Romero Lis written expression IV Peregrini

The arbitrariness and linearity of Saussure linguistic sign.

The linguistic sign is the combination of the concept and the acoustic image. The SIGN, as union of a SIGNIFIER and a SIGNIFIED, has two main characteristics. It can be arbitrary as well as linear. These definitions are explained by Saussure, one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major fathers of semiotics/semiology.

The bond between the signifier and signified is arbitrary. Saussure said that the linguistic sign is arbitrary because there is an unmotivated link between signifier and signified. In other words, there is not a natural relation between the concept and the acoustic image. Furthermore, Saussure saw language as an ordered system of signs whose meanings come arbitrarily by a cultural convention. There is no necessary reason why a pig should be called pork. Neither looks nor sounds or smells like the sound 'pork' in the same way that a "banana" looks, smells, tastes or feels like the sound sequence ‘banana’. It is only because in our language we agree called it ‘pork’. You and your circle of friends could always agree to refer to pigs as 'the squerdlishes' if you want. As long as there is general agreement, it is no problem - until you start talking about ‘squerdlishes’ with people who do not share the same convention.

 

 The second characteristic of the sign is that the signifier (here, meaning the spoken word or auditory signifier) exists in time, and that time can be measured as linear. You can't say two words at one time; you have to say one and then the next, in a linear fashion. The same is true for written language: you have to write one word at a time, though you can write over an already written word and you generally write the words in a straight line. This idea is important because it shows that language (spoken language, anyway) operates as a linear sequence, and that all the elements of a particular sequence form a chain. The easiest example of this is a sentence, where the words come one at a time and in a line, one after the other, and because of that they are all connected to each other. 

Taking all these into account, I can say that each object has its own name , established arbitrarily and culturally by human beings.Each word designs an object. Saussure is not very interested in how communities agree on fixing or changing the relationships between signifier and signified. Like all structuralists, he focuses on a synchronic analysis of language as a system or structure, meaning that he examines it only in the present moment, without regard to what its past history is, or what its future may be. (Analyses which do take time into account, and look at the history of changes within a structure, are called diachronic).