The Adventure of Semiotics

Linguistic philosophy has become one of the most popular study fields that has overstepped the borders of philosophy in the twentieth century. 1960s are the years of vehement discussions between existentialism, structuralism and Marxism. In these years, the studies of natural languages primarily expanded to cover artificial language studies as well. As a consequence of the influence of these studies, semiotics, trying to resolve and define all of the meaningful systems, has emerged. While Ferdinand de Saussure was forming semiology with his Linguistic studies in Europe on these dates, Charles Sanders Peirce was dealing with determining the principles of semiotics that was going to be used as a framework in order to define the relationships between signs in America. On the other hand, Roland Barthes was accepted as the founder of semiotics with his sign theory in the second half of the 1960s. This paper aims at describing how semiotics has emerged as a result of debates in the language philosophy by examining the first philosophical texts and current discussions.