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Semiotics: Saussure and the linguistic sign · The Signifier and the Signified

How Saussure's two-sided sign works: the signifier and signified, why their bond is arbitrary, and how signs gain meaning through difference.

Semiotics · 22 questions

Try 3 questions

1. How did Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published in 1916, come to exist?

  1. Students compiled it from lecture notes after his death
  2. Editors assembled it from his private letters
  3. He wrote it as his doctoral thesis
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Answer: Students compiled it from lecture notes after his death

Saussure never wrote the book: two colleagues reconstructed it from students' notes of his Geneva lectures, published three years after he died.

2. In Saussure's model, a linguistic sign unites which two elements?

  1. A sound pattern and a concept
  2. A speaker and a listener
  3. A word and a physical object
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Answer: A sound pattern and a concept

The sign joins a signifier (a sound-image) with a signified (a concept); the real-world thing is not part of it.

3. For Saussure, what is the signified of the word "tree"?

  1. An actual tree in the world
  2. The mental concept of a tree
  3. The letters t, r, e, e
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Answer: The mental concept of a tree

The signified is a concept in the mind, not a physical object, which is why we can talk meaningfully about trees that are absent or imaginary.

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