[Media, Information and Technoculture 2200F/G] - Midterm Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam (13 pages long!)
5 Oct 2016
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His ideas about the academic field of linguistics revolutionized the study of language. His ideas about language were widely influential: anthropology, philosophy, pop culture. The basic unit of language is the sign- saussure"s most important idea. The sign consists of two parts: signifier, signified. Signifier- the form: it can be many things, for example, the word cat , it can also be a picture of a cat, even a clipart version of a cat counts as a signifier. All of these forms are for us to link these to ideas. Sign is the union of a signifier (the picture of the cat) and the signified (mental idea of the cat) Bat (baseball bat) and a bat (animal: we can use a whole bunch of words as signifiers to evoke the signified. Kitty, feline, tabby, etc. are all cat : signifiers are distinct from their material manifestation.
