The semiotic tradition in communication theory is the study of signs, and includes how meaning is created and understood. Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist radically changed the way language is studied. He argued that words and other language elements had no natural connection with the things they were indicating. They only are related through the structure which we use. We see signs as natural because they are a part of our everyday life and …showed first 75 words of 723 total…

…showed last 75 words of 723 total…a maple leaf and those might differ from another culture's connotations with it. While Saussure paved the way for a new wave of thinking, structural analysis alone didn't help the progress of trying to understand human use of language. Today, many linguists have moved beyond the structural approach and take a different view called generative grammar. Generative grammar is a set of rules or guidelines that specify or produce well-formed expressions of a natural language.