ABSTRACT
Literary and cultural theory is often viewed as taking its origins from the birth of modern linguistics: a discipline which can be said to emerge in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. In his Course in General Linguistics, a collection of his lectures first published in 1915, Saussure looked again at the fundamental question: what is a linguistic sign? Dividing the sign into parts, Saussure produced a definition in which a sign can be imagined as a two-sided coin combining a signified (concept) and a signifier (sound-image). This notion of the linguistic sign emphasizes that its meaning is non-referential: a sign is not a word’s reference to some object in the world but the combination, conveniently sanctioned, between a signifier and a signified. In the English language we employ the word ‘tree’ not because it literally points to certain tree-like objects in the world but because the signifier ‘tree’ is associated with a certain concept. In Latin we would employ the signifier ‘arbor’ to refer to the same concept; in Saussure’s original French it would be designated by the word ‘arbre’. Signs are arbitrary, possessing meaning not because of a referential function but because of their function within
a linguistic system as it exists at any one moment of time. Language as it exists at any moment of time is referred to as the synchronic system of language, rather than the diachronic element of language, which evolves through time. When humans write or speak they may believe they are being referential, but in fact they are producing specific acts of linguistic communication (parole) out of the available synchronic system of language (langue). The reference of the sign is to the system, not directly to the world.
