The founders of modern semiotics are Saussure and Peirce. They respectively proposed their own basic systems of semiotics in the early 20th century. However, semiotics itself has always been on the fringes of the academic world. It had to wait until the 1960s. Saussure's semiotics took off under the name of structuralism. At that time, semiotics and structuralism were almost the same thing. In the 1970s and 1980s, structuralism broke through itself and became poststructuralism, in which semiotics played a huge role. After that, Peirce's model replaced Saussure's model and became the basis of contemporary semiotics.

In recent years, Peirce's semiotics has replaced Saussure's semiotics. A very important reason is that Peirce focused on the meaning interpretation of symbols. His semiotics is a semiotics that focuses on cognition and interpretation. His famous saying is “Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign.” This is the proper form of semiotics.