Quotes About Semiotics

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

Tout ce qu'on introduit dans un roman devient signe.

The Prison-House of Language

Reading functions as hallucinating a meaning between letters and lines.

A film is a system, not of meanings, but of signifiers.

other hand, any act constitutive of signification

All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning -- not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.

los símbolos, como sabemos, son intocables

A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately.

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

The mouth utters the word, the sign, and the symbol. If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything. When the way enters death and we are surround by rot and horror, the way rises in the darkness and leaves the mouth as the saving symbol, the word.

The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning.

What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning. It implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us.

Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning.

Remember that things are symbols, and that the thing symbolized is more important than the symbol itself.

Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

semiologists would agree is that one simply cannot speak of "meaning" as if it were one thing that we can all know or share. The concept meaning is multivalent, has many meanings itself…

Graphic Design, which fulfills aesthetic needs, complies with the laws of form and exigencies of two-dimensional space; which speaks in semiotics, sans-serifs, and geometrics; which abstracts, transforms, translates, rotates, dilates, repeats, mirrors, groups, and regroups, is not good design if it is irrelevant.

Icons speak icon language.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

They take seats across the head end of the table, which is wide enough for a Last Supper tableau. In the Jesus position is a really big chair. It is the kind of thing you'd get if you went to a Finnish designer with a shaved head, rimless glasses, and twin Ph.D.s in semiotics and civil engineering, wrote him a blank check, and asked him to design a throne.