FR2404 - Lecture 1 - Saussure and the Linguistic Sign

At the turn of the last century, linguists were primarily concerned with historical linguistics (how language changed over time) and comparative philogogy (comparing different languages), however, Ferdinand de Saussure, a professor in the university of Geneva, changed the study of linguistics completely. He gave a series of lectures on his theory of language as a system of signs which his students assembled into the book, "Cours de linguistique générale" after his death.

Saussure was influenced by his contemporaries, e.g. Freud, people who were not interested in investigating the experience of the individual but rather wanted to develop a 'social fact', that is something that is true for all humans. Likewise, Saussure wanted to develop a linguistic fact. He didn't want to study just one language or dialect, he wanted to describe the universality of language - the etat de langue - the state of all languages.

He wished to answer the following questions:

• How do we understand each other when we communicate?
• Why do we understand our native language but not foreign languages?

When we hear a foreign language, it sounds like chaos. We don't even know where words begin and end. However, when we hear our own language, we can easily make sense of it. This is because language is a system and the system can be learned.

The system is based on le signe linguistique  - the linguistic sign.

The sign is made up of two components, the signifiant and the signifié. The signifiant is that which signifies. It is the sound you hear. For example, if someone says the word 'cat', you will think of this:



The cat itself is that which is signified. In simple terms, the signifier is the word and the signified is the meaning of the word, or the concept attached to that word. Saussure theorised that when someone says a word to us, e.g. cat, we associate an image with this word. A word is just a noise. By itself this noise has no meaning. However, when the word is said to someone who understands it, this person then thinks of an image. This image is the signifié, the concept related to a word. It is the relationship between the word and the image that gives language meaning. Without this system of signs, language would not work. If I said, "Cat," but you thought of the image of a dog instead, we would not be able to understand each other. If people did not associate the same images with the same words, language would break down. This system of linguistic signs is true of every language in the world.

Suggested reading - Cours de Linguistique générale - Nature of the Linguistic Sign p. 65