Semiology and Grammatology

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Humans, as a species, feel a driving need to ascribe meanings to the world. We make meanings through the use of signs, which are things can be interpreted. Signs can any form, including words, images, sounds, acts or objects; even odors and flavors can be ascribed meaning. However, these things have no intrinsic meaning or value and only become signs when we put meaning into them. Basically, anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as 'signifying' something, meaning that it stands for something other than itself. Humans interpret things as signs in an unconscious way by relating them to familiar systems and conventions. It is this meaningful use of signs which is at the heart of the concerns of semiotics, being the study of how a sign correlates to communication and structure. Saussure, the creator of semiology, suggested a two-part model of any one sign. He states that any one sign contains a signifier and a signified. A signifier is the form a sign takes and the signified is the concept it represents. An important fact of the signifier/signified relationship is that a sign must have both parts, as there cannot be a totally meaningless signifier or a formless signified We can take any one word and break it down into these two parts, such as the word “closed.” The word “closed” means “not open,” as in “this door is closed.” The signifier is the word “closed” and the signified, or concept, is that the door not open. One of the more important concepts of Saussure’s idea is that a sign is not necessarily a link between a thing and a name, but a link between a concept and a sound pattern. Here’s where it gets even more abstract: the sound pattern is not actually a sound, since a sound is something physical. These sound patterns are the hearer's impression of a sound, given to them by their senses. This sound pattern can be called a material element,
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