sign

While signs are usually less germane to the development of words than signals, most of them contain greater amounts of meaning of and by themselves. Ashley Montagu, an anthropologist, has defined a sign as a “concrete denoter” possessing an inherent specific meaning, roughly analogous…

…with the concepts of symbol, sign, and picture. The function of the symbol is to represent a reality or a truth and to reveal them either instantaneously or gradually. The relationship of the symbol to a reality is conceived of as somewhat direct and intimate and also as somewhat indirect…

…diagrammatic or ideographic modes as signs, abbreviations, images, and objects of all kinds that indicate a larger context. In this category belong the simplified or abstract forms of objects of nature or other objects and geometrical forms, as well as colours, letters, and numbers. The circle, the disk, the rosette,…

…miracle is also called a sign—from the Greek sēmeion (biblical Hebrew ot)—signifying and indicating something beyond itself. Extraordinary and astonishing occurrences become specifically religious phenomena when they express, reveal, or signify a religious reality, however defined.

…in a general theory of signs. (This second part of Goodman’s aim is what Ferdinand de Saussure called semiology, the general science of signs [Cours de linguistique générale, 1916; Course of General Linguistics]). The theory derives from the uncompromising nominalism expounded in Goodman’s earlier works, a nominalism developed under the…

Those individual signs, called hieroglyphs, may be read either as pictures, as symbols for objects, or as symbols for sounds.

…called semiotics, the study of signs and sign phenomena. Signs are the irreducible elements of communication and the carriers of meaning. The American philosopher, mathematician, and physicist Charles S. Peirce is credited with having pointed out the three dimensions of signs, which are concerned with, respectively, the body or medium…

…a sacrament is an outward sign instituted by Jesus Christ that is productive of inner grace. The number of sacraments varied throughout much of the first millennium of Christian history, as did the definition of the term sacrament itself. After extensive theological discussion during this period, church leaders in the…

signs and sign-using behaviour. It was defined by one of its founders, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of “the life of signs within society.” Although the word was used in this sense in the 17th century by the English philosopher John…

…is the general science of signs and languages, consisting of three parts: (1) pragmatics (in which reference is made to the user of the language), (2) semantics (in which one abstracts from the user and analyzes only the expressions and their meanings), and (3) syntax (in which one abstracts also…

However, such signs function only because they represent a high level of linguistic structure and because they function to express one of a highly restricted range of meanings already known to the reader and not because they express ideas or thoughts directly. The sign on the toilet…