider is the syllable. The classic syllable is formed by a consonant (syllabic onset) and a vowel (rhyme). Then there are more complex rhymes, for example they can start with two consonants (polyconsonantal onset) or have rhymes formed by a vowel (nucleus) and a consonant (coda). The CV type syllable is called open, the CVC type is called closed. In speaking, different phonic units are often found superimposed according to two processes:

assimilation : a sound unit borrows, or copies, some features from a neighboring sound unit;
elision : omission of a phonic segment

MORPHOLOGY

In linguistics, morphology studies the grammatical structure of the word. The morpheme is the minimum unit with meaning or grammatical function of a word that is identified by segmentation, that is, with a comparison process within which the number of morphemes identified depends on the corpus of words analyzed. Morphemes can be lexical and grammatical and both are divided into free and bound. Free grammatical morphemes are called functional and are a closed class of words: articles, prepositions, conjunctions. Grammatical morphemes are divided into:

derivational : the grammatical function changes if suffixes are used, the lexical meaning if prefixes and infixes are used;
inflectional : neither the grammatical function nor the lexical meaning changes and are mostly formed through suffixes.

SYNTAX

Syntax is the branch of linguistics and grammar that studies the rules that allow us to understand whether a text is well or badly formed . Within it, we speak of syntagms (in the case in which the elements have unilateral relations) and sentences (in the case in which the elements have reciprocal relations). The syntagm can be:

prepositional (noun phrase + preposition);
nominal (noun + article, adjective, etc.). The element that can stand alone, that is, enjoys the property of being expressible in isolation, is called the head of the syntagm;
verbal (verb + several elements). The number of elements depends on the value of the verb.

Sentences can be simple (SV + SN) or complex (sentences that have other sentences inside them) .

Furthermore, sentences are described in different ways: horizontal diagram; labeled sentences and tree diagram (it is the most used and allows to highlight the syntagmatic structure rules and the lexical rules).

Features of generative grammar :

recursion : rewriting system ;
the equivalence of different forms: sentences with a different surface structure can have the same deep structure (active and passive);
ambiguity : some sentences may have a surface structure that lends itself to different interpretations .

SEMANTICS

Semantics is the branch of linguistics that deals with the meaning of signs and is based on two lines of study :

the philosophical-analytic theory : the meanings of words refer to objects (language as nomenclature) and the meanings of sentences depend on their truthfulness (there are, however, sentences that are neither true nor false);
semio-linguistic theory : meaning is considered internal to the sign and not external, and can be dependent (associative) or independent (conventional) on the context.

Semantics is concerned with seeing how the meanings of terms are related to each other:

homophony : two terms that have the same pronunciation but different meanings (meet – meat);
homonymy : two terms that have the same pronunciation and spelling but the meanings and etymology are different (pesca – pesca);
polysemy or metaphor: two terms that have similar meanings (lion);
contingency or metonymy: two terms that have contingent meanings, and contingency itself justifies the shifting of meaning (container for content: drink a glass). A particular case is synecdoche (the part for the whole: have a roof);
hyponymy and hypernymy : gradual meanings, from the least general (hyponym) to the most general (hypernym). The affirmation of the hyponym necessarily implies the hypernym, but the opposite is not true (man – living being);
complementarity : two terms that have opposite meanings in a non-gradual way, therefore the negation of one implies the affirmation of the other (alive – dead);
antonomasia : meanings that are opposed in a non-gradual way, so the negation of one does not imply the affirmation of the other (black – white);
synonymy : similar meanings (via – road);
prototypes : meanings given by common traits.

Semantics also deals with how meaning can be described :

semantic role , in the case of verbs that describe actions we have: agent (subject of the action, in the nominative), theme (object of the action, in the accusative) and instrument (means used for the action, in the ablative); in the case of verbs that express feelings we have: experiencer (subject of the action, in the nominative), theme (object of the action, in the accusative), locative (place where the action takes place), source (where the action starts from) and goal (where the action arrives).
Feature semantics : considers words as containers whose meaning is given by the set of features they contain. Features are therefore necessary and sufficient elements to establish the meaning of a word.

PRAGMATICS

Pragmatics is the study of how meanings are interpreted.

Identify some characteristics in the terms:

deixis : some concepts cannot be understood independently of the context, expressed by deictic terms. Deixis can be: personal, temporal and spatial .
Reference : unlike deixis, it is not a property of the word, but of the speaker and allows us to talk about something without knowing it.
Anaphora and cataphora : these are internal references to the text, to parts preceding the anaphora (ana: above, fora: from fero, to carry) or to parts following the cataphora (cata: below).
Presuppositions : Often the speaker assumes that the speaker already knows certain things and omits them.
Speech acts : since John Austin in 1960 emphasized how language serves not only to communicate and signify but also to make someone do something, speech acts have been analyzed: direct (representative: giving judgments on a state of affairs, directive: making someone do something, commissive: committing to do something, expressive: expressing the psychological state of the speaker and declarative: constructing or modifying a social reality); indirect : if a hierarchy between speakers is not recognized, direct orders cannot be given, so indirect ones are used to maintain a form of courtesy.

When a set of sentences can be considered a text:

syntactic cohesion : syntactically valid connections between terms;
semantic coherence : semantically coherent construction;
intentionality : the text must contain the author’s intentions, because the simple fact of containing them gives it meaning;
acceptability : the recipient must cooperate with the intentions communicated by the author;
informativeness : the text must inform;
situationality : some texts must be placed in the right context to avoid being ambiguous;
intertextuality : sometimes it is necessary to understand the textual references within a text in order to understand it, but this is not always essential.

Finally, pragmatics takes into account the work of Paul Grice who, in 1975, spoke of the principle of cooperation that must bind the participants in a conversation, formulating four maxims:

quantity : you should only say what is necessary, no more and no less;
quality : you must not report untrue or unverifiable information;
relationship : you have to be relevant;
way : you have to be concise.

In order to put the principle of cooperation into practice, it is often necessary to activate frames , that is, schemes based on conventional inferences. In relationships, implications are also put into action, which can be of two types: conversational (they depend on the situation, they always change depending on the activated frame) and conventional (they are independent of the situation and are never cancelled).