The cultural theorists Stuart Hall and Roland Barthes are leading writers on language theory and explored a diverse range of fields , heavily influencing the development of schools of theory including structuralism , semiotics , social theory , anthropology and post-structuralism . In their analyses , they suggest that both language and text are an arbitrary social construct with the ability to both determine and limit the way we think and perceive our environment , though seemingly a meer neutral method of communicating common ideas based on recognised cultural signs and signifiers or ‘ systems of representation ’ fed to us since birth : our ‘ shared conceptual map ’ ( Hall ). Though Hall and Barthes write primarily of the limitations of text , their research can be applied to sound and art .
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