A Study on Semiotics as a Literary Theory.
Compiled by:
Names Matric number
1) MAKINDE Kehinde O. 137437
2) FEMI-ADEOSUN Oluwadamilola Y. 143657
3) YAWE Doofan B. 180425
4) ODEBAMIKE Yemisi G. 137442
5) OYEKAN Bashirat Titilayo
6) AMIOLA Oyeleye
European studies,
Postgraduate school,University of Ibadan.
15th September, 2014.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The history behind semiotics testifies that it meant at first, a medical diagnosis. A study that identified the ways that various symptoms indicate the diseases that underlie them. It was not applied to the study of relation between human symbols and reality. Aristotle (384-322 BC) took it to investigate the relation between forms and reality more closely. He pointed out that words for instance, do indeed refer to real things, which helps to classify the world into real categories e.g. plants versus animals versus objects and so on.
St. Augustine (AD 354-430) defined a natural science as one that is found literally in nature such as bodily symptoms, the rustling of leaves, the colours of plants, as are the signals that animals emit in response to physical and emotional state. He distinguished this type of sign from a conventional sign, which is a sign made by humans. According to him, words, gestures and symbols are examples of conventional signs though in modern-day semiotic theory, these have been distinguished into verbal and nonverbal-words and other linguistic structures (expressions, phrases, etc.) could be termed as verbal signs; also, drawings and gestures are examples of non-verbal signs. As St. Augustine emphasized, conventional signs serve a fundamental psychological need that allow humans to encode and thus, familiarize with the world through routine recognitions.
He further defined sacred signs such as miracles, as signs containing messages from God. He believes these signs can only be understood on faith. He also emphasized that the whole process of understanding what signs mean is partly based on social conventions and partly on individual reactions to them. This idea was consistent with the hermeneutic tradition that had already been established by Clement of Alexandria (AD 150-215?), the Greek theologian and early Father of the Church. Hermeneutics was (and still is) the study of texts by taking into account their linguistic features and the historical contexts in which they were written.
His views were not known until the eleventh century, when interest in human signs was rekindled by traveling Arab scholars who had translated the works of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek thinkers. The result was the movement known as Scholasticim. Using Aristotle as their inspiration, the Scholastics asserted that signs captured truths, not constructed them. But within this movement there were some—the so-called nominalists—who argued that “truth” was a matter of subjective opinion and that signs captured at best, only illusory and highly variable human versions of it. John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) and William of Ockham (c.1285-c. 1349) for instance, stressed that signs only referred to other signs, rather than to actual things. The great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) countered however, that signs referred to real things since they were derived from sense impressions. But like St. Augustine, he asserted that sacred signs revealed truths that were beyond rational comprehension and therefore had to be accepted on faith.
About four centuries later, the British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) finally introduced the formal study of signs into philosophy in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), calling it semeiotics for the first time. Locke clearly anticipated that it would allow philosophers to study the relation between concepts and reality much more precisely. But the task he laid out for philosophy remained virtually unnoticed until the late nineteenth century, when the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) became the platform on which an autonomous field of inquiry was gradually constructed in the twentieth century. In his Cours de linguistique générale (1916), Saussure used the term semiology to designate the field. He coined it in obvious analogy to other scientific terms ending in-logy, such as psychology, biology, anthropology, (from Greek logos “word,” “study”). Somehow, Saussure’s term betrayed a belief in the supremacy of language among sign systems. He puts it this way:
“Language is a system of signs that expresses ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems” (Saussure 1916:16).
WHAT IS SEMIOTICS?
Semiotics which deals with the study of signs was propounded by Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Peirce. Although the two agree on the meaning of semiotics as the production and interpretation of meanings made by the deployment of acts and objects which function as signs in relation in relation to other sign, they defer in their concepts and conclusions. For Saussure, semiotics is based more on the concept of linguistics signifier and signified while Peirce’s is based on the logic of an object (referent) and reference (idea begotten by the sign). Saussure was less concerned with the referent instead emphasized the arbitrary nature of the relationships between the signifier and signified as well as the differences between signifiers in the production of memory.
Semiotics involves the study of not only of what we refer to as signs in everyday speech, but of anything which stands for something else which can be in form of words, images, sounds gestures and objects.
‘Signs do not just convey meanings, but constitute a medium in which meanings are constructed. Semiotics helps us to realize that meaning is not passively absorbed but arise only in the active process of interpretation …’ (Routledge 2006).
