Reinterpreting some key concepts in Barthes ’ theory

The paper makes clear some basic concepts in semiotic studies like signifier, signified and referent and core concepts in Roland Barthes’s theory are restudied with new developments especially in connotateurs, meta-language and meaning transfer, which play a key role in understanding how myth is constructed with the two mechanisms of naturalizing and generalizing. With the new understanding, the paper studies the representative signs from television and their semiotic function and concludes that meaning transfer is the fundamental way for media signs to construct new meanings.


INTRODUCTION Signification, denotation, connotation and metalanguage
It is Ferdinand de Saussure who makes the important distinction between signifier and signified of a sign (Saussure, 1915(Saussure, /1966)), which incurs persistent and diversified study on the structural characteristics of signs.Different from Saussure's focus on denotative meaning, Roland Barthes highlights the importance of connotation and provides his great account of mythology with the foundation of connotative meaning Roland,1957).We have a different understanding of what myth is from the common knowledge of taking the connotative meaning of a sign as myth.
One of the basic principles in semiotics is that meaning is made by difference, and difference is made by contrast between signifiers or signified.The arbitrariness of signs, for Saussure, alone, each of these pieces of the jigsaw of language, he said, is meaningless but as a whole, the system of language produces a picture which its 'speech community' (Cullen, 1976: 19) buys into.But for Barthes, the culmination of meaning created by signifier plus signified is more than just a system of random naming or nomenclature.It is subject to a rich layering of meaning according to each country's cultures.Barthes (1981) and Moriarty (1991) extend the study of signs in culture, and how they function in reinforcing cultural ideologies, or myths, "to evaluate their links with mass culture" (1991, p. 19), to determine the historical context in relation to its contemporary significance in maintaining the status quo.Like the equivalent pair of labor and income in economics, signifier and signified are similar pair in semiotics (or equivalence in Saussure's words), referring the signification.What Saussure called 'the sign' is to Barthes 'second order signification', packed quite deliberately with meaning, and hiding nothing as it constructs its message (Barthes, 1957: 121).
At the heart of Barthes's theory is the idea of two orders of signification i .First we should know what signification means before understanding denotation and *Corresponding author.E-mail: fancoffey@yahoo.cn.Tel: 0086-15810591805.
Author agree that this article remain permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License connotation.The signification can be conceived as a process; it is the act which binds the signifier and the signified, an act whose product is the sign.(Roland Barthes, 1964) In the process, the two parts of a sign are dependant on each other in the sense that the signified is expressed through the signifier, and the signifier exists with the signified.Facts, he said, are 'endowed with significance' (Barthes, 1957: 111).Let us take the word "table" for example.When we integrate the signifier "table" with the signified "piece of furniture (not a table) with a flat or sloping top and drawers at which to read, write or do business, e.g. one for office or school use", the language sign "table" appears.The process of such integration is called signification or a system of signification.
In Elements of Semiology, Barthes takes up the distinction, developed by the linguist Louis Hjelmslev, between denotation and connotation.A denotative statement is a first-order statement: a statement which concerns the literal (first-order) meaning of the words that make up that statement.We have the words used, or what Barthes calls a plane of expression (E), we have what the words literally mean, or the plane of content (C), and we then draw a relation between the two (R) to find the statement's meaning.We need to move to the relation (R) between (E) and (C), and thus to a secondorder meaning (connotation) to make any sense of the statement.There is clearly another meaning implied in this statement and this meaning exists at the level of connotation.To move from the plane of denotation to connotation involves the same processes we have already seen in the reading of myth: we move from a firstorder meaning (denotation) to a second-order meaning (connotation).As Barthes adds: 'the first system is then the plane of denotation and the second system (wider than the first) the plane of connotation.We shall therefore say that a connoted system is a system whose plane of expression is itself constituted by a signifying system' (ESe, 149).(Graham, 2003).
