In the world of semiology today, there are two pioneers that are being celebrated and each of them postulated different principles of semiology which are as follows:
3.1 Ferdinand de Saussure, (1857 – 1913)
Born in Geneva, Switzerland to a family commemorated for its excellent achievements in the study of natural sciences. He was known as the first person to discover linguistic studies early in life. He developed the theory of semiology and its application to language.
In the year 1875, he got an admission into the University of Geneva to study physics and chemistry, in a Greek and Latin language. This knowledge convinced him that his career lay in the study of language. In 1876, he entered the University of Leipzig to study Indo-European language. In the year 1878, he published a monograph on the primitive system of Vowels in Indo-European Languages, during that time; he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) for his thesis on the genitive case in Sanskrit. After the completion of his thesis, he moved to Paris, where he taught Sanskrit, as well as Old High German. For over 10 years, he focused on a particular as opposed to general linguistics.
In 1891, he returned to Geneva, to lecture Sanskrit and historical linguistics at the University. The University provided the method for shaping semiology while he was asked to lecture a course in general linguistics. He died in the month of February, 1913. After his death, his students took the course as an innovation which made them pull their notes together and published a book called Course in General Linguistics in the year 1916. In this book, Saussure focuses on the linguistic sign, making a number of crucial points about the relationship between the signifier (Sr) and the signified (Sd). The key ideas contained in the book were summarized as follows:
i. Language known as a self-contained system comprised of elements that perform varieties of functions; based on the relations the various elements have with one another. Syntax and grammar are known as organizing principles of language. There is no problem recognizing the grammatical sense of this sentence: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
ii. Language can also be thought of as a complete system of signs which we can study at any given point;
iii. A signifier (Sr), the sound-image or its graphical equivalent, and its signified (Sd), the concept or the meaning, make up the sign;
iv. For example, we can say that, to an English speaking person, the three black marks c-a-t serve as the signifier which evokes the "cat";
v. The relationship that exists between Signifier (Sr) and Signified (Sd) appears to be arbitrary. Different languages make use of different words for similar purposes. There exist no physical relationship between a given signifier and a signified;
vi. Language is a system of formal relations as described in the terms. This simply implies that the key to understanding the structure of the system lies in difference. One sound differs from another sound; for instance “p sounds similarly like b”; one word is quite different from another word; for instance “pat sounding similarly like bat”; and one grammatical forms differs from another, for instance “as has run from will run”; no linguistic unit such as word or sound has significance in and of itself. Each unit acquires meaning in conjunction with other units. One can distinguish formal language from the actual use of language which is known as parole;
vii. Expression used is based on collective behavior or principle. One can say that a sign is motivated when we perceive a link between Signifier (Sr) and Signified (Sd), for example, instance of onomatopoeia like “bow-wow” and “tick-tock”.
3.2 Roland Barthes, (1915 – 1980)
Roland Barthes, a cultural theorist and analyst was born in Cherbourg, a port-city northwest of Paris; his parents were Louis Barthes, a naval officer and Henriette Binger. He lost his father in the year 1916, during combat in the North Sea. In the year 1924, Barthes and his mother relocated to Paris, where he attended (1924-1930) the Lycee Montaigne. Unfortunately, he spent long periods of his youth in sanatoriums, undergoing treatment for a disease known as Tuberculosis. During the time of his recovery from the illness (1935-1939) he studied French and the classics at the University of Paris. He was given exemption from military service during the World War II. During the time he was relieved, he taught at different schools, such as Lycees Voltaire and Carnot. He also taught at Universities like Rumania (1948-1949) and Egypt (1949-1950). He joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted his time to sociology and lexicology.
3.2.1 Barthes’ academic career can be divided into three phases:
3.2.1.1 First phase: He focused on demystify the stereotypes of bourgeois culture (as he put it). For instance, in writing degree Zero, Barthes examined the link between writing and biography; he studied the modern practice of writing and historical conditions of literary language.
During the years 1954 to 1956, Barthes wrote series of articles for a magazine company known as Les Lettres nouvelles, in which he revealed a “Mythology of the Month” which implies how the denotations in the signs of popular culture betray connotations which are “myths” generated by the larger sign system that makes a society. A book titled Mythologies contained studies of everyday signs appropriately enough offers his meditations on many topics, such as striptease, New Citroen, steak and chips etc. In each article written by Barthes, he takes a seemingly unnoticed phenomenon from everyday life and deconstructs it which means shows that the “obvious” connotations which it carries have been carefully constructed.
3.2.1.2 Second phase: the semiotics phase from 1956, Barthes took over Saussure’s ideas of the sign, along with the idea of language as a sign system, producing work which can be known as appendix to Mythologies. In the year 1962, he became Directeur d’Etudes in the VIth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where he devoted his time to the “sociology of signs, symbols and representations”.
In the year 1964, Barthes produced works such as Elements of Semiology and the Fashion System in the year 1967, adjusting Saussure’s model to the study of cultural phenomena other than language.
3.2.1.3 Third phase: He began with a journal of S/Z (1970), marking a shift from Saussurean semiology to an assumption of “the text”, which he explained as a field of the signifier and of the symbolic. S/Z is a reading of Balzac’s novel Sarrasine, plotting the migration of five “codes”, understood as open groupings of signifieds and as points of crossing with other texts. The peculiarity between what can be written, readable or rewritten today, which mean actively produced by the reader, and what can no longer be written but only read which implies passively consumed, provides a new basis for evaluation.
In 1973, Barthes further on the idea in the Pleasure of the Text through the body as text and language as an object of desire. During this period, he wrote books as fragments, suggesting his retreat from what might be called the communication of power, as caught in the subject or object relationship and the habits of rhetoric. He made a distinction between the language of science known as ideological, which is concerned with stable meanings and identified with the sign and the language of writing, which aims as displacement and dispersion known as aesthetic. He became a professor of literary semiology at the College de France. The last book written by Barthes in the year 1980 was titled “Camera Lucinda”, reflects on different meanings of the photograph.
Barthes extended these ideas to messages like image relations and word of all sorts. He died on 26 March, 1980 by a vehicle accident, knocked down by a driver reported to be drunk.