Semiotics literary criticism also called literary semiotics is the approach to literary criticism informed by the theory of signs pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure. It is concerned with a formal analysis of narrative forms which would resemble a literary syntax. A semiotic analysis of a literary text deals, instead of themes and general meaning with the way in which meaning is produced by the structure of independent signs, by codes and conventions. As a linguistic sign, the test has an arbitrary nature and is based in conventions.
In semiotic literary criticism, two things are important; signified and signifier or signification. The first gives the mental presentation of a thing or an idea while the latter helps in the understanding of the given sign while taking into consideration the context or the environment in which the sign is used i.e. the context of the situation and the context of the culture. The situational context interprets the signs in its immediate environment of the text i.e. cultural context of the characters used in the text. Signifier or signification is an instrument that serves to interpret and bring out the hidden sense of symbols in the text. It explains and elucidates the importance of the use of metaphors, metonymies, hyperboles, personifications, idiomatic expressions, proverbs, etc. Semiotic methods have been identified in two folds which are synchronic and diachronic methods.
• Synchronic method: It is the study of signs at a given point in time.
• Diachronic method: it is the study of how signs change, in form and meaning over time.
PRINCIPLES OF SEMIOTICS
1. Culture: Culture is the way of life of a people. It is the shared beliefs, customs, values, practices and social behaviour of a group. culture in relation to semiotics as described by discourse analysts, focuses on the ways in which the shape of discourse is determined by social and situational factors. Culture- specific language ideology may make purpose mere or less relevant to how people produce and interprets discourse in particular relations and settings.
2. Signification: It is the meaning of a concept or an idea brought by a word, an event or other phenomenon. Signification happens in two ways namely denotation and connotation. Denotation is the surface or literal meaning of a word while connotation is the more profound and figurative meaning of it. Connotation helps to expand the application of signs or words creatively. For example, the word ‘house’. The denotation of the word house could signify where someone lives while the connotation could signify in sentences below:
The house is in session— legislative assembly, quorum
The house roared in laughter— audience in a theatre
They sleep at one of the houses in UI— dormitory, hostel
3. Symbol: A symbol is something that stands for or represents something else, especially an object representing an abstraction. On this note, Ferdinand de Saussure identifies the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, that is to say, the conventionality of the relationship between form and meaning where he explains that there may be several forms to just a meaning. For example concept ‘house’ remains the same to different groups of people in the world but the way it is called is different. However, a symbol is a sign which would lose the character which makes it a sign if there were no interpretant.
4. Icon: an icon is a sign which tends to possess the attribute which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence.
5. Index: according to C.S Pierce, an index is a sign which would, at once lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant. For example, we will be too quick to assume that smoke is fire or that someone with a slurred speech is drunk. We should note that the presence of smoke does not necessarily indicate that there is fire somewhere and that someone’s slurred is points to drunkenness.
6. Idealism: This is a principle that there is an objectively existing world which is not dependent on our minds, and that people are able to understand aspects of that world through perception.
7. Conceptualism: By this we mean to refer to any feature of semantics which defines the meaning of a word or other expression to be the concept associated with it in the mind of the speaker and hearer.
8. Nominalism: As concept could be in form of a word or sign, nominalism says that the apprehension of a concept in the mind is directly relative to its first intuitive apprehension.
9. Syntactic: Syntactic studies how signs are related to each other.
10. Semantics: It is simply the study of meanings. It also studies symbols, signs and what they represent. However, it studies how these signs.
11. Pragmatics: Pragmatics is concerned with how linguistic signs are related to people, that is, the effect of a signal on an individual. This part of semiotics is has a lot to pair with sociolinguistics.
According to Stephen C. Levinson (2003)
“Pragmatics is the study of those relations between language and context that are grammaticalized or encoded in the structure of a language. In a more implicit form and with a notion of appropriateness or felicity; it is the study of the ability of language users to pair sentences with the context in which they would be appropriate.
However, the relationship between the last three elements is such that if in a serious work, the notable reference is made to the speaker or to the user of the language, then it is assigned to the field of pragmatics. Then, if we go from here to the user of the language to analyse only the expressions and their designate, we are in the field of semantics and if at last, we move from here to analyse only the relations between expressions, we will be tending towards ( logical) syntax.
