p.2 Umberto Eco... states that 'semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign' (Eco 1976, 7)... Contemporary semioticians study signs not in isolation but as part of semiotic 'sign-systems'... They study how meanings are made and how reality is represented.

p.9 'The sign is part of organized social intercourse and cannot exist, as such, outside it, reverting to a mere physical artifact' (Voloshinov 1973, 21). The meaning of a sign is... in the social context of its use.

p.10 The sign, as Voloshinov put it, is 'an arena of the class struggle'

p.10-11 why should we study semiotics? ...No one with an interest in how things are represented can afford to ignore an approach which focuses on, and problematizes, the process of representation... While we need not accept the postmodernist stance that there is no external reality beyond sign-systems, studying semiotics can assist us to become more aware of the mediating role of signs and of the roles played by ourselves and others in constructing social realities.

p.11 meaning is not 'contained' in the world or in books... Meaning is not 'transmitted' to us - we actively create it according to a complex interplay of codes or conventions of which we are normally unaware. Becoming aware of such codes is both inherently fascinating and intellectually empowering. We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of signs and we have no way of understanding anything except through signs and the codes into which they are organized. Through the study of semiotics, we become aware that these signs and codes are normally transparent and disguise our task in reading them.

p.13 We seem as a species to be driven by a desire to make meanings: above all, we are surely homo significans - meaning-makers. Distinctively, we make meanings through our creation and interpretation of 'signs'. Indeed, according to Peirce, 'we think only in signs'... acts or objects... become signs only when we invest them with meaning. 'Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign', declares Peirce... We interpret things as signs largely unconsciously by relating them to familiar systems of conventions.

p.20 Saussure uses an analogy with the game of chess, noting that the value of each piece depends on its position on the chessboard

p.31 [Roderick Munday quoted] The three elements that make up a sign function like a label on an opaque box that contains an object... The first thing that is noticed (the representamen) is the box and label; this prompts the realization that something is inside the box (the object). This realization, as well as the knowledge of what the box contains, is provided by the interpretant. 'Reading the label' is actually just a metaphor for decoding the sign. The important point to be aware of here is that the object of the sign is always hidden... if the object could be known directly, there would be no need of a sign to represent it.

p.39 For Peirce... We interpret symbols according to 'a rule' or 'a habitual connection'... 'The symbol is connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using mind, without which no such connection would exist'

p.42 Peirce offers various criteria for what constitutes an index... 'Anything which focuses the attention is an index. Anything which startles us is an index'

p.42 Elizabeth Bruss notes that indexicality is 'a relationship rather than a quality. Hence the signifier need have no particular properties of its own, only a demonstrable connection to something else. The most important of these connections are spatial co-occurrence, temporal sequence, and cause and effect' (Bruss, 1978, 88).

p.46 Peirce... like Saussure... granted greater status to symbolic signs: 'they are the only general signs; and generality is essential to reasoning'

p.48 The very definition of something as a sign involves reducing the continuous to the discrete.

p.52 Voloshinov... insisted that 'a sign is a phenomenon of the external world' and that 'signs... are particular, material things'. Every sign 'has some kind of material embodiment, whether in sound, physical mass, colour, movements of the body, or the like'... For Voloshinov, all signs, including language, have 'concrete material reality' and physical properties of signs matter

p.60 Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch - the name of a Welsh village. [JLJ - I would like to see how they made the exit sign from the highway to this village. Or, what would your driver's license say? Good luck getting people to send you mail. Oh, then there is llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf - The ending "uchaf" is the welsh for "higher" or "upper", and refers to the upper (old) part of the village.

p.66 Being absorbed in the task led them to accept unconsciously the terms in which reality was constructed within the medium... Charles Peirce reflected that 'in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears'

p.71 The ladder metaphor is consistent with how we routinely refer to levels of abstraction - we talk of thinkers with 'their heads in the clouds' and of 'realists' with their 'feet on the ground'.

p.79 Jacques Derrida refers (originally in the 1960s) to the 'play' or 'freeplay' of signifiers: they are not fixed to their signifieds but point beyond themselves to other signifiers in an 'indefinite referral of signifier to signified' (Derrida 1967b, 25; 'freeplay' has become the dominant English rendering of Derrida's use of the term jeu...). Signs thus always refer to other signs, and there is no final sign referring only to itself.

p.80 any 'event' is a social construction - bounded 'events' have no objective existence, and all news items are 'stories' (Galtung and Ruge 1981).

p.92 Claude Levi-Strauss described the initial steps in his own analytical procedures as being to 'define the phenomena under study as a relation between two or more terms, real or supposed' and then to 'construct a table of possible permutations between these terms' (Levi-Strauss 1964, 16).

p.109 We may need to remind ourselves that any interpretive framework cuts up its material into manageable chunks; how appropriate this is can only be assessed in terms of whether it advances our understanding of the phenomena in question.

p.114 The most obvious example of sequential relations is narrative.

p.114 There are no 'events' in the world (Galtung and Ruge 1981). Reality cannot be reduced objectively to discrete temporal units; what counts as an 'event' is determined by one's purposes. It is narrative form which creates events.

p.115 Narratives help to make the strange familiar. They provide structure, predictability and coherence. In this respect they are similar to schemas for familiar events in everyday life. Turning experience into narratives seems to be a fundamental feature of the human drive to make meaning. We are 'storytellers' with a 'readiness or predisposition to organize experience into a narrative form' which is encouraged in our socialization as we learn to adopt our culture's ways of telling (Bruner 1990, 45, 80).

p.123 Semiotics represents a challenge to the 'literal' because it rejects the possibility that we can neutrally represent 'the way things are'.

p.151 As Derrida would put it, perception is always already representation. 'Perception depends on coding the world into iconic signs that can re-present it within our mind. The force of the apparent identity is enormous, however. We think that it is the world itself we see in our "mind's eye", rather than a coded picture of it' (Nichols 1981, 11-12).

p.152 Bill Nichols comments, 'a useful habit formed by our brains must not be mistaken for an essential attribute of reality. Just as we must learn to read an image, we must learn to read the physical world. Once we have developed this skill (which we do very early in life), it is very easy to mistake it for an automatic or unlearned process, just as we may mistake our particular way of reading, or seeing, for a natural, ahistorical and noncultural given' (Nichols 1981, 12).

p.152 We are rarely aware of our own habitual ways of seeing the world.

p.160 All representations are systems of signs: they signify rather than represent, and they do so with primary reference to codes rather than to reality.

p.160 Belsey notes, 'realism is plausible not because it reflects the world, but because it is constructed out of what is (discursively) familiar'... The familiarity of particular semiotic practices renders their mediation invisible.

p.173 Semiotics offers us some conceptual crowbars with which to deconstruct the codes at work in particular texts and practices, providing that we can find some gaps or fissures which offer us the chance to exert some leverage.

p.207-208 As the Peircean model suggests, the meaning of a sign is in its interpretation.

p.213 All signs, texts and codes need to be read. [JLJ - yes, and we as humans seem obsessively programmed to scan and react to signs deemed present in our environment - often using spring-loaded "scripts" which our minds seem to be crammed-full of. We alter our "programming" only when things do not go as expected. We contemplate, then form new (often only altered) sign-systems based on what we think reflects our new vision of reality.]

p.214 There are no ideologically neutral sign-systems: signs function to persuade as well as to refer. Valentin Voloshinov declared that 'whenever a sign is present, ideology is present too' (Voloshinov 1973, 10). ...Sign-systems help to naturalize and reinforce particular framings of 'the way things are'... Consequently, on these principles semiotic analysis always involves ideological analysis. [JLJ - actual Voloshinov text I have has the word 'Wherever' instead of 'whenever'.]

p.215 Synchronic analysis studies a phenomenon as if it were frozen at one moment in time; diachronic analysis focuses on change over time. The synchronic approach underplays the dynamic nature of sign systems

p.215 Structuralist semioticians seek to look behind or beneath the surface of the observed in order to discover underlying organizational relations. The more obvious the structural organization of a text or code may seem to be, the more difficult it may be to see beyond such surface features, but searching for what is hidden beneath the obvious can lead to fruitful insights.

p.216 As the sociologist Stuart Hall puts it, our 'systems of signs... speak us as much as we speak in and through them' (Hall 1977, 328). We are thus the subjects of our sign-systems rather than being simply instrumental 'users' who are fully in control of them. While we are not determined by semiotic processes we are shaped by them far more than we realize.

p.218 socially oriented semioticians tend to adopt constructionist stances, emphasizing the role of sign-systems in the construction of reality. They usually refer to 'social reality' (rather than physical reality) as constructed.

p.219 the social constructionist stance is... an insistence that although things may exist independently of signs we know them only through the mediation of signs and see only what our socially generated sign-systems allow us to see.

p.219 If signs do not merely reflect (social) reality but are involved in its construction then those who control the sign-systems control the construction of reality. [JLJ - hence, in a completely unrelated matter, the late-nineteenth-century national revival of interest in the Irish language (known as Gaelic) and Irish Gaelic culture (including folklore, sports, music, arts, etc.). The symbolic language points to a national identity.]

p.223 The primary value of semiotics is its central concern for the investigation of meaning-making and representation which conventional academic disciplines have tended to treat as peripheral.

p.225 A working understanding of key concepts in semiotics - including their practical application - can be seen as essential for everyone who wants to understand the complex and dynamic communication ecologies within which we live. As Peirce put it, 'the universe... is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs' (Peirce 1931-58, 5.449n.). There is no escape from signs. Those who cannot understand them and the systems of which they are a part are in the greatest danger of being manipulated by those who can. In short, semiotics cannot be left to semioticians.