Semiotics Preliminary Exercise 2

 Ferdinand de Saussure's Theory of Semiotics

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 - 1913) is a Swiss linguist who was one of the main people who helped develop modern day understanding of semiotics. Similar to Barthes, who I spoke on in Semiotics Preliminary Exercise 1, Saussure helped develop the idea of the signified and signifier. One of his major beliefs was that everything represents for something, which is often not the literal meaning of it. A common example used is the word "tree". When one refers to a tree, they could be referring to the idea of a tree (life, green, air, oxygen, cleanliness) rather than a physical tree.

To help explain this, I analyzed a video clip of "The Hunger Games". To provide some context: they are selecting a participant to represent their "district" in the hunger games, and it is pretty much guaranteed that they will die if they volunteer, so nobody wants to volunteer.






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