The Challenge of Semiotics

Abstract

Abstract In an influential discussion of the ‘place of language in human facts’, Ferdinand de Saussure set forth a vision of the science of semiology in which language, social institution’ as well as ‘a system of signs’, was given pre-eminent status: A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from Greek semeîon, ‘sign’). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts.