ReaDing and discusSion

1.1 Study the terms taken from the text below.

a sign, the signifier, the signified,

the referent, langue, parole, denotatum, motivation.

Can you define the meaning yourself? Read the definitions and compare them to the one’s you’ve just given.

1.2 Study information about signs and follow the activities after the text.

In semiotics, a sign is generally defined as, "...something that stands for something else, to someone in some capacity." (Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron, "Analyzing Cultures"). It may be understood as a discrete unit of meaning, whether denotative or connotative. Signs are not just words, but also include images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds — essentially all of the ways in which information can be processed into a codified form and communicated as a message by any sentient, reasoning mind to another.

The nature of signs has long been discussed in philosophy. Initially, within linguistics and later semiotics, there were two general schools of thought: those who proposed that signs are dyadic, and those who proposed that signs are interpreted in a recursive pattern of triadic relationships.

Dyadic signs

According to Saussure (1857-1913), language is made up of signs and every sign has two sides:

• the signifier (French signifiant)

the "shape" of a word, i.e. the sequence of letters or phonemes

e.g. C-A-T

• the signified (French signifié)

the concept or object that appears in our minds when we hear or read the signifier

e.g. a small domesticated animal with fur, four legs and a tail

(The signified is not to be confused with the referent. The former is a mental concept, the latter the actual object in the world)

According to him, the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, i.e. there is no direct connection between the shape and the concept (cf. Bussmann 1996: 434). For instance, there is no reason why the letters C-A-T (or the sound of these phonemes) produce exactly the image of the small, domesticated animal with fur, four legs and a tail in our minds. It is a result of convention: speakers of the same language group have agreed (and learned) that these letters or sounds evoke a certain image.

Signifier, and the signified cannot be conceptualized as separate entities but rather as a mapping from significant differences in sound to potential (correct) differential denotation. The Saussurean sign exists only at the level of the synchronic system, in which signs are defined by their relative and hierarchical privileges of co-occurrence. It is thus a common misreading of Saussure to take signifiers to be anything one could speak, and signifieds as things in the world. In fact, the relationship of langue to parole, or speech-in-context, is and always has been a theoretical problem for linguistics (cf. Roman Jakobson's famous essay "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics" et al.). He is also important in emphasizing that the relationship between a sign and its extralinguistic denotatum is arbitrary. There is neither a natural relationship between a word and the object it refers to, nor is there a causal relationship between the inherent properties of the object and the nature of the sign used to denote it. For example, there is nothing about the physical quality of "paper" that requires denotation by the phonological sequence 'paper.' There is, however, what Saussure called 'relative motivation': the possibilities of signification of a signifier are constrained by the compositionality of elements in the linguistic system (cf. Emile Benveniste's paper on the arbitrariness of the sign in the first volume of his papers on general linguistics). A word is only available to acquire a new meaning if it is identifiably different from all the other words in the language and it has no existing meaning. It was the twin discoveries that 1) the distinction between the levels of system and use and 2) the semantic "value" of a sign could only be defined system-internally, that formed the basis of structuralism.