Most women stabilize any water retention weight within a few months. However, if weight gain is excessive, check with your doctor to make sure hormone and blood sugar levels are normal, as excessive abdominal fat increases the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure.
Semiotics is the study of signs. In language, signs are part of the existing structure that we use to communicate. That structure is called la langue. Each sign is made up of the signifier (the word) and the signified (the concept).
General Semiotics tends to be formalistic, abstracting signs from the contexts of use; Social Semiotics takes the meaning-making process, semiosis, to be more fundamental than the system of meaning-relations among signs, which are considered only the resources to be deployed in making meaning.