Signifier/Signified

In his ''Course in General Linguistics Saussure introduced his definition of what constitutes a linguistic sign: a production in which a sign is imagined as a two-sided coin combining a signified (concept) and a signifier (sound-image). He uses this concept to establish that a signs meaning is non-referential; signs do not simply point to objects in the world, but are the culturally sanctioned combination of a signifier and a signified. The word chair, as signifying sound image, is not associated with a certain object in the world, nor to some platonic ideal of ‘chair’, but a porous signified concept that allows us to recognize or label a great variety of certain objects in the world as chairs. The signifier of a sign is arbitrary in this sense: the sound image “chair” possesses its meaning not because of a referentiality in the sound-image itself, but because of its function within a linguistic system at any given moment of time, and the conventional agreement within that system (here English) that allows the sound “chair” to refer to the familiar, yet Morpheus concept we use to recognize and name as chairs.

Not only arbitrary, the sign for Saussure is differential, relying on the processes of combination and association within a linguistic system. Signs, signifiers, are not to be understood as positive: what meaning they possess they only do possess because of both their similarity and difference from other signs within a system. No sign has a meaning in and of itself: this conception of the sign and its implications was to have a great influence over all areas of the human sciences in the twentieth century. In the Course in General Linguistics Saussure imagines the foundations of a new science to study “the life of signs within society” which he dubs semiology.