Understanding Linguistic Signs and Communication Elements

Linguistic Signs

Signs perceive realities. There are different types of signs used in the formation of messages in one language:

• Denotation: Collects the primary objective of a linguistic sign. It is formed by features that differ from one another concept.
• Connotation: Connotation signs bring together feelings, ideas, and cultural aspects.

Communication Functions

• Referential or representational: Reports on a target without expressing feelings or trying to provoke a reaction in the recipient.
• Emotive or expressive: Used for the expression of feelings and experiences.
• Phatic: Intended to initiate, maintain, or break contact between the sender and receiver. It relates the message with contact between the issuer through the receiver and the channel. It is necessary to initiate a conversation and keep breaking the social partners.

Characteristics of Signs

• Form part of a code, language, and symbol system.
• Can construct infinite messages.
• Conventional: Established by agreement.
• Linearity: The sign is constituted by the immutable succession of phonemes.
• Arbitrary: There is no reduction of similarities.

The sign meaning evokes in our minds a concept when we read it.

Connotative or Appellate Function

Those contained in the function are connotations that somehow prevail and are intended to influence the receiver.

Other Functions

• Metalinguistic: Lets languages refer to themselves.
• Poetic: Adorns the purpose of how we transmit to achieve aesthetic purposes or to attract the attention of the receiver.

Types of Signs

• Icons: If they have some resemblance to the object they represent, such as a portrait or caricature.
• Signs: When an object bears some relation of dependency, such as smoke indicating fire.
• Symbols: Representing objects without a similar relationship, they are purely conventional, such as the Red Cross flag.

Elements of Communication

• Code: Formed by a set of rules that permit the construction of messages with signs.
• Transmitter/Receiver: They know the rules of their code and can perform encoding and decoding activities.
• Message: Encrypted broadcasts by the sender to the receiver.
• Channel: Physical support through which the message is transmitted (e.g., paper, air).
• Context:
  • Immediate: The specific spatiotemporal circumstance in which the message is issued.
  • Cultural: The context in which the text has been produced and conditions it.