The phenomenon of semiosis is the instance where "something means something to someone" and is therefore a carrier of meaning. It must be clarified that signification is realized as a condition of semiosis from which Morris (1938) distinguishes: "sign vehicle (sign)", "designatum" (the designated); «interpretants» (considerations of the interpreter) and the interpreter himself. These three (or four elements if we consider the latter) within the framework of a system called language, which according to Morris is "every set of signs plus a set of rules"; points out the "dimensions" that constitute a language.
Some authors usually indicate a distinction between semiotics and semiology as postulating different fields of studies, a problem overcome in the Treatise of General Semiotics[4] by Umberto Eco, where this author minimizes the issue given that every sign is constructed of a social nature, although not all of them are. They should also be separated from the so-called information theory and communicology or the science that studies communication systems within human societies and hermeneutics or the discipline that is responsible for the interpretation of texts. The peculiarity of the semiological approach answers the following question: "Why and how in a given society does something - an image, a set of words, a gesture, an object, a behavior, etc. - mean?"[5].
What was later called semiotics, as a disciplinary field, emerged as one of the sciences integrated into linguistics. Its systematic development began in the sixties, but its glimpses were already found in the Course in general linguistics[6] by the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure, published posthumously by his disciples in 1913, within an epistemological current called structuralism "Structuralism (linguistics)") Saussure-Hjelmslevian that obtained a strong imprint of this linguistic discipline because its fundamental authors were philologists and linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the words of Saussure, semiotics is a science that studies the life of existing signs within society; shows what constitutes signs and what laws govern them. It derives from the Greek semeion, which means "sign." This science is used to know how to interpret and read signs on a daily basis, to be able to decipher the world and receive more information from these interpretations. Likewise, semiotician Roland Barthes' perception of semiotics consists of the conclusions we deduce from others and the environment when looking at and receiving stimuli. He argues that the majority of signs that we encounter cannot be interpreted in isolation, but that each sign has associated ideas and can give us additional information if we look for its second meaning.
Eagleton (1994) considers structuralism as a research method that can be applied to a whole range of objects, from football matches to production systems in the economic field, while semiotics refers rather to a particular "field" of study, that of systems that in some way would ordinarily be considered signs: poems, bird calls, traffic light signals, medical symptoms, etc. However, both terms converge, since structuralism studies what cannot be considered a system of signs, while semiotics commonly applies structuralist methods. Likewise, a structuralist analysis must seek to isolate the set of underlying forces by which signs combine and form meanings (Eagleton, 1994).
The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, at the beginning of the century, had conceived the possibility of the existence of a science that studied signs "at the heart of social life", which he called "semiology." Subsequently, another linguist, the Danish Louis Hjelmslev, delved into this theory and developed its systematic formalization within the structural paradigm, which he baptized as glossematics in his Prolegomena to a theory of language (1943),[7] establishing a set of principles that will serve as a theoretical and epistemological foundation for further developments of structuralist semiotics. They added their contributions to these authors; another famous linguist, the Russian Roman Jakobson, and the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein, the latter laid the foundations of linguistic pragmatics by declaring that "meaning is use."
Saussure considered language as a system of signs that should be studied synchronically and not diachronically. Each sign had to be considered as consisting of a signifier (a sound-image or its graphic equivalent), and a meaning, that is, the concept or object it represented (Eagleton, 1994).
Independently of this European development, another line of semiotic research was developed on the writings left by the American philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce, what is known as "Anglo-Saxon semiotics", "logical semiotics" or "semiotics" simply. Peirce's study has been defined as pragmatic, that is, he thinks giving priority to practical considerations. In his theoretical development, Peirce takes semiosis as an object of study, a process in which the cooperation of three instances (or subjects) occurred:
• - The "representamen", or sign itself, that is, a material and perceptible manifestation that represents another object.
• - The "object", which is what is represented, that is, what the sign accounts for.
• - The «interpretant», or meaning that the sign produces and that is translated into another sign or representation.
Thus, the sign is for him the product of this dynamic of semiosis, which European semiology designated with another terminology, respectively, signifier, referent and signified, which was later called the Ogden and Richards triangle, a structure that integrates these three elements that make up any sign and that can be disfigured by phenomena such as synonymy, homonymy, polysemy, etc., so that the triangle can be transformed into a rhombus, a segment, etc.
Going deeper into the classification of signs, Peirce came to the conviction that they could be classified by the relationship between these elements and each other into three specific types:
• - Iconic or icons, whose respective representation or signifier has a similar relationship with its object or referent: maps, caricatures, sketches...
• - Indications or indicators, whose representative or signifier has a natural or cause-effect relationship with the object or referent: smoke as a sign of fire, crying as a sign of intense emotion (sadness or joy).
• - Symbols, those signs in which the relationship between representation or signifier and object or referent is neither similarity nor natural or cause-effect, but arbitrary, conventional, agreed upon within a society: the national anthem, the flag, most of the words of natural languages except for the sound onomatopoeias of oral language or visuals of written language (calligrams, for example).
Fontanille would say in Semiotics of discourse[8] that the research carried out, until the end of the nineties, around semiotics "has been developed from perspectives that are often divergent, sometimes even frankly controversial", however there is a theoretical and methodological innovation that is based on structuralism, but unlike this, instead of stating as a principle that only discontinuous phenomena and so-called "discrete" oppositions are relevant, it takes into account the processes of emergence and installation of these phenomena and of these oppositions; This is how the different branches of semiotics have emerged.