Saussure's Course in General Linguistics Terminology-Sign, Signifier and Signified





 Sign, Signifier and Signified:

Jonathon Culler again provides a good definition and starting point:

"...The Linguistic Sign. If speakers of different ages, sexes, and regions utter the sentence

The cat is on the mat, the actual physical sounds produced will vary considerably, and

insofar as they are referring to different cats and different mats, their intended meanings

will not be identical, yet from the point of view of the English Language, they are all

uttering the same sequence of signs. The sign, therefore, is an abstract unit, not to be

confused with an actual sequence of physical sounds nor with a referent. It is the

combination of a signifier, which is a phonological sequence or "sound image", and a

signified or concept, which in parole are manifested as sounds and as meanings and

references..."

we disagree with

Dr. Cohen, and to an extent with Culler, about the definitions of the

signifier

my view, any of the terms "

more or less acceptable ways to describe Saussure's

part of

"real world"). we think

so far as some people think, as Culler might, that it is impossible to separate meaning from

reference.) The

intuitively satisfying) are theoretical units, unknown in advance of empirical study—from my point

of view, meaning must be discovered through extensive and rigorous analysis.

and the signified. Culler's description of the signified as a concept is fine. However, onmeaning," "function," "content or substance" and "value" would besignified. Culler claims here that meaning isparole and does not distinguish it from reference (implications of the communication in themeaning is the signified. (Reference is irrelevant to the discussion except insign itself is part of langue and both the signifier and the signified (no matter how

Dr. Cohen

changes in its various syntactic contexts (contexts defined not by

taken as the largest unit of syntax, but by the genre of some larger environment, a

Saussure was certainly not saying.

to develop there own understandings of the Saussurian sign.

The

one more important point to remember about the sign: it is doubly arbitrary. Here is Culler on that

topic:

" ...Moreover, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary. That is to say

there is no intrinsic and "natural" reason why a particular concept should be linked with

one "sound image" rather than another, and therefore the linguist cannot attempt to explain

individual signs in piecemeal fashion. He must, rather, show how arbitrary signs fit

together in an internally coherent system. There is not intrinsic and inevitable connection

between the phonological sequence

the morphological system of English—the rules governing the internal structure of words

—relate is to relation as dictate to dictation, narrate to narration, etc... Precisely because

the individual signs are arbitrary, the linguist must, by way of explanation, attempt to

reconstruct the total system."

relate and the concept associated with it, but within

wants the signified to equal the grammatical function of the signifier as thatthe sentence, which is usuallytexteme). ThisDr. Cohen and other members of the faculty are, of course, freesign is Saussure's fundamental unit of langue and of language inheritance. There is

Dr. Cohen

relations among signifiers and signifieds as subject to a kind of radical instability. He sees in it a

support for the notion that the same signifier will appear with different (and many, many) functions

as its communicative environment changes. (I think an opposite tendency, one that leads to the

conservation and limitation of forms and functions, is at work in languages through a process

roughly parallel to genetic inheritance and natural selection.)

Left unstated in the previous quote from Culler (though understood by him) is that the

concepts, the signifieds, themselves are arbitrary: language is not a nomenclature that assigns

labels to concepts given somehow in advance or necessitated in an irresistible way by the nature of

human beings or reality. Every language is in Saussure's terminology, "its own principle of

classification." It categorizes according to the interests, needs, and peculiarities of the population in

and for which it develops. The identification of cross-linguistic grammatical categories or

functions, categories that do not seem to result from inheritance (i.e. for which we can trace no

history), such as "predication," "subordination," "attribution," "modality," or "tense/aspect" does not

fit with the assumption that every language is categorizing reality on and in its own terms. (That

these categories do not reflect a single or simple "grammatical nature" but instead seem to derive

variously from "logical", "philosophical", or "semantic" domains is itself deeply problematic.) In

the

universal) functions. Saussure is right and contemporary linguistics, to the extent that it insists on chasing such phantoms, is wrong.

sees in this fact about the sign, its arbitrary character, a support for regarding theCourse, Saussure never mentions or attempts to identify such cross-linguistic (or worse,