schema/schemata * A schema (sometimes called scheme), schemata (or schemes), may best be viewed as a model (Baddeley 1976) or as a inini-system (Phillips 1981) by which wc internalize, structure and make sense of an event. * The term is used to explain how established ways of understanding, or ways of stmcturing experience, are used to make sense of new situations. The new is made to fit the pattern of the familiar. This would explain the distortion of novel information so that it fits in with existing expectations: a useful account of information loss or distortion within communication processes. With reference to cognitive development, Piaget has referred to schemata as symbolic representations that are assimilated within an intellectual framework. For example, a child might assimilate the sign 'pram' and this then provides a future understanding or reference point for other restricting yet mobile objects. Ultimately, complementary schemata may be organized into some coherent structure or mental map. As such, they may modified or replaced as more and more events and relations ps are assimilated and acted upon, or as cognitive structuring becomes more advanced. pj See cognition, memory Further reading Phillips (1981); Neisser (1976) The study of meaning from a linguistic perspective, '"antics aims to analyse and explain how meanings are ed in language. Current enquiry seems to be organized express jjnportant distinctions. aB'Jj? flense versus reference The meaning of a linguistic ex-• „ _ a word, for instance - can be treated in terms of its nnectJ°n with extra-linguistic reality. Thus, the meaning of the ^ord 'chair' lies in its capacity to refer outwards from the lance to objects like the one on which you may be sitting as you j^ad this entry. From a different perspective, however, the mean-of a word can be considered in terms of its relationship to jther words in the language. Thus, the meaning of the word 'chair' lies in its relationship with other words such as 'furniture', •table', 'seat', 'bench', etc. A famous example of the distinction between sense and reference is the way in which objectively the same planet - Venus - can be referred to equally appropriately as 'the morning star' and 'the evening star', since it has the capacity to shine brightly in both the morning sky and the evening sky. Consequently, the two expressions 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' have an identical referent, although the sense of each expression is of course quite different. More attention in semantics has been given to the area of sense relations than to that of reference, in line with Wittgenstein's dictum: 'the meaning of a word is its use in the language'. But ignoring either side of the contrast between sense and reference tends to lead to unbalanced theories of meaning and this can have consequences that go beyond the domains of linguistic theory. It is worth noting, for instance, that rival aesthetic theories can be divided into two camps depending upon whether they tend to favour one or other side of the distinction between reference and sense: realist theories favour art that appears to mirror or reflect reality in as direct a way as possible; other more Formalist theories, however, stress the conventionality of artiste representation and see art, and more particularly literature, as ^continual experiment with meaning (or 'sense'). Contemporary erary theory tends to be very strong on the conventional bases meaning, so much so that at times it seems to deny the sibihty of any reality at all outside language. At the very least, 276 277 it insists that reality is not mediated to us directly kj constructed through acts of meaning, so that we have no access to it outside of language. One pitfall of this position n°di*ct that into it can lead to a species of idealism in which reality is spoken existence through language, and arguments about interpreta*"10 become avowedly subjective, to the exclusion of culture 00 history as material process. In modern semantics sense relations have been treated in .u. ____i_______u:_. a....... ter i ■ -11 rWl tlni* still survives intact. These kinds of distinctions are important for the analyse meaning in all kinds of discourse. Ideological claims f0" ■ stance, are often promoted implicidy rather than explicit" covertly rather than overtly; and they often need to be recov from the presuppositions or entailments of a discourse rather th^ from its surface assertions. Thus, when a Ministry of Defe^^ pamphlet urged that 'Britain must do everything in its pow ... to deter Russia from further acts of aggression', various unargued propositions were merely presupposed; notably f0r example: (i) 'Britain has power' and (ii) 'Russia is committin acts of aggression'. (3) Text versus context The third major area of inquiry and debate is addressed to issues such as how much of meaning is created and carried by the linguistic system and how much and in what way it is determined by crucial characteristics of the context in which any utterance is grounded. Indeed, some aspects of meaning previously considered to be semantic - i.e. part of the linguistic system itself - are now being treated as part of pragmatics. The history of linguistics during the last sixty years can be read in terms of a continual deferral of the study of meaning. Indeed, the progression during this time has been very much from the smaller units of linguistic organization, such as the phoneme