advertisements. In his analysis, he didn’t describe the icons and symbols separately. He gathered them in one explanation.
So, in the writer’s thesis untitled “A Semiosis Process Analysis on Six Cellular Phone Advertisements of Samsung Galaxy Series
using C.S Peirce’s Theory, which makes it different from previous researches is the thesis tries to
explain the semiosis process that occurs on those advertisements and the signs meaning icons and symbols that contained on them after analyzing through
semiosis process used Peirce’s triangle concept. The thesis will draw the Peirce’s triangle to show the relation between the object, representment, and interpreten.
Furthermore, the icons and the symbols will be described separately and descriptively.
B. Theoritical Description
1. Definition of Semiotics
Semiotics is the study of sign or the science that study about the sign in human beings. It means, every exist things in our life is looked as the sign, that is
something that we should give them meaning.
6
Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as
significantly substituting for something else.
7
6
Benny H. Hoed, Op.Cit. p.3
7
Umberto Eco. A Theory of Semiotics. London: Indiana University Press. 1979, p.7
Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as signs in everyday speech, but of anything which stands for something else. In a semiotic
sense, signs take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects.
8
The object or subject matter of semiotic inquiry is not just signs but the action of signs or semiosis. This action, we now see, occurs at a number of levels
that can be distinguished or identified as specific spheres or zones of sign activity.
9
It is well known that semiotics as we find it today traces back mainly to two contemporaneous pioneers, one in the field of linguistics and one in the field
of philosophy. The first of these, Ferdinand de Saussure, envisioned the possible developments under the label of semiology, which seems to have been a word of
his own coining, fashioned, of course, from the Greek semeion. The second, C. S. Peirce, chose the name semiotic, also fashioned from the Greek but not of Peirces
own coining.
10
2. Peirce’s theory of semiotics
Charles Sanders Peirce 1839 –1914, whose surname is pronounced
„purse’, was a son of Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor of mathematics and astronomy and, at the time, America’s foremost mathematician.
11
C.S.Peirce was the founder of pragmatism and a pioneer in the field of semiotics. His work
8
Daniel Chandler. Semiotics for Beginners. 1994, p.8
9
John N Deely. Basics of Semiotics Advances in Semiotics. London: Indiana University Press. 1990, p.105
10
Ibid. p.3-4
11
T. L.Short. Peirce’s Theory of Signs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007, p.1
investigated the problem of meaning, which is the core aspect of semiosis as well as a significant issue in many academic fields.
12
Peirce said that a sign is an object which stands for another to some mind.
13
Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odors, flavors, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when
we invest them with meaning. „Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign’, declares Peirce in another book
14
. In Peirce’s own words:
A sign . . . [in the form of a representamen] is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses
somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the
interpretant
of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea,
which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen.
15
To use Peirce’s terminology, we can say that the sign, in the broad sense, consists of three interconnected elements: 1 the sign in the narrow sense, also
referred to as the representamen, i.e. that which represents something else; 2 the object
, i.e. that which the sign stands for, that which is represented by it; and finally 3 the possible or potential meaning the sign allows for, which may
12
Floyd Merrell. Peirce, Signs, And Meaning, Toronto Buffalo London: University Of Toronto Press. 1997, p.2
13
Steven C. Hamel. Op.Cit. p.67
14
Daniel Chandler. Semiotics The Basics. Second edition. New York: Taylor Francis, 2007, p.13
15
Daniel Candler, Op.Cit. p.29
materialize as its translation into a new sign. Peirce refers to this as the interpretant
.
16
The interaction between the representamen, the object and the interpretant is referred to by Peirce as „semeiosis’. A good explanation of how Peirce’s model
works is offered by one of his own students, Roderick Munday
17
:
Semeiosis, this term also spelled semiosis was used by Peirce to refer to the process of meaning-making
– specifically to the interaction between the representamen, the object and the interpretant.
18
According to Peirce semosis is unlimited process, however, Eco refuse it by the argument that semiosis process
will stop when human restricted by supra individual principle. Individual principle is cultural rule that decided and restricted the autonomy for doing interpretant
process in human mind. That can be understood because Eco saw the sign as unit of culture.
19
16
Jorgen Dines Johanson Sven Erik Larsen. Sign in Use an Introduction to Semiotics. New York: Taylor Francis, 2005, p.27
17
Daniel Chandler. Op. Cit. p.30
18
Ibid p.259
19
Benny H. Hoed. Op. Cit. p.26
Representament
Object Interpretent
Figure 1. Pei rce’s semotic triangle.
Nicole said in the site that Peirce tries to engender and to process signs in order to make them meaningful through an intricate interplay among firstness,
secondness, and thirdness. 1.
Firstness is a conception of being that is independent of anything else. 2.
Secondness is the mode of being that is in relation to something else. This is the category that includes the individual, experience, fact, existence, and
action-reaction. 3.
Thirdness belongs to the domain of rules and laws; however, a law can only be manifested through the occurrences of its application, that is, by
secondness; and these occurrences themselves actualize qualities, and
therefore, firstness. Thirdness is the mediator through which a first and a
second are brought into relation.
20
3. Three Trichotomies of Signs
