Mythos is a Greek word for event or story, often used in opposition to logos. A word used by Aristotle in his Poetics to denote something that is too close to what today's narratologists call a plot.
Semiology Glossary
Narrative
A narrative is a specific type of text or discourse that supports some kind of narration. The narratives are very much present in every kind of text. Be it made of words, or moving images. News Media broadcasts have a narrative, politicians have narratives, and even...
Narrativity
Narrativity is a one or series of markers that differentiate the narrative from other types of text and discourse. Related: Narrative Discourse Text
Narratology
Narratology is the act of studying the narrative, which is often performed via the structuralist perspective. Therefore, Narratology strives to create a grammar of the narrative of sorts. Related: Greimas Discourse analysis
Neologism
Neologism is a newly introduced or newly created word. While Charles Peirce, one of the creators of contemporary semiotics, was studying the signs, he had to coin a significant number of new words. His motivation was the same as that of the physicist that coined the...
New Criticism
The new criticism is an important school in literary critique, that flourished in the United States of America from the '30s to the '50s. Probably one of the main contributions of this school of thought was its focus on the autonomy of the literary work. When they...
New Historicism
A completely new reaction on the part of literary theorists and other scholars against the anti-historicism of some of the dominant approaches to textual analysis and critique (especially New Criticism, Archetypal Criticism, and Deconstructivism). New historicism is...
Noise
A side sound that interferes with or creates during the transmission of a message, in general - anything that works against the message so that it cannot reach its final destination. The noise affects the message channel.
Nomenclature
From Latin nomen - name; nomenclature called by name, list of names. The naming process; the result of this process - a series of names. Early in his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure put forward the question, "Why is semiology (general study of...
Nominalism
From the Latin nomen, name. Nominalism is a doctrine that is dealing with the status of universals. For the nominalist, individuals are only real, and the universals are simply names or sounds of the voice. The universals are predicative terms for an unlimited number...
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Decoder
The addressee - the one who receives the message, considered in his role of understanding (decoding), interpreting the message. The addresser - the sender of the message - encrypts the message, ie. transmits the information through some code while the decoder...
Deconstruction, Deconstructionism
A contemporary intellectual current, especially in philosophy, literary theory, and criticism, which (among many other things) tests the rigor of established hierarchies so central to Western thought and culture. For example, in the oppositions: work/play,...
Deduction
A type of inference in which it is assumed that the conclusion necessarily follows from the premise. For example, if it is true that A is greater than B and that B is greater than B, then it necessarily follows that A is greater than C. In this example A is greater...
Deep Structure
A term often used in linguistics and less often in semiotics (mostly in narrative analysis), which is the opposite of surface structure. The deep structure is the subsurface, often hidden structure through which the surface structure, say the sentence or narrative, is...
Defamiliarization
A term that (except for defamiliarization) is often used in the translation of the Russian word ostranenie, used by Russian formalists, to denote an important function of the fairy tale. The main function of poetry and other works of art is to provoke our usual...
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A completely and truly free course on Semiology (Semiotics). Learn about the meaning of signs, how and why did the field emerged. What is the relationship between the street signs and the signs that we use every day - words.
