The Collaborative International Dictionary
Semeiotics \Se`mei*ot"ics\ (s[=e]`m[-i]*[o^]t"[i^]ks), or Semiotics \Se`mi*ot"ics\, n.
The study of signs as an element of communication; the analysis of systems of communication; -- also called semiology.
a theory of signs and symbols, including as branches semantics, pragmatics and syntactics.
--[RHUD]
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1690s, "sign language," from Greek semeion "a sign, mark, token," from sema (compare semiotic) + -ology. As "branch of medical science concerned with symptoms," 1839; as "logical theory of signs" from 1923. Related: Semiological.
Wiktionary
n. 1 semiotics, the study of signs. 2 (context dated English) The science of the signs or symptoms of disease; symptomatology. 3 (context dated English) The art of using signs in signalling.
Wikipedia
Semiology (from Greek σημεῖον sēmeion, "a sign, a mark") is a branch of Gregorian Chant research. Semiology refers specifically to the study of the neumes as found in the earliest fully notated manuscripts of Gregorian Chant, the oldest of which have been dated to the 9th century. The first application of the term 'semiology' (which first appeared in the 1960s) for the study of Latin chant was made by Dom Eugene Cardine (1905–1988), a monk of the Abbey of Solesmes. In this context, 'semiology' is understood as 'the study of musical signs'. Text and neumatic notation, together with significative letters adjoined to the neumes, presents an effective and integrated mnemonic for the rhythmical interpretation and the melody. While Gregorian palaeography offers a description of the various neumes and their rhythmical and melodic values, Gregorian semiology explains their meaning for practical interpretation.
Usage examples of "semiology".
I did not feel I was leaving the field of this general semiology of our bourgeois world, the literary aspect of which I had begun to study in earlier essays.
I do not mean that semiology could account for all these aspects of research equally well: they have different contents.
This is the case with mythology: it is a part both of semiology inasmuch as it is a formal science, and of ideology inasmuch as it is an historical science: it studies ideas-in-form.
Let me therefore restate that any semiology postulates a relation between two terms, a signifier and a signified.
In semiology, the third term is nothing but the association of the first two, as we saw.
If one wishes to connect a mythical schema to a general history, to explain how it corresponds to the interests of a definite society, in short, to pass from semiology to ideology, it is obviously at the level of the third type of focusing that one must place oneself: it is the reader of myths himself who must reveal their essential function.
Aunt Lindsay was Professor of Vertebrate Semiology at the University of Wisconsin, and Aunt Kym ran the only sensory deprivation spa in Madison.
And just as interpretation in the sixteenth century, with its superimposition of a semiology upon a hermeneutics, was essentially a knowledge based upon similitude, so the odering of things by means of signs constitutes all empirical forms of knowledge as knowledge based upon identity and difference.
He would have to lecture for a little longer at the film school than he had hoped: fortunately, his subject gave him no trouble there, because he knew how easily difficult the synthesis between semiology and Marxism could be made to appear.
Barthes was a mid-century master of semiology, the study of artistic and cultural artifacts according to the sign systems of which they are made and the manner in which their particular signs, symbols, images, and words function.
This semiology extends beyond the written text and incorporates the gesture, voluntary and convulsive.
If one wishes to connect a mythical schema to a general history, to explain how it corresponds to the interests of a definite society, in short, to pass from semiology to ideology, it is obviously at the level of the third type of focusing that one must place oneself: it is the reader of myths himself who must reveal their essential function.