Semiotic criticism of LES SOLEILS DES INDEPENDENCE by Ahmadou Kourouma
The novel narrates the life of Fama after the independence of his country. Fama is a prince of Togobala, a village in the Horodougou regionof the imaginary country the Cotes of Ebenes. He fights soul and body for the independence of his country from France. Unfortunately, he did not benefit from the fruit of his effort because after the independence the new administrators did not recognize his past participations. He lives on the foods distributed to the visitors invited for funeral ceremonies and small scale business if his sterile wife. He decided to go the city after being imprisoned and release to leave in the village after the death of his cousin Lassina. The journey was fatal for him because he was killed on his way.
From the title of the novel Les Soleils des Independences. Les Soleils in this context does not signify the sun but an ‘era’- a period’ after independence.
Signs of language deconstruction in les soleils des independences
In the book the author through the deliberate use of borrowing, neology and pidgin, portrays the concept of deconstruction of the imperial language which is Français.
"Famaetsesdeux femmes occupaient la petite pièce avec un seul lit de bambou, un seultara". (p.151)
Tara: traditional mat in Malinke country used in place of "la natte" the standard french.
"Les chefs de Toukorodormait, ivre de dolo au milieu de ses sujets".
Dolo: traditional bier from corn.
The semiotic elements in Buchi Emecheta’s work Second-Class Citizen (1975).
It is a literary work that tells us the story a passionate young girl of Ibuza who was born and breed in the city of Lagos. Her story which was opened to us of her life from age 8 as she guessed into her childhood, adolescence and marital ordeals.
The title Second-Class Citizen implies her life as a “deuxieme sexe”- all she suffered based on gender deprivation, illiteracy level of her society, lack of social amenities in her homeland and how she felt unloved and unwanted from infancy <her parents were expecting a male child> and her husband saw her as his personal ATM.
The plotting was intelligently coined to create an imagery of her experiences such as:
"a cold welcome”: it makes us imagine the level of interpersonal relationship that exist amongst the English people. Their persona is as cold and unwelcoming as their season- winter. England was cold in every possible way- culturally as its citizens.
“population control”: Adah had to try to take her life in her hands- health; she had to try out one of the birth control / or family planning methods to protect herself from the overpopulation experienced in their one room apartment with her meagre salary to cater for their monthly feeding budget, health care and family emergencies. These are things that should naturally be the burden of a government to curb inflation or poverty in a country.
‘United kingdom’- a place of great civilization, prosperity and a nation that has gotten to its peak symbolized the pinnacle of her ambition / dreams.
“But she made a secret vow to herself that she would go to this United Kingdom one day. Her arrival there would be the pinnacle of her ambition” pg. (17)
“Lucifer”- in her dream her husband became her personal chief spirit of evil and adversary of her very existence; he was the master of the Hell of a life she was living. It painted Francis in the best way a pained heart would describe a tormentor, a manipulator and oppressor who had become an itch on her very skin.
“Girl”- it denotes a slave- a domesticated being, sex object and child bearer and care taker. The African society were this work draws her relevance does not regard the girl child as worthy of birth as a male child is worth more than seven (7) female children – patriarchal society.
“Presence”- was depicted as the persona of Adah – her zeal, passion, determination and inspiration to attain all her desire and glide like the eagle through the wind- situations.
Linguistic defects used as a tool of imagery in a situational context:
“Breeding”- it was created from the distortion of a word <bleeding> caused by a linguistic defect called Spoonerism< the transposition of initial consonants in a pair of words>. It was intended to create the image of what the French calls mère pondeuse or chaud lapin to describe the successive child bearing of Adah; c'estunevraie pondeuse - she breeds like a rabbit.
“Good Rord”- as against <good Lord>, it was used to describe how fertile and effective Francis’s penis was in making Adah breed children.
“A face like an O”- it is an expression used to create a mental image of the physical facial feature of the people of the Japanese Archipelago- a round looking face.
Analysis and interpretation of UNDER THE BROWN RUSTED ROOFS.
