Meaning-makingIn psychology, meaning-making is the process of how people construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self. The term is widely used in constructivist approaches to counseling psychology and psychotherapy, especially during bereavement in which people attribute some sort of meaning to an experienced death or loss. The term is also used in educational psychology. In a broader sense, meaning-making is the main research object of semiotics, biosemiotics, and other fields.
Visual rhetoricVisual rhetoric is the art of effective communication through visual elements such as images, typography, and texts. Visual rhetoric encompasses the skill of visual literacy and the ability to analyze images for their form and meaning. Drawing on techniques from semiotics and rhetorical analysis, visual rhetoric expands on visual literacy as it examines the structure of an image with the focus on its persuasive effects on an audience. Although visual rhetoric also involves typography and other texts, it concentrates mainly on the use of images or visual texts.
Encoding (semiotics)Encoding, in semiotics, is the process of creating a message for transmission by an addresser to an addressee. The complementary process interpreting a message received from an addresser is called decoding. The process of message exchanges, or semiosis, is a key characteristic of human life depending on rule-governed and learned codes that, for the most part, unconsciously guide the communication of meaning between individuals.
Prague linguistic circleThe Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation from 1928 to 1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Café Derby in Prague, which is also where meetings took place during its first years. The Prague School has had a significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics.
UmweltIn the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, umwelt (plural: umwelten; from the German Umwelt meaning "environment" or "surroundings") is the "biological foundations that lie at the very center of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal". The term is usually translated as "self-centered world". Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment.
SemiosphereThe semiosphere is an idea in biosemiotic theory proposing that, contrary to ideas of nature determining sense and experience, the phenomenal world is a creative and logical structure of processes of semiosis where signs operate together to produce sense and experience. Abstraction (sociology) Human communication Biosemiotic theorists regard the idea of the semiosphere as beginning with continental philosophers' recognition of an epistemological gap between the ontological and the ontic, where it is initially difficult to conceptualize the way that subjectivity is created in between them.
Semiotics of music videosSemiotics of music videos is the observation of symbolism used within music videos. Semiotics in popular music, or mesomusica, is different from semiotics in other musical forms, because pop music denotes a cultural object (Matusitz, 2004). Popular music has many signs in itself because it has many components and uses, but it also appeals to the emotions of a generation. Music is the “logical expression” of feelings, a "symbolic form". Music videos are an example of syntagm, wherein interacting signifiers form a meaningful whole.
Sign relationA sign relation is the basic construct in the theory of signs, also known as semiotics, as developed by Charles Sanders Peirce. Thus, if a sunflower, in turning towards the sun, becomes by that very act fully capable, without further condition, of reproducing a sunflower which turns in precisely corresponding ways toward the sun, and of doing so with the same reproductive power, the sunflower would become a Representamen of the sun. (C.S. Peirce, "Syllabus" (c. 1902), Collected Papers, CP 2.274).
Semiotic literary criticismSemiotic literary criticism, also called literary semiotics, is the approach to literary criticism informed by the theory of signs or semiotics. Semiotics, tied closely to the structuralism pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, was extremely influential in the development of literary theory out of the formalist approaches of the early twentieth century. The early forms of literary semiotics grew out of formalist approaches to literature, especially Russian formalism, and structuralist linguistics, especially the Prague school.
ZoosemioticsZoosemiotics is the semiotic study of the use of signs among animals, more precisely the study of semiosis among animals, i.e. the study of how something comes to function as a sign to some animal. It is the study of animal forms of knowing. Considered part of biosemiotics, zoosemiotics is related to the fields of ethology and animal communication. It was developed by semiotician Thomas Sebeok based on the theories of German-Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll.
