Editing Semiotics (section)

=== Pictorial semiotics<!--'Pictorial semiotics' redirects here--> ===
'''Pictorial semiotics'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--><ref>{{Cite journal|title=Pictorial Semiotics|url=http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100326357|publisher=Oxford University Press, n.d. Web.|website=Oxford Index|access-date=2014-10-31|archive-date=2018-09-20|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180920124019/http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100326357|url-status=dead}}</ref> is intimately connected to art history and theory. It goes beyond them both in at least one fundamental way, however. While [[art history]] has limited its visual analysis to a small number of pictures that qualify as "works of art", pictorial semiotics focuses on the properties of pictures in a general sense, and on how the artistic conventions of images can be interpreted through pictorial codes. Pictorial codes are the way in which viewers of pictorial representations seem automatically to decipher the artistic conventions of images by being unconsciously familiar with them.<ref>{{Cite journal|title=Pictorial Codes|url=http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100326343?rskey=TyYRDS&result=6|publisher=Oxford University Press, n.d. Web|website=Oxford Index|access-date=2014-10-31|archive-date=2014-10-31|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141031201421/http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100326343?rskey=TyYRDS&result=6|url-status=dead}}</ref>

According to Göran Sonesson, a Swedish semiotician, pictures can be analyzed by three models:  the narrative model, which concentrates on the relationship between pictures and time in a chronological manner as in a comic strip;  the rhetoric model, which compares pictures with different devices as in a metaphor; and  the Laokoon model, which considers the limits and constraints of pictorial expressions by comparing textual mediums that utilize time with visual mediums that utilize space.<ref>{{citation |last1=Sonesson|first1=Göran|date=1988|title=Methods and Models in Pictorial Semiotics|pages=2–98}}</ref>

The break from traditional art history and theory—as well as from other major streams of semiotic analysis—leaves open a wide variety of possibilities for pictorial semiotics. Some influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, structuralist, and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology and sociology.