De Saussure's concept of Linguistic Sign

Dziecko ma concept ''zwierzęcia'', zna słowo ''pies'', widzi kurę i mówi, '' pać pieś!''

Linguistic Sign- polaczenie konceptu z nazwa, basis of communication, unity of a concept and sound image

According to Ferdinand De Saussure, language is made up of signs and every sign has two sides:

1. Signified – concept

– the shape of a word, its phonic concept, i.e. the sequence of letters or

phonemes ( what you say and what you write)

– more abstract

– purely differential

– directly dependent upon the sound image with which it is associated

2. Signifier – sound image

– memory of the sound trace that we can hear in our imagination

– it is not an actual spoken word, it is a sum of limited numbers of elements or phonemes which in turn can be called up only by a corresponding written symbols). There is a thing and it has a name.

– the sounds that compose the acoustic image, the phonemes, will be permissible ranges of sound differences imposed by the phonology of a particular language.

– The psychic impression of a sound, the representation of it which our senses give us.

The Linguistic Sign illustrated by:

It unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and an acoustic image, the physic entity with two sides. These two sides cannot be separated = the sign is indissoluble unity, permanent unit of two sides, which can not be separated.

The Sign is said to be:

- Concrete and integral (whole, entire) object of linguistic science, the point of view creates the object. That is, the point of view determines what is considered concrete (whole, entire), as opposed to an abstract (partial)

Signs are of two basic types, which will account for an important difference in the discussion of the properties of the sign. If a sign cannot be analyzed into constituent signs, it is a simple sign; if it consists of two or more meaningful parts, it is called a syntagme.

There are two types of signs: Simple and Syntagme. All signs have two central properties: Arbitrary and Linear

- Arbitrary: No motivation for the phonetic constitution of a sign is to be found in the thing for which it is a sign (mostly true in simple signs)

- Linear: Seen in significant (sound image) which can be segmented into parts succeeding each other in time (chain of speech)

The term Sign is a general expression. It can refer to sentence, clause, phrase, words or morphemes (only inflectional and derivational, not for roots or stems).

The word ''arbitrary'' does not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker. A speaker has no power to change a sign in any way once it has become established in the linguistic community. I mean that it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified.

Two objections against arbitrary nature of the sign:

- Onomatopoeia: the choice of signifier is not arbitrary (e.g., tick-tack); limited in number, not important

- Interjections: (e.g., ouch!)

[Additional objections:

- Immutable (changeless, inherited by generations) and mutable (from the History point of view)

- Simple (if it can not be analyzed into the consistent signs) and syntagme (if it consists of two or more meaningful parts i.e., complex and compound words, syntactic constructions).