Linguistic Sign Quotes

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

An object never serves the same function as its image - or its name.

Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

I begin, then, with some remarks about 'the meaning of a word.' I think many persons now see all or part of what I shall say: but not all do, and there is a tendency to forget, or to get it slightly wrong. In so far as I am merely flogging the converted, I apologize to them.

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.

The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.

There is the name and the thing; the name is a sound which sets a mark on and denotes the thing. The name is no part of the thing nor of the substance; it is an extraneous piece added to the thing, and outside of it.