The Semiotic School Of Communication

1.

A control description sheet communicates to orienteers detailed information about features of a control point. But what does communication mean?

It is not only a subject of study, on the grounds that it involves approaches from various perspectives, e.g. linguistic, sociological, psychological. In order to make it easier to examine communication, Fiske makes some assumptions, thereby, he establishes “a general definition of communication as ‘social interaction through messages’”(1990: 2). Moreover, he emphasises two main traditions in the study of communication, which are: the process school and the semiotic school. Both of them define communication as Fiske (1990: 2) did it, but they interpret and understand it on their own way. In order

1.1.1. The process school.

The process school, which interprets communication as transmission of messages, owes its name to the fact that “it sees communication as a process by which one person affects the behaviour or state of mind of another”. Based on psychology and sociology it focuses on the acts of communication. (Fiske 1990: 2). In the process, following elements are distinguished: sender, receiver, encoding, decoding, channel and media. What differentiate it from the semiotic school are primarily the concepts of message and communication failure.

According to this school, the message is the thing deliberately transmitted by the sender in the process of communication. It is the deliberateness that decides whether a signal is a message or not. It is believed that the intention does not have to be stated or conscious, but it must be retrievable. Moreover, the same school assumes that when the result of the communication process is different than expected communication failure occurs.

has its fundamentals in Shannon and Weaver’s model of

Sign structural models - analysing a structured set of relationships which enable a message to signify something. 1.4.1. Peirce, as a philosopher, was concerned with meaning on the grounds of structural relation of signs, people and objects.

“A sign 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. The sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. (In Fiske 1990: 42)

In other words, a sign (e.g. dog) refers to an object (real animal) which causes the interpretant to be created in a users mind. So the sign and the user’s experience of the object produce its mental concept. Every user has a different interpretant of the sign, because of social and psychological differences. Encoder and decoder are both users of the sign, there is no difference.

1.4.2. Saussare

Saussare on the other hand focuses on the sign itself and its relation to other signs. He defined sign as a combination of a signifier, the sign’s physical object like words or sounds, and a siginified, the mental concept to which it