to the larger, such as the sentence or text; it has also been a progression from substance (phonology) to significance (semantics). Meaning, however, has at last come centre stage, and the last ten years has seen an immense burgeoning of work in both semantics and pragmatics. Meaning, of course, cannot be other than the ultimate goal of linguistic enquiry; and findings in this area undoubtedly have important consequences for associated areas of scholarship such as media studies, literary criticism, interpretive sociology, or cognitive science, in all of which issues of meaning are often at the centre of debate. MM 280 collocation, discourse, multi-accentuality, pragma-. semiotics, speech act ^her reading Lyons (1981) * The study of the social production of Semiotics isn't so much an aca- s»mioti«/semio,ogy meaning from sign systems defll'c di^P0'16 as a theoretical approach and its associated methods of analysis. It has not become widely institutionalized as a 'subject'. y^n indication of semiotics' provisional and marginal status is that it is still usually defined in the terms first proposed by its so-called 'father', the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. He suggested a 'science that studies the life of signs within society', in a book published in 1916. The suggestion was taken up principally by tne French structuralist Roland Barthes, who was chiefly responsible for popularizing and extending semiotics in the 1960s. Semiotics as an intellectual enterprise endeavours to reveal and analyse the extent to which meanings are produced out of the structural relations that exist within any sign system, and not from the external reality they seem so naturally to depict. Since it is committed to the notion of systematic relations operating in abstract structures (that is, structures that cannot be observed direcdy, like language), semiotics has a tendency towards abstraction, formalism and lack of historical grounding. However, since it is equally committed to the social production of meaning (language cannot be invented by individuals) semiotics has always sought to relate the production of meanings to other kinds of social production and to social relations. Semiotics as a method takes its terminology from linguistics and uses spoken language as the prime example of a sign system. However, its growth and success is not so much in the analysis of speech as of other sign systems, especially literature, cinema, publicity, photography and television. In fart semiotics has become associated largely with the increasingly serious study of various forms of popular culture. It has been especially useful 111 this context, since popular culture was previously a very 281 neglected field in academic study, and such attention receive was often either highly derogatory or else a lit^ ^ branch of American empirical sociology. Semiotics does^ ^ principle at least, approach popular culture with prior n°1' * artistic or moral merit by which to judge a given" 1^°^ °^ approach common in certain kinds of literary critici ^ unlike empirical sociology it is able to deal with the s ^ rather than with large-scale patterns. Thus semiotics is in the first place text-centred, since ' devoted to analysing how meaning systems produce rrt via texts. But as it has developed, greater attention has beeri^ to the role of the reader in realizing or producing meanings^*"* of textual resources in an interactive way. Thus semiotics ht^* by showing how texts were structured reworkings of the signs' codes, and so on of their particular sign systems, and how these structures generated myths, connotations, and so on. It went on to demonstrate how such textual structures and devices as point-of-view, mode of address or preferred reading pro-posed or even fixed a position from which sense could be made by a reader - the positioning of the subject. At this point it became clear that 'actual' readers might not necessarily occupy the position proposed for them by ideological texts and discourses, and further that hitherto too much attention had been paid to the cognitive or rational activities involved in reading, and not sufficient to the pleasure and desire involved. Thus semiotics was forced to take account of the social processes in which texts are encountered, and of the role of pleasure in these social processes. Clearly such issues as these are not the exclusive preserve of semiotics, and there has in fact been a fruitful cross-fertilization between it and other intellectual enterprises, notably psychoanalytical theory, Marxism, feminism and various sociological approaches. The distinctive feature of semiotics remains, however, its attempt to specify in general and in detail how meaning is soa produced (not individually created), and subject to power lations and struggles just like other kinds of social Pr^uf?