Editing Semiotics (section)

=== Ferdinand de Saussure ===
[[Ferdinand de Saussure]] founded his semiotics, which he called [[Ferdinand de Saussure#Language as semiology|semiology]], in the social sciences:<ref>Cited in [[Daniel Chandler|Chandler, Daniel]]. ''Semiotics for Beginners''. "Introduction."</ref>

{{blockquote|It is...possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek ''semeîon'', 'sign'). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge. ||title=|source=}}

[[Thomas Sebeok]]<ref group="lower-alpha">The whole anthology, ''Frontiers in Semiotics'', was devoted to the documentation of this ''pars pro toto'' move of Sebeok.</ref> would assimilate ''semiology'' to ''semiotics'' as a part to a whole, and was involved in choosing the name ''[[Semiotica]]'' for the first international journal devoted to the study of signs. Saussurean semiotics have exercised a great deal of influence on the schools of structuralism and post-structuralism. [[Jacques Derrida]], for example, takes as his object the Saussurean relationship of signifier and signified, asserting that signifier and signified are not fixed, coining the expression {{Lang|fr|différance}}, relating to the endless deferral of meaning, and to the absence of a "transcendent signified".