According to Barthes, there is a dual message within any singular sign: the aesthetic aspect, apparent, and the hidden ideological meaning that reinforces the historical significance of that sign in relation to the dominant sociopolitical and economic structure (Moriarty, 1991).Denotation takes place on the primary level of signification and consists in what we think of as the literal, fixed, dictionary meaning of a word, ideally one that can be universally agreed upon.Connotation occurs on the secondary level of signification and consists of the changing associative meanings of a word.In his later writings, Barthes is explicit that the distinction between these two levels of signification is only a useful theoretical one (S/Z Barthes,1974). 3-11;Roland Barthes (Barthes1977).62-67).In actual practice the limiting of meaning to a single denotative one would be very difficult because sings always bear traces of their meanings from previous contexts (Kay, 1995).Denotation for images implies what all viewers would recognize the objects, which the images intend to convey, while connotation refers to the socio-cultural and personal associations of the sign (Chandler, 2002;Sturken and Cartright, 2003).(Connolly and Iain 2002).explain that denotative meaning of a sign corresponds to the external reality, while the connotation deals with associations.Connotation builds upon already existing system of significance, or denotation (Chandler).Denotation refers to the common-sense, obvious meaning of the sign ii .In 'Myth Today' Barthes reminds us that the sign is, in fact, involved in a three-part relationship.A sign is, after all, the relation between a signifier and a signified, a sound or mark and a concept (Graham, 2003).In Barthes' words, every system of signification contains a plane of expression (signifier E) and a plane of content (signified C), and relations between these two planes are the signification (R).As shown in Figure 1, the left rectangle represents signifier E, the right rectangle signified C, and the mark in the middle is the significance R. Thus a sign is expressed in the system of ERC.
Every sign can be expressed in a system of ERC.Now we take the system of ERC as a denotation because it can be added more layers into a complex sign.There are two situations when we include more significations into the system of ERC.One is the system of ERC that plays the role of E in another system of ERC, and the other is the role of C. The following illustrations will give a clear map of what we are discussing here.
Situation one: when the first system of E1R1C1 is put into the expressive plane of another system of E2R2C2, we will have a complex system(E1R1C1)R2C2, as is shown in Figure 2.
In this situation, the first system, still having its own signifier E1, shares the signified with the other system E2R2C2 and for the new sign (composed of these two systems) two signifiers are signifying the same signified.Thus connotation happens in the new sign because E1 is not signifying C1 but C2.To put it in another way, in a sign with connotative meaning, the expressive plane E2 is composed of another system of signification E1R1C1.Signs are full of connotations but without disclosing where these connotations come from, we would always take them for granted and the seemingly naturalized process is covered up.Connotations happens when signs are interacted with each other and the more complex signs are, the more concealing the forming process of connotations, and we tend to neglect the hidden transformation between signs.For Barthes, the critical factor in connotation is the signifier in the first order.The first-order signifier is the sign of the connotation iii .With the map we have drawn, the concept of connotation is made clear.Mythology takes this sign and turns it into a signifier for a new signified, a new concept.As Barthes puts it: 'myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system.That which is a sign (namely the associative total  of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second' (MY: 114) Graham ( 2003).
Barthes represents this relationship in the following manner (MY: 115), shown in Figure 3. Situation two: when a system of E3R3C3 is put into the content plane C1 of another system of E1R1C1, we will have a complex system E1R1(E3R3C3), as is shown in Figure 4.
In this case, the system of E3R3C3, not functioning as the expressive plane in the connotation, becomes the content plane or signified of the system of E1R1C1.For the new sign, the same signifier E1 has two different meanings, and one is reflected by signified C1 and the other contains a signification system of E3R3C3.To distinct from situation one, we call this signification metalanguage (Barthes used the term but without clear definition), in which the content plane C1 is composed of another signifying system of E3R3C3.He called the 'materials of mythical speech' (Barthes, 1957: 114) represented a 'second-order semiological system ' (1957: 114) in which the sign in the first order became a signifier in the second.He termed it a 'meta-language ' (1957: 115).Myth, as it were, hijacks meaning and turns it into a second-order meaning or what Barthes calls signification.Signification here refers to the second-order sign; it is meaning which has been produced through the transformation of already existent meaning, already existent (first-order) signs.Myth is a metalanguage: a second-order language which acts on a first-order language, a language which generates meaning out of already existent meaning (Graham, 2003).
