Aesthetics of Language: Semiotics

Say I told you to picture waves battering against a sea cliff, fauna idling about a forest clearing, or the awakening of a quaint, sleepy town - why are you able to conceptualize such things?

Of course, some of these thoughts can be conjured up from memories of a scenic drive, a hike you went on with friends, or a coda to a sleepless night, but some of the descriptors are used to paint such images because of the meaning we derive from them. As humans making sense of a vast, uncertain world, we naturally try to make meanings out of the abounding sights, scents, sounds, and other sensations that we experience, but it’s only with the meaning that we invest in these things that materialize them. Some experiences are widely felt, but not given a name in the culture we immerse ourselves in - hygge, a Danish and Norweigan term that describes the feeling of assured comfort and contentment, has no singular translation in English. Neither does schadenfreude, a German word that verbalizes the guilty pleasure we all have in seeing the misfortune of others - say, your ex-friend not making the track team.

There are other words that exist within the bounds of our language that are often underused, outdated, esoteric, or simply too “grown up” for most people to understand, like bijoux or otiose, that really don’t hold much meaning for anyone, save for the people that - God forbid - still use these words. Even the words I’m using in my writing, or when I talk to a friend, can be meaningless to a non-English speaker or a toddler who’s simply trying to get a grasp of the alphabet. This means no word, or string of words to form the sentences I write, is truly safe.

I present these disparate categories in our vocabulary to illustrate one belief in the philosophy of language: our experiences, when turned into words, have no intrinsic meaning until we invest meaning into them. This act of creating meaning from experience is what is referred to as a “sign”. Within this field of semiotics, the study of signs and their interpretation, lie two dominant theories from the central founders of semiotics as to what constitutes a sign.

Context Matters

Ferdinand de Saussure suggested a two-part, or dyadic, model for signs, which consisted of a signifier and the signified. Signifiers are the sensory experiences we take on, typically in sounds (a caveman’s grunt), images (the mysterious symbols on our car dashboards), or the more standardized form of these images, language (the multifaceted word ‘negative,’ for example).

The signified represents the context in which we use these signifiers. The caveman’s grunt can change meaning based on his inflection and the situation he is in - perhaps it is to discourage a behavior he sees, and uses these grunts as a stern warning before he relies on other methods to discipline his fellow Neanderthals. A high beam signal in a car can just as easily be put on a sign in a shooting range to suggest the presence of live ammunition rounds. What we’ll be focusing on the most, though, is the signified counterpart when we speak. Using the case of ‘negative,’ which can be applied to the various signified situations of negative numbers in a math lecture, photographic negatives in a darkroom, or an expression of disapproval in radio communication. What is important to note is that a signifier cannot exist without its signified, and they each depend on the other to form meaning.