Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. It is a
subsection of linguistics that became its own distinct field of study at the start of
the 20th century with the work of the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure's background was in comparative and historical
linguistics; he was an expert in the study of Indo-European languages.
In a series of courses that he gave at the University of Geneva, Saussure outlined his
thoughts on creating a new field of study that would be a science of language. The
study of languages at the time was commonly called philology and it was a study of the
development of languages rather than looking at living language.
Saussure delivered this Course on General Linguistics three times in 1907, 1909 and
1911. He never published anything on the subject because he always felt that his work
was too tentative and that he hadn't found the solid ground worthy of publishing. But
after his death in 1913, a group of students and colleagues of Saussure's took their
notes on his course and compiled them into a book called Course on General
Linguistics. This work ended up being highly influential in the 20th century in the
development of semiotics as well as structuralism and poststructuralism through
which it influenced everything from anthropology and sociology to psychoanalysis
and literary theory. In this episode we are going to explore the
core pillars of Saussure's semiotics. First we're going to look at what Semiotics is by
looking at Saussure's distinctions between synchronic and diachronic studies of language
and between langue and parole. Then we are going to look at three core elements
of semiotic theory: the structure of a sign, the arbitrariness of language and Saussure's
interesting claim that language is about relations and differences and not about naming.
Diachronic vs Synchronic In demarcating the field of study for the
nascent semiotics, Saussure drew a distinction between two ways of studying language
which he called diachronic and synchronic.
Diachronic which comes from the Greek words dia- meaning through and chronos
meaning time - is the study of the evolution of language through time. This was the
classical field in which Saussure was himself already an expert. Philology and
historical linguistics take this diachronic approach to language and explore the
historical evolution of languages. Synchronic on the other hand comes from the
Greek words syn- meaning together and again chronos meaning time and what Saussure
means by the synchronic study of languages is the study of language at a moment
in time without any consideration of its history or evolution.
This diachronic/synchronic distinction is Saussure's first boundary marker for
semiotics. It's basically stating that this new science of linguistics that he is proposing
is separate to the historical linguistics that is being done everywhere else. This new
science is to explore the language itself at a moment in time.
This distinction was later picked up in the sociological and philosophical traditions
by thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul
Sartre and Jacques Lacan.
Langue vs. Parole The next boundary marker that Saussure lays
down is the distinction between langue and parole. With the distinction between synchronic
and diachronic study of languages, Saussure tells us that semiotics
is the study of language in a moment in time rather than looking at historical development.
The distinction between langue and parole tells us what aspect of this language at a
moment in time semiotics is going to be studying. He distinguishes between two French words
for language: langue and parole. Langue is the equivalent of the English word tongue.
Like the English word this captures the sense of articulate language while also being
the word for that all important organ of language that you find in the mouth.
The other word that Saussure uses is parole which is usually translated in English as
speech. Saussure uses these terms to refer to two
different aspects of language. The difference between langue and parole is the difference
between language and speech. Langue is the entirety of the structure of
the language while parole is the language as
we speak it. With parole, we make the langue concrete; we are using it in the flow of
conversation bringing the langue to life and using it to communicate.
But unlike this concrete instantiation of language, langue is the abstract structure
which is always behind parole and which parole draws upon.
A good way of thinking about this is through music. So let's say you have a musician
who is playing Mozart's Ein Klein Nachtmusik. This musician may miss some notes,
they may add some flourishes, they may even stop halfway through. This individual
instance and playing of Mozart is what Saussure means by parole. It is the concretising
of Mozart's music. The piece of music itself however - the langue
- is always separate. The musical piece we call Ein Klein Nachtmusik is always
separate from its concrete instances. It is one step abstracted from these playings of
it. Some of these renditions may be closer to the abstract Ein Klein Nachtmusik and some
may be further away but they are all separate to it. This abstract piece of music
that we call Ein Klein Nachtmusik then is what Saussure means by langue.
When you speak English you are like the musician playing Mozart. Your speech or
parole is one instance of English, one rendition of the monolithic piece of music that
we call the English language or that Saussure calls langue.
Your speaking English is a concretising of this abstract langue that exists separate
to any usage of it.
The other thing that Saussure says is that langue is social. It is never contained
completely in one individual. There will be words you know of that I don't and there'll
be words that I know that you don't; sometimes I might even use the language
improperly. This is all part of the incomplete instantiation of langue in the everyday
parole. What Saussure is looking to do with this distinction
is to demarcate langue as the field of study for semiotics. Semiotics is to be
the science of langue, of this abstract structure of language. This homogenous structure
of langue is what Saussure wants to isolate and study with semiotics.
Signifiers, Signifieds and Referents Having marked off the territory of semiotics
using these distinctions between diachronic/synchronic and between langue/parole,
there are three revolutionary insights that Saussure outlined in his Course
in General Linguistics that ended up being extremely influential in the intellectual
landscape of the 20th century. The first is of these is Saussure's definition
of the fundamental linguistic unit. Saussure calls this unit the sign and there
are two sides to it that he calls the signifier and the signified. These two aspects are as
distinct and interdependent as the two sides of a coin.
The signifier is the sensible aspect of the sign.
In speech it is the sound of the word, in writing it is the marks on the page or the
pixels on the screen while in sign language it is
physical gestures and expressions. But these signifiers don't just have to be linguistic;
street signs or traffic lights are examples of
signifiers that don't use words to signify. So the signifier is the word sign or symbol
that points us in a certain direction. The signifier points us to the signified,
the second aspect of Saussure's linguistic anatomy of language. So when you use the word
tree that signifier points me towards the signified which is my mental concept of
tree. This idea of the signified becomes clearer when contrasted with what Saussure
calls the referent. The referent is the objective thing that we
are speaking about. So if we take the example of a tree then you've got your signifier
in the word tree; this signifier points you to the signified - in this case the mental
concept of a tree and together these form the Sign. And separate to these you have the
tree that you are experiencing in reality and trying to point to with language.
