Page 222 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

SEMIOTICS/SEMIOLOGY

science, in all of which issues of meaning are often at the centre of
debate.

See also: Discourse, Multi-accentuality, Pragmatics, Semiotics/
semiology, Speech act

Further reading: Lyons (1981)

SEMIOSPHERE

The ‘semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of
languages’, which is both the ‘result and the condition for the
development of culture’ (Lotman, 1990: 123–125). The term was
coined by Yuri Lotman, on the model of the ‘biosphere’. Unlike
Saussure, who sought the smallest signifying unit in language, Lotman
was convinced that communication could not occur without the
system in place first; he thought dialogue was a precondition for
language, not the other way round. So he wrote that the ‘smallest
functioning mechanism’ of meaning-generation is ‘the whole semiotic
space of the culture in question’ (Lotman, 1990: 125). Hence the
semiosphere is the enabling structure that allows asymmetric or
mutually untranslatable messages – like the communication between
mother (language of smiles) and baby (looks and burbles) – to work as
communication.

Further reading: Hartley (1996); Hartley and McKee (2000)

SEMIOTICS/SEMIOLOGY

Semiotics is the study of signs. It seeks to understand howlanguage is
made meaningful and howmeaning can then be communicated in
society. Semiotics is not to be found in the text itself, but rather it
should be understood as a methodology. Accordingly, it is not a
discipline in its own right, but its influence on institutionalised ways of
approaching media texts has been considerable.
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is often considered to be the
founder of semiotics, along with other figures such as the American
philosopher of language C. S. Pierce, the Italian semiotic theorist
Umberto Eco and the Soviet theorist of language Valentin Volosinov
(who may have been the literary writer Bakhtin).

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