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The term 'semiotic" was coined in the late nineteenth century by the American pragmatist philosopher, C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), to denote "the formal doctrine of signs", and Ferdinand de Saussure in his Cours de Linguistique Générale (1915) argued that linguistics was only part of a general science of signs, which he called semiology. The terms are more or less interchangeable. The basis of semiotics is the sign, that is, any configuration to which there is a conventionalised response. Not only are languages and comnmunication systems such as morse code constituted by signs but, radical semioticians would argue, the world itself as it relates to the human mind consists entirely of signs since there can be no unmediated relationship with reality. Semiotics investigates the various systems of signs that create the shared meanings that constitute any culture. Language being the fundamental sign system for human beings, non-verbal signs such as gestures, forms of dress, numerous conventionalised social practices like eating, can be seen as akin to language in that they are constituted by signs which take on meaning and communicate by virtue of the relations between signs.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-19486-5_13

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