<Li> Syntactics / Syntax: relations among or between signs in formal structures </Li> <Li> Pragmatics: relation between signs and sign - using agents or interpreters </Li> <P> Syntactics is the Morris'ean branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols; the interrelation of the signs, without regard to meaning . Semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects that they may or do denote; the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply . Finally, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena that occur in the functioning of signs; the relation between the sign system and its human (or animal) user . Unlike his mentor George Herbert Mead, Morris was a behaviorist and sympathetic to the Vienna Circle positivism of his colleague, Rudolf Carnap. Morris was accused by John Dewey of misreading Peirce . </P> <Ul> <Li> Thure von Uexküll (1908--2004), the "father" of modern psychosomatic medicine, developed a diagnostic method based on semiotic and biosemiotic analyses . </Li> <Li> Roland Barthes (1915--1980) was a French literary theorist and semiotician . He often would critique pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois society used them to impose its values upon others . For instance, the portrayal of wine drinking in French society as a robust and healthy habit would be a bourgeois ideal perception contradicted by certain realities (i.e. that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics useful in conducting these critiques . Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were second - order signs, or connotations . A picture of a full, dark bottle is a sign, a signifier relating to a signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage--wine . However, the bourgeois take this signified and apply their own emphasis to it, making "wine" a new signifier, this time relating to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing wine . Motivations for such manipulations vary from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo . These insights brought Barthes very much in line with similar Marxist theory . </Li> </Ul>

Symbols are signs that are inherently and logically connected to the thing they represent