Semiotics, Communication, and Cultural Theory: Basic Assumptions
Semiotics, Communication, and Cultural Theory:
Basic Assumptions
1. Cultures are formed through language. Language is public, social, and communal, not private or personal. (If anyone used a private language, it would be very uninteresting to the rest of the world.)
2. Users of a common language form what is called a "speech community," though we use "speech" in this context to include many kinds of communication communities (subcultures, dialects, ethnic groups, social-class specific communities, etc.); any individual can participate in multiple "speech communities".
3. Language is a system with rules (its own internal structure). Language as a system is multi-leveled, from speech sounds, words, and sentences to longer units called discourse. Discourse circulates through a culture, providing meanings, values, and social identities to individuals.
4. Discourse is the level studied by most cultural theory and semiotics. All of our cultural statements--from "mainstream" and official "high culture" products to popular culture genres and emerging new cultural forms--can thus be studied as forms of discourse, parts of a larger cultural "language."
5. Communication and meaning are formed by mediations--representive or symbolic vehicles that "stand for" things, meanings, and values. The mediating vehicles are called "signs". For example, words in a language, images, sounds, or other perceptible signifiers.
5.1. Thus signs and sign-systems never present a copy of "reality"--the order of things external to language and our mediated way of knowing things--but a socially interpreted and valued representation.
6. The study of how a society produces meanings and values in a communication system is called semiotics, from the Greek term semion, "sign". (Here "sign" has a specialized meaning, referring to our social and cultural vehicles for signification or meaning.) Languages, and other symbolic systems like music and images, are called sign systems
Basic Assumptions
1. Cultures are formed through language. Language is public, social, and communal, not private or personal. (If anyone used a private language, it would be very uninteresting to the rest of the world.)
2. Users of a common language form what is called a "speech community," though we use "speech" in this context to include many kinds of communication communities (subcultures, dialects, ethnic groups, social-class specific communities, etc.); any individual can participate in multiple "speech communities".
3. Language is a system with rules (its own internal structure). Language as a system is multi-leveled, from speech sounds, words, and sentences to longer units called discourse. Discourse circulates through a culture, providing meanings, values, and social identities to individuals.
4. Discourse is the level studied by most cultural theory and semiotics. All of our cultural statements--from "mainstream" and official "high culture" products to popular culture genres and emerging new cultural forms--can thus be studied as forms of discourse, parts of a larger cultural "language."
5. Communication and meaning are formed by mediations--representive or symbolic vehicles that "stand for" things, meanings, and values. The mediating vehicles are called "signs". For example, words in a language, images, sounds, or other perceptible signifiers.
5.1. Thus signs and sign-systems never present a copy of "reality"--the order of things external to language and our mediated way of knowing things--but a socially interpreted and valued representation.
6. The study of how a society produces meanings and values in a communication system is called semiotics, from the Greek term semion, "sign". (Here "sign" has a specialized meaning, referring to our social and cultural vehicles for signification or meaning.) Languages, and other symbolic systems like music and images, are called sign systems