semiotics, the study ofsigns and sign-using behaviour. It was defined by one of its founders, the Swiss linguistFerdinand de Saussure, as the study of “the life of signs within society.” Although the word was used in this sense in the 17th century by the English philosopherJohn Locke, the idea of semiotics as an interdisciplinary field of study emerged only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the independent work of Saussure and of the American philosopherCharles Sanders Peirce.

Peirce’sseminal work in the field was anchored inpragmatism andlogic. He defined a sign as “something which stands to somebody for something,” and one of his major contributions to semiotics was the categorization of signs into three main types: (1) anicon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign for falling rocks); (2) anindex, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is a sign of fire); and (3) asymbol, which is related to its referent only by convention (as with words or traffic signals). Peirce also demonstrated that a sign can never have a definitemeaning, for the meaning must be continuously qualified.

Saussure treated language as a sign-system, and his work inlinguistics supplied theconcepts and methods that semioticians applied to sign-systems other than language. One such basic semiotic concept is Saussure’s distinction between the two inseparable components of a sign: the signifier, which inlanguage is a set ofspeech sounds or marks on a page, and the signified, which is the concept or idea behind the sign. Saussure also distinguishedparole, or actual individual utterances, fromlangue, the underlying system of conventions that makes such utterances understandable; it is this underlyinglangue that most interests semioticians.

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This interest in the structure behind the use of particular signs linked semiotics with the methods ofstructuralism, which sought to analyze such relations. Saussure’s theories were thus also considered fundamental to structuralism (especially structural linguistics) and topoststructuralism.

Twentieth-century semioticians applied Peirce and Saussure’s principles to a variety of fields, includingaesthetics,anthropology,psychoanalysis,communications, andsemantics. Among the most influential of these thinkers were the French scholarsClaude Lévi-Strauss,Jacques Lacan,Michel Foucault,Jacques Derrida,Roland Barthes, andJulia Kristeva.