Semiotics refers to the study of signs, their production, use, and meaning. The meanings provided by signs contribute to social identities, and thus, semiotics is often incorporated into studies of identity, communication, and culture. Semiotics covers four areas: semantics, syntactics, pragmatics, and semiosis.

Semantics is the study of the relationship between signs and the things they reference. For instance, one might study the relationship between an object and its name. Charles Morris refers to objects of reference as designata, ...