Semiotic in general it's mean study of sign. A sign is something that stand for something else that is not itself. It's mean that a sign which have different kind of interpretation or meaning.



"Not only are words signs but also gestures, images, non-linguistic sounds like the chimes of Big Ben. Obviously devices (such as flags) created by man in order to indicate something are signs, but so are, in ordinary language, the thread of smoke that reveals a fire, the footsteps in the sand that tells Robinson Crusoe a man has passed along the beach, the clue that permits Sherlock Holmes to find the murderer."
(Umberto Eco, Times Literary Supplement. 1973)

From Umberto Eco, he's state that sign is not just a word, it can be gestures, images, object, and sound. Semiotics is not only study of sign that around us, it also include anything which 'stands for' something else. It also study on how meaning are made and how reality is presented.

Text in Semiotic

Meaning-making and representation in form of text and media is the most obviously concern in semiotics. Text is something that are writing, verbal, and non-verbal. Usually 'text' is message that refer to something that is recorded, which means, it can be writing on a book, audio recording, or video recording.

A detailed analysis of the text as sign as well as of literariness was provided by the German professor of English, Heinrich Plett, in his 1975 study Text Science and Text Analysis. Plett points out that, as a linguistic sign, the text has an arbitrary nature and is based on social conventions. In accordance to the semiotic triangle, it has: a signifier (the sounds / letters), a signified (the meaning related to it), and a referent (the reality it points to). As referents one can find abstract concepts, current, historical or imaginary events. The text is actually a “super-sign”, which includes psychological and sociological prerequisites underlying the specific communication situations. The code itself is such a prerequisite, which differs from age to age and from person to person. -source

Media in Semiotic

In the everyday use of languages and signs, we combine several kinds of physical media in communicating and making meaning--from voice and printed texts to mass media images, music, movies, computer Web content, and digital multimedia. The various material means of conveying meaning (sometimes called communication "modalities") often overlap and pass on or interpret meaning from other concurrent media in our culture. Social Semiotics takes the meaning-making process, "semiosis", to be more fundamental than the system of meaning-relations among signs themselves, which are considered only the resources to be deployed in making meaning. -source