This distinction between the signified and the referent can be a little tricky to grasp
at first. You might think that the signifier
points directly to the referent, why do we have
this conceptual middle man called the signified? Well this becomes clearer in the case
of fictional entities.
So let's take a dragon for example. Now we can have a number of signifiers for dragon
such as fire-breathing monster, a flying lizard or we could take the word for dragon in
all the different languages. These are all different signifiers.
But now if we were to go look for a referent we would never find one because dragons
don't exist. In the case of the dragon it is clear that there is one thing which these
different signifiers point to and that this one thing doesn't have a referent.
What these different signifiers do point to is a single signified and that is the concept
of a dragon. This concept that the different signifiers point to is what Saussure calls
the signified. Arbitrary Nature of Signifiers and Signifieds
Having uncovered this signifier/signified structure of Signs, Saussure's exploration
of this structure reveals two big insights. The
first is that both signifiers and signifieds are
arbitrary. In the case of signifiers what this means
is that the words we use for things are not necessary connections but arbitrary ones.
The word tree could just as easily have been bool or stoog. There is nothing about the
word tree itself that is inherently connected to the tree as we experience it.
This makes sense when you think about the fact that the word tree varies from
language to language while doing just as good a job at telling people about the referent.
There are exceptions to this which serve to make Saussure's point all the clearer. One
exception is onomatopoeia. In this case words like bang, meow or smack are not
arbitrary. That is to say, they do actually bear a necessary relation to the signified.
The word meow is intended to represent the actual
sound a cat makes. But this is a case of the exception proving
the rule. Most words do not bear any such connection and could easily be switched for
another without any loss of effectiveness as signifiers. This is what Saussure means
when he says that signifiers are arbitrary. But that is not all. Saussure also tells us
that signifieds are arbitrary. This one is a little
trickier to get your head around because you think well surely the concept of an oak is
something fixed. But, says Saussure, if signifieds weren't
arbitrary then we would have this Platonic realm of fixed concepts that we merely needed
to put signifiers on. If this were the case then we would expect all words to be
directly translatable between different languages. The variation between languages
would merely be a matter of changing the signifiers for different concepts. In English
we say cat in French they say chat. Same concept different word.
But this is not always the case. One example that Saussure gives is of the French word
boeuf. If you were to translate this French word into English you would have two
choices. On the one hand you might be talking about the food product beef but
depending on the context you might also be talking about the animal that this food
product comes from - the ox. What's going on here is that the French concept
of boeuf does not exist in English. In English we have two concepts instead of one,
we have two signifieds instead of French's one.
The same goes for the French word belle-m re. If you were to translate this word into
English you would have two choices: stepmother or mother-in-law.
In both these examples we can see that the French language has cut up the conceptual
landscape in a different way to English. This conceptual landscape doesn't just vary
between languages but over time. The colour orange only entered the English language
in the early 1500s. The word orange had been in the English language since the
1300s in exclusive reference to the fruit but
over time it came to capture the colour between red and yellow.
If you had asked an English speaker about the colours of the rainbow in the 1300s
their account would not have included the colour orange. But over time the conceptual
landscape has shifted so that the concept of orange emerged as a distinct signified.
In this case it's not that the referent orange
did not exist, it's that the way the landscape of
reality was cut up by language was different. This is what Saussure is getting at when
he says that the signified is arbitrary; he's pointing to the fact that the conceptual
landscape varies across cultures and across time.
Language is All Differences and Relations Saussure's other big insight comes from the
implications of this arbitrary nature of the signifiers and the signifieds.
Because when Saussure realised that the signifier and the signified are arbitrary, he
began to wonder how the hell language actually operates. And what he realised is that
language doesn't work by naming things - otherwise it wouldn't be arbitrary - it
communicates through a system of relations and differences.
The example that Saussure uses to illustrate this principle is the 8.25 Geneva to Paris
Express train. Saussure says that we think of this 8.25 Geneva to Paris Express as the
same train everyday even though the train itself may be a different vehicle, it may
be operated by a completely different group of
people without a single passenger in common. And the train may even be late.
Nevertheless we all take it for granted that this is the same train regardless of the
physical train, the people or even the time. What's important according to Saussure is
that it be distinguished from the 10:25 Geneva to Paris Express, the 8:25 Geneva to
Dijon local and all the other trains that are
flowing in and out of the station. Another example is of a chess board. Let's
say you're missing a knight on the chessboard. You can easily swap in another
object in its stead and this object will function as a knight because of its difference
and relation to all the other pieces around it.
This is what Saussure meant when he said that in the system of language "there are
only differences, with no positive terms." He was referring to this definition of terms
requiring their relation to other terms in order to derive their meaning.
Summary So to summarise what we've covered we looked
at how Saussure demarcated the field of semiotics using the distinctions between
synchronic and diachronic and between langue and parole. These told us that semiotics
is the study of language at a moment in time rather than historically and that it's
the study of the structure of language rather than its use in speech.
From there we looked at the structure of the basic linguistic unit the sign and how it
is composed of signifiers - the words we use
for things - and signifieds - the concepts that these words point to.
We then looked at how these signifiers and signifieds were both arbitrary and changed
between languages and over time and finally we looked at what Saussure meant when
he said that language works by relations and differences.
That's everything that I wanted to cover on this episode of the living philosophy. If
you have any thoughts insights or feedback I'd
love to hear from you down in the comments, if you've enjoyed the video you
might like to give it a thumbs up down below and if you're new to the channel you
might like to subscribe otherwise I shall see you next time thanks for watching