Semiotic Study of English Text

Abstract

Researches show that semiotics is both a kind of theory and a kind of methodology. Contemporary semioticians study signs not in isolation but as part of semiotic sign systems. They study how meanings are made, concerned not only with communication but also with the construction and maintenance of reality. Semiotics supplies people with a new thinking mode, which can be used to analyze some phenomena or problems in many fields. A semiotic study of text scrutinizes the various signs in the text in an attempt to characterize their structure and identify potential meanings, especially socio-cultural meanings. Semioticity is one of the important characteristics in text. Semiotics seeks to analyze texts as structured wholes, involving identifying the components within the semiotic system, and the structural relations between these components. Semiotics stresses the semiotic structures and relations both within and outside the sign system, and their interactions.