General language

General language

Use this category for general terms related to languages.

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General language

Metaphor

Language; General language

Metaphor expresses the unfamiliar (known in literary jargon as the 'tenor') in terms of the familiar (the 'vehicle'). The tenor and the vehicle are normally unrelated: we must make an imaginative ...

Whilst these terms appear to be graphocentric and logocentric, they are often used in semiotics to refer broadly to 'texts' and their users, regardless of medium. Writers and readers are sometimes ...

Real

Language; General language

For Lacan, 'the Real' is a primal realm where there is no absence, loss or lack. Here, the infant has no centre of identity and experiences no clear boundaries between itself and the external world.

Semantics

Language; General language

Morris divided semiotics into three branches: syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. Semantics refers to the study of the meaning of signs (the relationship of signs to what they stand for). The ...

Second articulation

Language; General language

At the (lower) structural level of second articulation, a semiotic code is divisible into minimal functional units which lack meaning in themselves (e.g. phonemes in speech or graphemes in writing). ...

Semiosis

Language; General language

This term was used by Peirce to refer to the process of 'meaning-making'.

Semiology

Language; General language

Saussure's term sémiologie dates from a manuscript of 1894. 'Semiology' is sometimes used to refer to the study of signs by those within the Saussurean tradition (e.g. Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Kristeva ...