The two situations show that connotation and metalanguage function differently in the signifying process and constructing new meanings.In connotations, connections are built between the expressive plane of E1RIC1 with the content plane of E2R2C2 and their original groupings are broken and new meanings take place.Let us look at an example to make it clear.Li Yuchun, a 20-year-old girl from Hubei Province, China, became an overnight super star after attending a popular talent show on Hunan Television.Li Yuchun (standing for E1R1C1) is a sign, in which the girl's name is the signifier E1, and points to the meaning (signified C1) of a girl with certain age from a region of China.After attending the TV program, people will not take her as a normal girl but someone sparkling with overnight success and great luck.Thus a new sign comes into being because of the connotations.As is shown in Figure 5, people care more about her overnight success rather than a common girl when reading the sign of Li Yuchun.
The meta-language works the other way in constructing new meanings in a sign.It is built by a logic extension between signifier E1 and signifier E3 in the combination of signs.Let us still take Li Yuchun for example.Her overnight success attracted millions of young girls to follow suit.Teenagers became loyal fans to her and lined up to attend various auditions expecting to get fame and success as their dreamed girl Li.In this case, Li's fans play a new role in the meaning making process.As is shown in Figure 6, Li's success extends to the hope of all her fans or followers, and they are not a group of average girls but dreaming of the same road to success as Li.The success of Li is not individual but implicates a fast success without many efforts.Distinguishing connotation from meta-language is a crucial point to understand the "Myth" put up by Roland Barthes.For Barthes, The meaning of the myth is not determined by the message it conveys, but rather the manner in which the message is communicated.In relation to the mythical system, there is the myth itself, or the metalanguage, and the languageobject, or that which is representative of that myth iv .
Signification is therefore a process, a product, and a social event, not something closed, static, or completed one and for all.All members of a society are interpreters or decoders.Ability to decode and understand signification is based on competence with the sign system and with a larger cultural encyclopedia of codes and correspondences.(Martin Irvine) Barthes (1977) argues that in photography at least, the difference between connotation and denotation is clear.Denotation is the mechanical reproduction on film of the object at which the camera is pointed.Connotation is the human part of the process: it is the selection of what to include in the frame, of focus, aperture, camera angle, quality of film, and so on.Denotation is what is photographed; connotation is how it is photographed.For Barthes, signification and meta-language are inseparable from myth, and they are combined into the same being.We admit their close relations but make clear distinction from the three key concepts (signification, meta-language, myth).Such distinction is a necessary step to fully understand how myth is constructed.

MEANING TRANSFER IN CONNOTATEUR
Discourse is the level studied by most cultural theory and semiotics.All of our cultural statements--from "mainstream" and official "high culture" products to popular culture genres and emerging new cultural forms-can thus be studied as forms of discourse, parts of a larger cultural "language."Communication and meaning are formed by mediations--representative or symbolic vehicles that "stand for" things, meanings, and values.The mediating vehicles are called "signs".For example, words in a language, images, sounds, or other perceptible signifiers.(Martin Irvine) Connotateur is mentioned in the Elements of Semiology by Roland Barthes but without detailed explanation.To uncover the construction of myth, we have to make clear the role of connotateur especially in transferring meanings and spreading ideology.Barthes defines ideology as "the deployment of signifiers for the purpose of expressing and surreptitiously justifying the dominant values of a given historical period" (Silverman,1983(Silverman, ). 1986, p. 27), p. 27).Connolly and Iain (2002).explain that ideology corresponds to the worldview and power relationships, and signs may convey the meanings to promote or resist the system of power.It is futile to discover what connotateur is without understanding how meaning is transferred.