°"t When it turns its attention to the individual reader, this sho be understood as a return to the free-floating abstract inai the individual/subjea whose individuality is largely a but rat" ^ ^ ideological discourses and signifying practices product •^iaj3jts or encounters in social relations, which sine jjj cultural studies, structuralism frrtherreading Culler (1976, 1983); Hawkes (1977); Fiske (1982) / eceiver * Broadly, the key points at the beginning and *ed a f the linear process model of communication, though in models they may be preceded by terms like source, and followed by ones like reaction. * The terms sender and receiver are the most general ones, easily understood by the layperson, but within their area of meaning we will come across a number of more specific terms. The most common of these are: Encoder/decoder Using these terms can imply that we think of the message as having an abstract existence to which encoding gives a concrete form that can be transmitted. Decoding can then restore it to its original abstract content or meaning. This is the implication of their use within the process school. But these terms (or more commonly their verbal forms encoding and decoding) are also used in the semiotic, linguistic school. Here they imply that a text is composed of a number of codes which are derived from other texts and cultural products: encoders and decoders who share broadly similar codes (as a result of broadly similar cultural experience) will generate broadly similar meanings in the text, but those with different cultural experience, and thus different codes, may find their meanings differ significantly. Addresser/addressee These terms are used by Jakobson, a linguist, and they imply a relationship between the two parties, within which certain modes of address are appropriate. An addresser has an orientation towards the addressee that affects the form and function of the message. Transmitter/receiver These are pieces of technology used to extend human powers of transmission and thus the range of communication, but are sometimes used in the process school to refer to human beings. Author/reader Those involved in the semiotic act of encoding 283 and decoding (see above). The reader is as creative as the as both bring to the text their cultural experience via th*11^01' that they use. The author may, through textual means impose his or her 'authority' on the reader (that is m ' ^ 10 him/her to a preferred reading), but can never do so absol^^ The reader is where the signifying system of the text inte"^ with the value system of the culture, and reading U the ation of meaning that results. genet- JF sense/sense relations * The communicative value assumed h word or expression by virtue of its place within a linguist system. * The precise value of a word or expression may be explored in terms of its sense relations with other words in the system. Particular kinds of sense relation include those of antonymy, synonymy, and hyponomy (see semantics), which are relations of opposite meaning, identical meaning and included meaning, respectively. All words and expressions, of course, are capable of sustaining multiple senses, though context usually works to highlight one sense and exclude others. MM Sec meaning, multi-accentuality, polysemic, pragmatics, semantics Further reading Lyons (1981) íust have i sign * A sign has three essential characteristics: it must physical form, it must refer to something other than itself, and it must be used and recognized by people as a sign. * Bardies gives the example of a rose: a rose is normally just a flower, but if a young man presents it to his girl friend it becomes a sign, for11 refers to his romantic passion, and she recognizes that it does-Signs, and the ways they are organized into codes or languages, are the basis of any study of communication. They can have a variety of forms, such as words, gestures, photograph50 architectural features. Semiotics, which is the study of s'S"5' -md culture, is concerned to establish the essential features C***eS and the ways they work in social life, of sig115' jjyjjes a sign into its two constituent elements - the ^"fier (its physical form as perceived by our senses), and the ^ified (the mental concept of what it refers to). Peirce thinks 11 jjjgre are three types of signs - icons, indexes and symbols. h these early authorities have had a considerable influence ^er later work in this area. Saussure stresses that a sign can properly be understood only in relation to other signs in the same code or system: its meaning is determined partly by other signs which it is not. The significance of a bowler hat is clear only when we say it is not a topper, and not a trilby. The sign boy is understood as not-MAN or not-GiRL, and man as not-ANiMAL, or not-GOD. As a linguist, Saussure is primarily interested in the relation of signs to each other within a code, and in the relationship of signifer to signified within a sign. He is less interested in the relationship of a sign to its referential reality (which he calls signification). Peirce, on the other hand, gives this relationship at least as much emphasis as others. He, like his followers Ogden and Richards, takes the viewpoint of a philosopher, and believes that a sign can be studied only in relationship to two other elements which we can simplify into the terms mind and referential reality. His terms for them are, respectively, the interpretant and the object; Ogden and Richards's terms are the reference and the referent. See signification, signifier, symbol signal * In communication theory, the physical form that the message is given in order to be transmitted: the term does not refer to the content or meaning, but only to the physical existence or form of the message.