Semiotics

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Semiotics is the study of signs. It is an interdisciplinary field that examines what signs are, how they form sign systems, and how individuals use signs to produce and communicate meaning. Semiotics is usually divided into syntactics, which addresses how signs are organized and combined; semantics, which addresses the relation between signs and their meanings; and pragmatics, which addresses the relation between signs and their users. Semiotics is related to linguistics but has a broader scope that includes nonlinguistic signs, such as maps and clothing. Signs are things that stand for something else, such as the word cat, which stands for a carnivorous mammal. They can take many physical forms, called sign vehicles, such as sounds, images, written marks, and gestures. Icons are signs that communicate meaning through qualitative resemblance to their referents, such as a portrait of a person. Indexical signs are based on a direct physical link, such as smoke as a sign of fire. For symbolic...

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