Indicator (index)......

Indicative means that the sign and the object can prompt each other because of a certain relationship, especially the relationship between cause and effect, adjacency, part and whole, so that the receiver can think of its object, and the role of the indicator sign is to draw the interpreter's attention to the object.

The most fundamental property of an indicator sign is to direct the interpreter's attention to the symbol object.

For example, the road sign before the car turns, the wind flag indicates the wind direction, the mercury column of the thermometer indicates the air temperature, and so on. Some experts, such as Peirce in the United States, call it an index symbol. The so-called indexed symbol is the information that infers the symbol through the relevant connection, without explanation.

The use of masks as a substitute for the theater of Europeans is a vivid example, and these must be conventional.

Statute symbol.

Relying on the relationship between socially agreed symbols and meanings, such signs are called normative signs. A prescriptive sign is a sign that has no reason to connect with an object, that is, what Saussure called an "arbitrary/arbitrary" sign.

For example, red and yellow are used in traffic to refer to warnings. "+", "—"=" in mathematics, etc. Another example is communication code, zebra crossing, etc., which is still the most used in the field of transportation.

Peirce named it a symbol, and some experts also called it a finger symbol.

In short, the more similar or close the symbol is to the object, the easier it is to recognize, and the more abstract or ethnocultural the symbol, the more difficult it is to recognize.

For example, Europeans often wrap snakes around their cups to refer to medicine, and it is difficult for Orientals to understand what this means. For those that can be used all over the world, it is best to use consensus symbols that resemble or are closer to the object.

If it's a cultural type, do it according to the signifier or signifier mind. If neither is possible, it is necessary to use mandatory statute symbols.

However, design does not need to be so strict, it is very necessary to use it cleverly, the more you know, the greater the chance of inspiration, so knowledge is the contact point for creating inspiration.

Four patterns of semiotic development.

The first model is the linguistic model......

Saussure believed that language, although only one of the symbols used by human beings, was a disproportionately large system of symbols, and that linguistic research should provide a model for semiotics, so the fundamental principle of symbolic expression was arbitrariness.

In the early twentieth century, "Saussure linguistics matured rapidly", and in the sixties, when the trend of structuralist semiotics surged into a powerful movement, linguistics provided a systematic and well-established theoretical framework.

The semiotic systems proposed by the Prague School in the thirties and the Paris School in the sixties were mostly based on Saussure's principle, and their semiotics were actually "linguistic" semiotics.

The linguistic model makes semiotics inevitably fall into the closed pattern of structuralism. Saussure's theory is difficult to get rid of the closed system view.

The second model is the logical-rhetorical model proposed by Peirce.

This model considers all symbol types, not linguistics.

Therefore, it is found that the rationality of symbolic ideograms is different, and this starting point prompts the semiotics to expand to non-verbal and even non-human symbols. More importantly, Peirce's model proposes a series of thirds of symbolic signification, opening up symbols to infinite derivation.

For most of the twentieth century, despite the insistence of Morris, Mead, and others, the Pierce model was neglected. By the seventies, the semiotic community had "rediscovered" Pierce. Sibiok, Eco, and others advanced semiotics to the post-structuralist stage.

Peirce's theory has become the basic theory of contemporary semiotics and the most important model of semiotics. Some commentators even believe that Saussure's contribution to the development of semiotics in the modern era can only be said to be "quite small", and that the "father of semiotics" has been marginalized by the development of semiotics in recent years.

The third model is Cassirer's "cultural semioticism".

Cassirer established a symbolic philosophy as a universal "cultural grammar".

Cassirer's symbolic ideas were fully developed in the literary aesthetics of his disciple Lange. Their arguments are brilliant, but they are difficult to deduce further in other disciplines, and this model is similar to the American literary theorist Burke's theory of "symbolic action".

Burke's position was close to that of the New Criticism, which in the early fifties pushed to broaden its horizons.

The Cassirtian school paid little attention to the operability of semiotics as a methodology, and their model became a kind of historical relic, which has since disappeared from semiotics due to the absence of successors.

But their emphasis on culture is still a prized academic treasure today.

The pioneer of the fourth model was the Soviet-Russian semiotician Bakhtin.

Bakhtin pioneered the tradition of studying culture in terms of form, which some people call "language-centric Marxism", but his achievements have long been obscure; In the sixties and seventies, the Moscow-Kartu school, led by Lotman and Ivanov, was carried forward.

This school insists on using semiotics to study society and culture, especially their theory of "symbolic field", and focuses on the study of culture from a broad perspective, getting rid of the triviality that is often associated with formalism. However, the theoretical model of this school is mainly borrowed from information theory and cybernetics, especially Prigogine's dissipation theory, and has a strong technical color.

How to deal with the tension between scientific models and humanistic thinking is still a question that needs to be explored.

All four of these models have contributed to modern semiotic theory, but they also have weaknesses that must be overcome for the further development of semiotics.

Semiotics has come out of the previous model again and again, and its maturity is the result of self-learning and self-improvement in the semiotic community. It is undeniable that the starting point of today's semiotics should be Peirce's theory, not Saussure's theory.

Three stages in the development of semiotics.

Phase 1......

The first half of the twentieth century was the stage of model laying and interpretation.

In addition to the founders of the above four models, there are also a number of earliest promoters: Morris developed Peirce's theory into a system; Lange & Söhne advanced Cassirer's theory in aesthetics and literature, and Burke echoed Cassirer's theory; And the Bakhtin theory was shelved for political reasons.

The most prominent of the early advances was Saussure's theory, which matured into a complete system by the sixties thanks to the enthusiasm of the Prague school (Mukalovsky, Trubetskoy, etc.) and the semiotic linguistic school (Yermslev, Martinay, Banvinist, etc.).

Phase 2......

Emerging in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century, semiotics took off as a theory.

Saussure's semiotics developed directly into the structuralist tide of the sixties. Jacobson, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Greymas, Todorov and others developed structuralism into the most prominent school of thought of the sixties; Semiotics began to be involved in other currents of thought: Marxism (Goldman, Althusser), psychoanalysis (Lacan, Kristeva), phenomenology/hermeneutics (Merleau-Ponty, Licoeur), etc.

Most of these people do not admit that they belong to a movement called "structuralism", but they do not hide their passion for semiotics. At a later date, the Moscow-Tartu school began to take shape in the Soviet Union; Eco, Sibiok and others began to develop the semiotics of Peirce's branch.

The second stage is characterized by the emergence of semiotics as a large-scale methodology in the humanities and social sciences. This stage is characterized by the Saussure model.