ABSTRACT
Contemporary semiotics (or semiology) and various genres of structuralism all emerged out of the linguistic philosophy of Ferdinand de Saussure in Europe and Charles Sanders Peirce in the United States. Although Saussure is often given almost full credit for the genesis of the semiotic tradition, Peirce was expressing similar ideas at approximately the same time. The term semiotics itself can be traced to the Middle Ages when it referred to the observation of medical symptoms or signs of illness. It entered the discourse of philosophy and the social sciences when the English political scientist, John Locke, began using it to designate the study of signs employed by the human mind for the purpose of social communication (Rossi, 1983). Since then, semiotics has tended to be characterized as the science of signs.
