Semiotics - Topics

The difference between a sign and a symbol and why semiotics still argues about it What a code must share before a message can be read at all Why do researchers treat silence as a message rather than an absence of one? The hashtag as irony: when the tag says the opposite of the post How influence study differs from intertextuality in practice Why does the sender-message-receiver model explain almost nothing about real talk? What is communicative competence beyond grammar? Signs versus symbols versus signals: the basic distinctions in semiotics What syntagm and paradigm mean when you read a menu What Uexküll's Umwelt says about signs an animal cannot perceive How advertising builds connotation with props instead of claims Emoji replaced a whole vocabulary of gestures and nobody agreed on what they mean Why Saussure's sign is arbitrary and Peirce's is not Writing a raga down in staff notation loses the parts that carry the music Why a thumbs-up fails as a sign outside its code community Why a photograph feels evidential when light leaves an index Incongruity theories say a joke lands when two frames collide What an indexical sign does that an icon cannot How do legal fictions like the reasonable person do real work? Why a forged photograph breaks an index rather than a symbol Reading street signs and shopfronts the way you read a language What can literary reading teach lawyers about interpreting a statute? The difference between a sign and a symptom in medical diagnosis How Barthes read myth as a second-order sign system Why does a pain scale from zero to ten capture so little of suffering? How dress codes mark class without stating it