Connotation is a second-order of signification which uses the denotative sign (signifier and signified) as its signifier and attaches to it an additional signified v .In this way, a connotation can be made by adding many new layers of denotation into its signifier.Roland Barthes' Elements of Semiology (1967).argues that verbal text is the central anchorage of human meanings and perceptions.A verbal code can also extend or add new information to the visual code, which Barthes labels 'relay'.Barthes reveals that his focus is on images by suggesting a historical reversal in which 'the image no longer illustrates the words; it is now the words which, structurally, are parasitic on the image' (Barthes, 1978, p.204).In his terms, images are polysemous -unstable and subject to interpretation -and words are used to fix the ambiguous meaning of images.We can find enormous examples of this type of connotation especially in visual signs like advertisements.In a poster, many signs like words, pictures, colors are composed together to denote the same signified -the advertised product.An ERC system or denotative sign in the signifier of a connotation is called connotateur.Or we may say the signifier of connotation is made up of more than one connotateur.No matter how many connotateurs there are in a connotation, they all denote the same meaning -the only signified.Take the ad of Chanel No.5 vi for example.In the ad, the photo of famous French film star Catherine Deneuve is put together with a Chanel perfume No.5 and they are framed together into the same picture.Putting Yan and Ming 63 these two objects together is not a coincidence.Rather, it is a combination in order to send intended meaning.The ad itself is a signifier and the aim to attract people's attention and approval is the signified.When you are attracted by the charm of the film star and accept that she is a perfect match with the elegant and luxurious perfume, then you receive what are intended to transmit in the sign of advertisement.That is the purpose of the ad.But how does it work?In the ad, there are two main signs -one is Deneuve and the other Chanel No.5.Both of them have denotative meanings, which is clear and simple.We use sign 1 and sign 1' to represent them respectively and thus have two signifying systems: E1R1C1 and E1'R1'C1'.When reading the ad, we will not separate these two objects but connect them together and think both of them share the same quality of beauty, elegance, status.This connection is the connotation of a new sign E2R2C2, or we may say the signified of the ad is the charm and attraction they have.That is to say, signs 1 and 1' are bonded to denote the same signified C2 and they become connotateurs in this advertisement sign, as shown in Figure 7. Chanel No.5 is a commodity without any social class, but under the frame of this ad, it has different meaning among readers.It keeps distance from other common or unfamous perfumes and acquires the qualities of beautify, elegance and high status from Deneuve whose social specialties have already been widely accepted by people.
The signified meaning of Deneuve, elegance and nobleness, is transferred to an industrialized product.Via such meaning transfer, the ad reaches to the unique signified.Actually the transfer we say here is a second transfer, because the first was done in between signified 1 and signifier 1.Without meaning transfer from one signification to the other, the sign in ads is not completed and can never realize its aim of luring potential customers.Just like the relation between signifier and signified, the transfer of meaning is totally intentional, arbitrary and classified as a social behavior.The connotateurs connect irrelevant things from different fields and add the social attribute of one object to the other in order to change the original natural feature of the perfume.In this way, we find a seemingly reasonable excuse for the high price of No.5 and endow it with a certain social class.The ad strongly implies to consumers that you could have the elegance and beauty like Deneuve after purchasing a bottle of Chanel No.5.This is the trick in the age of consumerism.We are trapped by signs to act like what the ads imply.Meaning transfer is not a scientific concept but can be taken as a process in constructing connotation by connotateurs.In our view, when a signified (C2) of a connotation [(E1R1C1)R2C2] is transferred into another signifier (E1'), a new meaning is transplanted into the sign of E1'R1'C1'.In the above example, the connotative signified of Deneuve, elegance and nobleness, is transferred to the neutral brand Chanel No.5, therefore the commodity from the industrial age has its own class feature.In the era of consumption, commodities are bestowed with cultural, social and ideological features with the help of meaning transfer in connotations.What products we choose to use reflects huge social difference.Connotations are not purely personal meanings -they are determined by the codes to which the interpreter has access.Cultural codes provide a connotational framework and certain connotations would be widely recognized within a culture vii .To make sense of the signs, viewers as well as artists rely on codes which organize into meaningful systems and relate to a set of social practices known to users of a medium (Chandler, 2002).The system of codes operates as a broad cultural framework and underlies the production of meaning within a culture because they are connected with human knowledge and the body of rules elaborated by society.Barthes (1985) describes codes as "associative fields, supra-textual organizations of notations imposing a certain idea of structure" (p.93).The truth and value of meaning transfer is to build new ideology.
