UCL - General Semiotics

[COMU1121]

[30h + 10h] 4 credits

This course is taught in the 2d semester.

Teacher(s): Philippe Verhaegen

Language: French

Level: First

Aims
Main themes
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- present and discuss the principal theoretical and conceptual frameworks used in the study of sign systems (digital and analogue)
- situate Semiology within the field of Communication Sciences and within the broader field of Social Sciences
- conduct a methodical and detailed analysis of elementary semiotic devices (text and image-based media)

Main themes

During lectures, students will be taught the general theory of signs including:
- an introduction to Saussurian Linguistics (syntax and semantics) and Structural Semiology (Buyssens, Priéto, Hjelmslev, Barthes, Eco etc.)
- an introduction to Linguistic Pragmatics (analysis of deictic and interactional contexts, Austin, Searle and Ducrot) and General Pragmatics (Jakobson, Bateson and Goffman)
- an introduction to Inferential Semiotics (Peirce, Sperber and Wilson)
Practical exercise sessions will be given on:
- how to apply the concepts and notions discussed in the theoretical part of the course to a range of corpora from different areas of society (such as journalism, science, political propaganda)
- how to carry out a methodical semiotic analysis

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Supervision: The ten hours of practical exercises are in the form of project work which will be supported and supervised by members of the scientific personnel.
Additional Information: this course is part of the Minor in Information and Communication