"Only connect! . . .Live in fragments no longer.”  E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), ch. 22

‘One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep, ‘Hammer your thoughts into unity’. For days I could think of nothing else and for years I tested all I did by that sentence [...]” William Butler Yeats (cited in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.51 )

the meaning of “SEMIOTICS” in various disciplines

 PHILOSOPHY The general study of symbolic systems, including language. The subject is traditionally divided into three areas: syntax, or the abstract study of the signs and their interrelations; semantics, or the study of the relation between the signs and those objects to which they apply; and pragmatics, or the relationship between users and the system (C. W. Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, 1938). The tradition of semiotics that follows Saussure is sometimes referred to as semiology. Confusingly, in the work of Kristeva, the term is appropriated for the non-rational effluxes of the infantile part of the self.

"The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Simon Blackburn. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online:

 GEOGRAPHY The ways in which signs and meanings are created, decoded, and transformed. For geographers, these signs may be in the landscape; landscapes may be ‘read’ in different ways, and may become part of the political process. See iconography.

A Dictionary of Geography. Susan Mayhew. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online.

LINGUISTICS.  The study and analysis of SIGNS and SYMBOLS as part of COMMUNICATION as for example in LANGUAGE, gesture, clothing, and behaviour. Present-day semiotics arises from the independent work of two linguistic researchers, one in the US, the other in Switzerland. Charles S. Peirce (1834–1914) used the term to describe the study of signs and symbolic systems from a philosophical perspective, while Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) coined semiology as part of his interest in language as a system of signs. The terms have generally been regarded as synonymous, and semiotics is better known, especially in the English-speaking world.

Almost anything can be a sign: clothes, hairstyles, type of house or car owned, accent, and body language. All send messages about such things as age, class, and politics. Sign systems, however, are not peculiar to human beings: the study of animal communication by gesture, noise, smell, dancing, etc., is termed zoosemiotics, while the study of technical systems of signals such as Morse code and traffic lights is communication theory. In semiotics, the term CODE refers loosely to any set of signs and their conventions of meaning. Language represents a rich set of such codes, both verbal (in language proper) and non-verbal (in the para-language of facial expressions, body movements, and such vocal activities as snorts and giggles). The media provide visual and aural signals in photographs, radio and television programmes, advertisements, and theatrical performances. Literature is seen as a particularly rich semiotic field with such sub-disciplines as literary and narrative semiotics. Critical attention has come to focus not only on the codes themselves, but on the process of encoding and decoding. Readers, it is argued, do not simply decode messages, but actively create meanings: that is, they re-code as they read.

Peirce and Saussure were interested in the relationship between sign and referent (what a sign refers to). Although they both stressed that this relationship was essentially arbitrary, Peirce argued that different types of sign had different degrees of both arbitrariness and motivation. What he terms an icon is a highly motivated sign, since it visually resembles what it represents: for example, a photograph or hologram. His index is partly motivated to the extent that there is a connection, usually of causality, between sign and referent: spots indexical of a disease like measles; smoke indexical of fire. Peirce's symbol is the most arbitrary kind of sign: the word in language, the formula in mathematics, or the rose representing love in literary tradition. See LINGUISTIC SIGN, SEMANTICS.

Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Ed. Tom McArthur. Oxford University Press, 1998. Oxford Reference Online.

BIBLICAL STUDIES   The study of the system of signs as means of communication; one of the synchronic methods of analysis. It claims that words do not have any meaning in themselves, but only in the context in which they appear; and hence the study of the function of contrasts in language. It is not interested in what might have been the process of composition of a text. The discipline arises from the observation of social behaviour and a network of relationships and conventions; a certain gesture or word receives its meaning from its context and not by reason of its inherent nature. Applied to biblical studies, semiotics is the attempt to discover the conventions by which the reader understands what is signified; to discern what significance a particular narrative conveyed to the first readers. Evangelists and readers shared common conventions. There existed rules and structures in discourse which enabled sayings and events transmitted during the ‘oral period’ to be captured in writing and made intelligible. Thus it was possible both for a writer to use shared conventions to manipulate the readers and for readers to infer quite different meanings from the same text e.g. of parables. This could be considered to be as valid a method of studying as traditional historical criticism. A group can discuss together how a parable was created and proclaimed, and what its purposes and effects were and are.

A Dictionary of the Bible. W. R. F. Browning. Oxford University Press, 1997. Oxford Reference Online.

SOCIAL SCIENCES semiotics and semiology  Often used interchangeably, the terms refer to the study of systems of signs—above all in regard to language but with consequences in other areas of cultural theory, where questions of interpretation are paramount. Although semiotics has deep roots in Western philosophy, it received its major modern formulations around the turn of the twentieth century in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher C. S. Peirce. Saussure described language as a system of signifiers (or sound patterns, which can be represented as words) and signifieds (or the mental concepts of material things, such as the concept of a tree). The pairing of these two components constitutes a sign—what Saussure somewhat paradoxically described as an “acoustic image.” Saussure challenged theories of natural language by suggesting that signs depended not on the thing signified but only on their relationship to other signs. In other words, the system of signs is conventional and arbitrary, rather than rooted in a natural relationship between language and things. Language is structured, therefore, by oppositions and differential relationships among signs.

This insight had a profound effect on linguistics, as well as on the study of mythology, folklore, and a range of other forms of highly structured cultural activity. Claude Lévi-Strauss carried this structural principle toward one of its limits with the theory of structuralism, which sought to explain the sources of primitive social organization on the basis of certain fundamental organizing oppositions: raw versus cooked, left versus right, exogamy versus endogamy, and so on.

Semiology, in contrast, became a major term in cultural theory following Roland Barthes's work of the 1950s and 1960s. His Elements of Semiology (1964 [1967]) provided a theoretical context for his practice of decoding the content of cultural signs and locating these significations within larger structures of myth. Barthes used the terms connotative and denotative to refer to the manifest and latent levels of signification in these myths. His version of semiology was influential on a range of culture and media studies in the 1970s and 1980s.

Peirce inaugurated a somewhat independent line of semiological inquiry that emphasized a third position, the “interpretant” in the process of signification. In this way, he addressed the question of how systems of signs were mobilized in communicative acts that were themselves dependent on logical structures. This gave rise to a largely British and American tradition of speech-act theory and communications theory. It was also part of the more general philosophical movement known as pragmatism. Communications theory and pragmatism have been of considerable importance in the social sciences, especially through their offshoot, the sociological theory of symbolic interactionism.

Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Craig Calhoun, ed. Oxford University Press 2002. Oxford Reference Online.