AQA Textbook

Ferdinand de Saussure:

Saussure was a Swiss linguist, and is considered by most people to be one of the 
founders of semiotics, Saussure believed that linguistics provided a good model for application to

wider cultural phenomena. Written or spoken language is the primary form of
communication between humans, but it is not the only form. The mass media are

forms of communication which deploy traditional language structures, but also

are full of other codes. Semiotics allows us to access these other codes and to

understand the sense that audiences make of them.








Charles Peirce
categories he defined were:

• Arbitrary signs, or symbolic signs, where there is no physical relationship

between the signifier and its concept (using Saussurian definitions). Language,
which we discussed earlier while looking at Saussure, falls into this category.

• Iconic signs, look like their signified, making the relationship between the two

very straightforward and obvious.

• Indexical signs, where there is a causal relationship between the signifier and

signified.