Roland Barthes uses the word "association" to explain what connotation is, because we often read in between what we see directly and associate it with related consensus we have achieved before, and in such way connotation is understood.The meaning transfer in connotateur explains how we make such association.To understand a joke, we often interpret not from its literal meaning but from what it implies.We are socially cultivated to associate other connotateurs with the expressive layer of a sign.Therefore, to combine one denotation with the other will bring connotateurs and meaning from one connotateur will be transferred into the other and interpretation may change in different cultural and historical context with hidden ideologies.Signs are consumed nowadays with social and classical features.
Especially in language signs, the relations of signifier and signified seem absolutely natural or isology in Barthes' words.We could give the name of isology to the phenomenon whereby language wields its signifiers and signifieds so that it is impossible to dissociate and differentiate them (Barthes, 1964).People use language as a natural way without noticing the underlying process of naturalization which dissolves history, tradition, ideology and culture into a simple sign.This process of naturalization, the covering up of the cultural and historical determinants of meaning can occur when we assume that a representation is a direct presentation of the real.The quintessential example of naturalization is the press photograph which is presented as an unbiased, "mechanical analogue of reality," when it is actually "worked up, selected, composed, constructed…treated according to various professional, aesthetic, or ideological norms" ("The Photographic Message (Barthes, 1985)."6-7).Saussure's structural linguistics provided this theory as well as a model for an ideological critique of a variety of texts other than strictly verbal ones (Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge (Barthes, 1988 5).The correspondence between signifiers and signifieds is confined with the influence from society, culture, history, ethics, and geography etc.This is not to say certain signifieds are surely and permanently expressed in specific signifiers, rather, their connections could change but only with the social and cultural development.According to Saussure, language is always caught up in the social "current".It "never exists apart from the social fact, for it is a semiological phenomenon."There are, Saussure says, "forceswhich from one moment to the next are shifting the relationship between the signified and the signifier" (75-77).He says, business suits as a symbol are the most popular and formal dress in the international business activities.After its introduction to China in last century, business suits (called western-style dress in Chinese) have carried various meaning or signifieds in people's lives throughout history.In the time of Culture Revolution (from 1966 to 1976), suits symbolized an extravagant and decadent way of life for capitalists and only negative roles or villains on screen were in suits.Turning to the beginning of Reform and Opening time (since 1978), the connotation of suits became a token for fashion and openness, and people dressed them in every possible occasion including shopping, meeting friends and even doing sports activities.Various types of suits were tailored into uniforms in many factories and working places.Suits, as a fashion, were used for Chinese people, especially the young, to declare they have reformed.After several decades of changing in connotations, suits finally find their way to their dress code of the international agreement in China and those who dress them in casual time are treated as inappropriate and out-of-date.From the changing history of what suits stand for in China, we could understand that clothes have far over passed their functional signifieds as a way of keeping warm and covering body and embodied more complex connotations in the consumer society where the abundant commodities are the prominent feature.Many years ago, such signs as green army suits, Sun Yat Sen's uniforms and color in red (they all represented a communist revolution against the imperialist aggression and rivalry party) had great emotional affections for Chinese people and their particular meanings dramatically influenced a generation's lives and values.To view the point from a larger perspective, the same is true with culture.Whoever control or influence the signification (signifying process) of signs would have great power and impact on all human beings.Because we live immersed in a world full of signs, he warns, control of signification is a tremendous power, one that is never neutral and that can bind us to representations of the world and of ourselves.(Kay Westmoreland) A word designates or means what it does, not because of some inherent correspondence between the signifier and the signified, but because at some point in time a cultural group has arbitrarily agreed on the relationship between these two parts of the sign (Kay, 1995).What allows the sign to work as a whole unit of social meaning is a code, the rule for combining a sensory impression with a mental content, and the basic signifiers in a language into a system of meanings.(Martin Irvine) These codes are never purely random subjective associations of the reader but are to a large extent prescribed by our cultures as values, meanings, and practices we have agreed upon (Kay 1995).
