ABSTRACT
An important development in structural linguistics occurred with the theory
by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the author of Mémoire sur le système primitive des voyelles dans les languages Indo-européennes (1878). His students reconstructed from their class notes his Course de linquistique générale (1906-11). In these works, de Saussure argued that a word such as “cat” not only produces an inscription for a four-legged animal, but it
creates a concept or mental image of such an animal. The initial inscription
is called the signifi er, whereas the concept is the signifi ed. The relationship
between the former and the latter is completely arbitrary, which implies that
the system of language does not embody a natural meaning; however, it does
mark distinctions within a system of identities and differences.
