ABSTRACT
Saussure’s theories on the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of the sign take us only so far towards understanding how signs work. Saussure was interested primarily in the linguistic system, secondarily in how that system related to the reality to which it referred, and hardly at all in how it related to the reader and his or her socio-cultural position. He was interested in the complex ways in which a sentence can be constructed and in the way its form determines its meaning; he was much less interested in the fact that the same sentence may convey different meanings to different people in different situations.
