69249454-chandler-semiotics

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of amazement or even disbelief generated by encountering such
‘counter-intuitive’ gendering of colours serves to alert us to a realization
that some of the codes which seem most natural may be
rather more arbitrary than we had assumed. Reading the justification
in the passage for pink being deemed more suitable for boys
than for girls may seem initially to be an amusing rationalization,
but the realization quickly dawns that our own rationale for the
opposite case is hardly immune from the same judgement. Such
revelatory moments powerfully suggest the denaturalizing potential
of semiotics.
TEXTUAL CODES
Every text is a system of signs organized according to codes and subcodes
which reflect certain values, attitudes, beliefs, assumptions and
practices. Codes transcend single texts, linking them together in an
interpretive framework which is used by their producers and interpreters.
In creating texts we select and combine signs in relation to
the codes with which we are familiar. Codes help to simplify phenomena
in order to make it easier to communicate experiences. In
reading texts, we interpret signs with reference to what seem to be
appropriate codes. This helps to limit their possible meanings.
Usually the appropriate codes are obvious, overdetermined by all
sorts of contextual cues. The medium employed clearly influences the
choice of codes. In this sense we routinely ‘judge a book by its cover’.
We can typically identify a text as a poem simply by the way in which
it is set out on the page. The use of what is sometimes called ‘scholarly
apparatus’ (such as introductions, acknowledgements, section
headings, tables, diagrams, notes, references, bibliographies, appendices
and indexes) – is what makes academic texts immediately identifiable
as such to readers. Such cueing is part of the metalingual
function of signs. With familiar codes we are rarely conscious of our
acts of interpretation, but occasionally a text requires us to work a little
harder – for instance, by pinning down the most appropriate signified
for a key signifier (as in jokes based on word play) – before we
can identify the relevant codes for making sense of the text as a whole.
Textual codes do not determine the meanings of texts but dominant