Another work for consideration is Abiombola Adunni Adelakun’s Under The Brown Rusted Roofs where the author uses several imageries to reveal the way of life within the Ibadan metropolis in late 1970s to the early 1980s. The title begins with a prepositional phrase Under The Brown Rusted Roofs; we can start by digging into what could be the nearest possible message of the author. The concept brown in this context simply refers not just to a natural colour but of course the colour of the African man’s skin which though in contrast to the white man’s skin is generally referred to as black. Also, it is scientific just as it is logical for a rusted roof to be brown, this means however that for a rusted roof to be brown, it must first have gone through many years of utility without repair or replacement before it is termed rusted. However, it is significant to know that before the duration of years within which this the author sets her work, the roofs had been rusted, within those years of political and military era, the roofs were still rusted and also, since that time till now, the roofs of these houses with location and sight that gives a traveller the impression that he has entered Ibadan on arrival haven’t still changed from being rusted.
This simple interpretation tells us something of importance; the work Under The Brown Rusted roofs is a work that doubtlessly characterizes postmodernism, feminism and of course post colonialism which helps feature the characters involved that in bid not to give in to western education (cultural decolonization) and whatever it brings along, these indigenes find themselves still wallowing in their primitive lifestyle.
Anyway, one good thing about the houses under these roofs is that they are still strong. One easily wonders why despite the rustication that has pervaded these metropolis, the people (houses) living under remain convincingly and emotionally resilient and unbreakable, still thriving over years. Whether they are corrupt or stubborn is not our concern here at least they have a culture with which they identify. This is as depicted by Arigbabuwo as a child asking his father that ‘those houses…...the roofs are rusty…..they won’t collapse one day? His father responded telling him that the roofs under them (houses) are strong.
Therefore, the rusted roofs is significant to the age-long life of corruption, illiteracy, dirt, immorality and politics of polygamy that engulfs the beere, ojee area of the Ibadan indigenes. Illiteracy made a character like Mulika forget that she had missed her period when pregnant for Rafiu, the also, Baba n’sale believed that any wife who messes up in his corridor (house) was simply due to be replaced by two after being sent out. Also his refusal to take to western medication and treatment during his illness which later led to his death though after being treated. Also, Sikira left AlhajiArigbabuwo to another man with the thought that she may soon be forgotten with the way things went in the house, house, illiteracy made her think that she could still prevail over Alhaji even in the local magistrate. As for dirt, the picture of animal domestication in the corridor as well as the veranda of Alhaji’s house and the agboole (community compound) is a good proof.
The usage of proverbs and idiomatic expressions is also of importance here though most of them are based on superstitions. For example, Motara believed beating a boy with a broom would make his penis to go back inside his body (.140). This, however hilarious makes a deeper sense than it naturally sounds; a boy’s penis going back inside simply signifies affects him psychologically, thereby, reducing his self-esteem. Also, the chairman during one of the party’s meeting comes up to reprimand with two men quarrelling saying ‘we will not say a child will die, we should give him his father’s scrotum to play with’ (.38)By this, he tries to lay a standard of discipline in the party meetings thereby sending a warning signal to Iyiola, one of their members in power who had refused to come to party meetings over time; these goes beyond a statement involving the mind picture of a child and his father’s scrotum but goes ahead to connote that some disciplinary measures must be established in the party.
Also, by literal translation by the author, we are able to know how much the Yoruba language can do even to the extent of stylishly raining insult on someone. For example, Chief Akeweje, an elder politician in the party abused verbally Chief Lanihun, saying: ‘I just thought people are tired of those teeth of yours which are scattered like the welder’s fire’. By this he meant to describe the poor dentition of the latter because a welder’s fire naturally is not what could be touched with bear hands and also, because a welder’s fire usually comes up in sparks when contacted with iron.
We have come to see semiotics not just as a linguistic field but as a literary theoryand if anyway to be considered as a linguistic concept, its sociolinguistic feature would hinder such judgement. Attempting its definition and principles, we could see what it entails. With the literary works carefully selected namely:
Les Soleils Des Independences (Ahmadou Kourouma), Second-Class Citizens (Buchi Emecheta) and Under The Brown Rusted Roofs (Abimbola Aduni Adelakun), we have been able to see its manifestation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adelakun, Abimbola A. Under The Brown Rusted Roofs, Krafts books Limted, 2008.
Emecheta, Buchi. Second-Class Citizen, Allison and Busby Ltd., 1974.
John, Lyons, Semantics 1. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978.
Ferdinand, de Saussure. General Linguistics, Peter Owen London, 1964.
Johnstone, Barbara. Discourse Analysis, Blackwell Publishing, 2010.
Levinson, Stephen C. Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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