Signification is the act of signifying or being a sign or meaning. The term signification is also used to mean importance or consequence.

Signifyin(g) (Gates) or signifyin' (slang) is an African-American rhetorical device featuring indirect communication or persuasion and the creating of new meanings for old words and signs. Signifying, in this sense, includes repetition and difference, implication and association, combining words and meanings to create or associate new ones. In everyday practice it consists of telling people you know what you think about them or their actions, or making some other point, in an indirect way. Literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1988, xxi, 44, 52) uses the Signifying Monkey tales of African-American folklore and the pan-African Yoruba Esu-Elegbara to function "as a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition" which he further describes as "the rhetorical principle in Afro-American vernacular discoure". Among other examples, he cites "marking, loud-talking, testifying, calling out (of one's name), sounding, rapping, playing the dozens," and Ralph Ellison's play on Richard Wright's Native Son and Black Boy in his Invisible Man. Other examples include many hip hop techniques and forms such as sampling and answer records. Roger Abrahams (n.d.) cites the subversive elements of the improvised and repetative lyrics of old work-songs such as collected by John and Alan Lomax.

Caponi (1999)) "describes calls, cries, hollers, riffs, licks, overlapping antiphony" as examples of signifying in hip hop music and other African-American music. He explains that signifying differs from simple repetition and from simple variation in that it uses material "rhetorically or figuratively--through troping, in other words--by trifling with, teasing, or censuring it in some way (Wentworth and Flexman 1960; Major 1970). Signifyin(g) is also a way of demonstrating respect for, goading, or poking fun at a musical style, process, or practice through parody, pastische, implication, indirection, humor, tone- or word-play, the illusions of speech, or narration, and other troping mechanisms...Signifyin(g) shows, among other things, either reverence or irreverence toward previously stated musical statements and values." (141) Schloss (2004, 138) relates this to the ambiguity common to African musics including looping (as of a sample) for "it allows individuals to demonstrate intellectual power while simultaneously obscuring the nature and extent of their agency...It allows producers to use other people's music to convey their own compositional ideas."

See also: call and response

Sources

• Caponi, Gena Dagel (1999). Signifyin(G), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 155849183X.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195034635.
• Schloss, Joseph G. (2004). Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0819566969.