semiotics
n. the study of verbal and nonverbal signs and of the ways in which they communicate meaning within particular sign systems. Unlike semantics, which restricts itself to the meanings expressed in language, semiotics is concerned with human symbolic activity generally. As an academic discipline, semiotics developed within the general framework of 20th-century structuralism, taking as its premise the view that signs can only generate meanings within a pattern of relationships to other signs. Also called semiology. [introduced by Charles S. Peirce]