From the point of view of these semiologists like Barthes, Fiske and Terence Hawkcs, myth is the connotation built on denotation.But we do not think it is enough to understand myth well and truly without mentioning the meta-language, metonymy and generalization.In our view, mythology, as a strategy of language, is composed of two layers: one is the connotation which is formed by metaphor and the other is meta-language formed by metonymy.And the deep rule of connotation and metaphor is naturalizing, and generalization is rooted in metalanguage and metonymy.Thus mythology contains two mechanisms: the naturalizing functions when metaphor and connotation connects irrelevant things together and the generalization works when metonymy and metalanguage highlights correlations of things and produce imagination and equivalence.When connotation and meta-language, metaphor and metonymy, generalization and naturalizing work together, mythology appears.All these structures and mechanisms create new similarities and correlations, construct new equivalence and communicate new information.See in the following examples.
The myth in Figure 8 shows, when referring to the prosperity of Shanghai, we cannot give an exhaustive description with either language or videos.All we could do is use one street or district such as the Bund or Nanjing road to emphasize the similarities between these streets and the whole metropolis.In semiotics, the signified of these districts is the metropolis-Shanghai instead of the location, scenery or history of streets, which is the connotation.The Bund is a metaphor of modern city.These concepts are accepted by large, which is the natualizing.Meanwhile, one district to the whole city means a relation of part to the whole, thus a metonymy.When a signification system E3R3C3 becomes the signified C1 of another system E1R1C1, this is a meta-language and generalization makes it possible.The shot shows the prosperity of the city Shanghai rather than the Bund itself.
Figure 9 is a diagrammatical analysis of a recruitment advertisement of China University of Communication (CUC), which denotes the myth of fame and wealth after entering this university.The first step of making myth is to build connotations with these media celebrities such as Wangzhi etc.The public treats them as a symbol of success, fame and wealth.The famous host Chenluyu becomes a metaphor of fame and money like every else in the ad.These concepts have won a common consent in society with the powerful influence of mass media.The second step is to highlight these celebrities are graduates of CUC, or a part to the whole relation in Fiske's term.This is a metonymy, in which the correlations are built and Chen become a spokeswoman for students in CUC.This is also a meta-language, in which a system of E3R3C3 becomes the signified of another system E1R1C1or E1'R1'C1'or E1"R1"C1"and generalization appears.It suggests that you will become as successful as these hosts after entering this university.Thus the myth -fame and wealth after entering CUC is constructed with the naturalizing rule of the metaphor with Chen and the generalization of all students in CUC.
As the book name of Empire of Signs (Roland Barthes, 1970) indicates, humans have long been entangled and manipulated by signs and symbols.Semiotics is 'concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign' (Eco, 1976, p. 6).An image, a gesture, a sound and words may all be treated as a sign.In the consumer society, we are surrounded by all types of signs around every corner of our lives, including cultural life and social inter-relationships.The value of signs in the industrial world even becomes a powerful way of accumulating social capitals.Signs are so critical that the communication between people or through history will not happen without them, whereas signs are mightier in the sense of changing our lives, constructing our cultures and controlling our minds.

Figure 1 .Figure 2 .
Figure 1.A sign is expressed in the system of ERC.

Figure 8 .
Figure 8.The myth referring to the prosperity of Shanghai.

Figure 9 .
Figure 9.A diagrammatical analysis of a recruitment advertisement of China University of Communication UC).