* jf 284 285 signification * For Saussure, the relationship of s'gn system to its referential reality. * Bardies makes much ^ the concept, and uses it to refer to the way that signs °f culture: he adds the dimension of cultural values to * ' use of the term. aussure's Bardies identifies two orders of signification: the first is rt, denotation (which is what Saussure calls 'signification*) the °^ is that of connotation and myth and occurs when the first^0011^ meanings of the sign meet the values and established disco01^ of the culture. The first order of signification: denotation This refers to the " or literal relationship of a sign to its referent. It assumes thaTh'6 relationship is objective and value-free - for all their differen the words 'horse', 'steed' and 'nag' all denote the same animal The mechanical/chemical action of a camera in producing an image of what it is pointed at is denotation. The concept is generally of use only for analytical purposes; in practice there is no such thing as an objective, value-free order of signification except in such highly specialized languages as that of mathematics: 4 + 8= 12 is a purely denotative statement. The second order of signification: connotation This occurs when the denotative meaning of the sign is made to stand for the value-system of the culture or the person using it. It then produces associative, expressive, attitudinal or evaluative shades of meaning. In photography the mechanical/chemical process produces denotative meanings, but the human intervention in the choice of features such as focus, framing and lighting produces the conno-tative. Connotation, then, is determined by the form of the signifier: changing the signifier while keeping the same signified on the first order is the way to control the connotative meanings. Examples are: two photographs of the same girl, one in sharp focus, the other in soft; the same word spoken in different tones of voice, or printed in different typefaces; or the choice between 'horse', 'nag' and 'steed'. Connotation works through style an^ tone, and is concerned with the how rather than the what o communication. The second order of signification: myth Barthes's rather sP^y ized use of the term myth refers to a chain of concepts wi j v,rnuffhout a culture, by which its members conceptua-tedtnro«& _______________,.f>,.____.,_____• aCC^P ^^gjstand a particular topic or part of their social experi-^ ° Thus our myth of the countryside, for example, consists of a fllCC of concepts such as it is good, it is natural, it is spiritually ^^h'ne it is peaceful, it is beautiful, it is a place for leisure and r*"^ ^on Conversely, our myth of the city contains concepts fC^*^urinaturalness, constriction, work, tension, stress. These SU h are arbitrary with respect to their referents, and culture-m ec in the eighteenth century, for example, the city was ' h looized as good, rivilized, urbane, polite; the countryside as ^ uncivilized, rude, primitive. A typical twentieth-century advertisement shows a happy family picnicking in a meadow heside a stream, with their car parked in the background. The mother is preparing the meal, the father and son are kicking a football, and the daughter is picking flowers. The ad acts as a trigger to activate our mYtns °f countryside, family, sex roles, work-and-leisure, and so on. To understand this ad we must bring to it our 'ways of conceptualizing' these topics (or our myths): if we do not have these myths, the ad will mean something different to us, or may not mean very much at all. The term myth, then, is not to be used in the layperson's sense of a 'false belief, but in the anthropological sense of 'a culture's way of c»ncepmalizing an abstract topic'. Myths are conceptual and operate on the plane of the signified; connotations are evaluative, emotive and operate on the plane of the signifier. Signification and ideology: the third order Fiske and Hartley (1978) suggest that the connotations and myths of a culture are the manifest signs of its ideology. The way that the varied connotations and myths fit together to form a coherent pattern or sense of wholeness, that is, the way they 'make sense', is evidence of an underlying invisible, organizing principle - ideology. Barthes identifies a similar relationship when he calls connotators (the signifiers of connotation) 'the rhetoric of ideology'; Fiske and Hartley suggest that it may be helpful to think of ideology as the third order of signification. 286 287 NATURE -- CULTURE See code, ideology, intersubjectivity, signifier/signified signifier/signified * The pair of concepts which together con tute a sign according to Saussure. He models them thus: The signifier is the physical form of the sign as we perceive it through our senses — the sound of a word or the appearance of a photograph. The signified is the user's mental concept of what the sign refers to. * The relationship between the two can be either arbitrary or iconic. In the arbitrary sign there is no necessary relationship between the signifier and the signified: the signifier takes the form it does by convention or agreement among its users. In the iconic sign, the nature of the signified influences the form of the signifier: the signifier looks or sounds like its signified (see motivation (of the sign)). It is important to realize that these two terms are used for analytical convenience only: a sign cannot actually be split into signifier and signified any more than a coin can be split into heads and tails. Saussure believed that the arbitrary nature of verbal language is the main reason for its complexity, subdety and ability to perform a wide range of functions. G N S constant dynamic interaction between the two See motivation (of the sign), sign, signification 288