semiology
academic discipline of signs and their use or interpretation
Summary
Semiotics is the study of signs. It is an interdisciplinary field that examines what signs are, how they form sign systems, and how individuals use them to communicate meaning. Its main branches are syntactics, which addresses formal relations between signs; semantics, which addresses the relation between signs and their meanings; and pragmatics, which addresses the relation between signs and their users. Semiotics is related to linguistics but has a broader scope that includes nonlinguistic signs, such as maps and clothing.
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