Hello, guys. In 1916, Course in General Linguistics
was published. It was a collection of notes
from lectures held by the Swiss linguist,
Ferdinand de Saussure. In the book, Saussure
created structural linguistics, and laid the
foundation for the study of signs, known as
semiotics or semiology. And his theories have
remained central to fields like philosophy,
anthropology, media studies, literary studies
cultural studies. So, what is language according
to Ferdinand de Saussure? Language is a system
of signs, and signs are basically things that
stand in for something else. And signs are
literally everywhere. It's the pictograms
on restroom doors, showing you who this particular
restroom is intended for. And signs can be
found in literary and media texts, as well,
where they should be playing with forms and
codes in all sorts of interesting ways. And
signs can be found in cultural events, too,
like wrestling, or boxing, or football (soccer),
or something not pertaining to sports. And
the linguistic sign works the same way. For
example, we say "dog" in conversations to
avoid showing a dog to the people with whom
we're conversing. The word "dog" stands in
as a representation for the actual thing.
And signs are two-sided, according to Saussure.
One of these sides is the signifier, or signifiant
in French. It's the sign we use to refer to
the things we're talking about. And in language,
this is words, e.g., the word "dog". And the
things we talk about, our ideas and concepts,
are called signified, or signifié in French.
That could be anything, but if we go with
the example from before, it could be an actual
dog. Saussure talks about the arbitrariness
of the linguistic sign. This refers to the
relationship of the signifier and signified
because there's no natural link between the
two. The signifier "dog" is not more dog-like
than the signifier chair, or table, or flatscreen
TV. As a community, we've chosen to link the
word "dog" with the furry, fuzzy four-legged
animal. If you imagine a sign to be a piece
of paper, one side is the signifier, for example
the word "dog", and the other side functions
as the signified, in this case an actual dog.
Practical effects are in my budget. It's not
just the signifier that's arbitrary, it's
the thing being signified, too. You can't
just point to things and name them, that's
not how language works. If that was the case,
we'd all be amazing at all the languages in
the world because translation wouldn't really
be a thing. Furthermore, there are the things
that can't be translated directly because
some languages lack the words for it, whilst
other languages do have said words. And concepts
change all the time; for example the words
"queer" or "gay", meaning flamboyant and happy
at one point, now they refer to homosexuality
in our point of history. This means there's
no standard to which a concept being signified
must live up. Signifieds are as changeable
as the signifiers. If the community using
the signs agrees on a signifier and a signified,
then it's a-ok. And this arbitrariness of
the sign leads us to the distinction between
langue and parole. Langue is the structure
of language, the system of language. It's
what we internalise when we learn a new language,
e.g., syntax and grammar. According to Saussure,
this is the social aspect of language. Parole
is how the language is executed. It's how
we talk, how we pronounce words, and how we
affect each other psychologically. E.g., if
I say "dog", your version of a dog might be
different to my version of a dog. Parole is
the individual aspect of language, according
to Saussure. This distinction means the nature
of signs has a clear pattern; it cannot stand
alone. It must belong to a system, to a structure.
And that's because it divides a continuum
in ways peculiar to the language it belongs
to. I you show a person a lot of green things,
and didn't show them brown, black, or yellow
things, they still wouldn't know how to distinguish
between colours. You'd have to teach them
the other colours, as well. That's because
signs are relational and work through exclusion.
We define the colour green as something that's
not brown, or yellow, or black, or red. Colour
is a linguistic structure, and colours are
held together by their relation to other colours.
And it's this structure of language that has
made signs interesting to a lot of people.
Another system could be chess.The basic units
of chess are straightforward; kings, queens,
rooks, knights, bishops, and pawns. And even
tough chess pieces look like this, their appearance
really doesn't matter. As long as we can distinguish
between them, we could literally change any
of them within the structure, like swapping
out the rooks for dog treats. A chess piece
doesn't have a standard it has to live up
to. It's completely arbitrary how it looks
or feels. Its identity is wholly a function
of differences within a structure. Remember
to like and subscribe and I'll see you all
next time. Bye.
