Linguistics through its proper mirror-glass: Saussure, signs, segments
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Pierre Swiggers
Pierre Swiggers (b. 1955) is a professor at the University of Leuven and the University of Liège 〈pierre.swiggers@arts.kuleuven.be〉. His research interests include descriptive linguistics, historiography of linguistics, methodology of comparative studies, and name theory. His publications includeGrammatical theory and philosophy of language in antiquity (ed. with A. Wouters, 2002);Aux carrefours du sens (ed. with M. Riegel, C. Schnedecker & I. Tamba, 2006);Edward Sapir: General linguistics (2008); andLinguistic identities, language shift and language policy in Europe (ed. with B. Cornillie & J. Lambert, 2009).
Abstract
This article starts from a typology of sign models and sign functions in order to assess Saussure's classification of linguistics as a branch of semiology. Saussure's definition of the linguistic sign raises the issue of a possible semiotic approach of the morpheme (unit of expression and content). In Saussure, and even more so in American structural linguistics, the approach of morphology is characterized by low “semiotic investment”; rarely, if at all, is the notion of “linguistic sign” made operational within their conception of morphological analysis, in spite of interesting opportunities for its use. In poststructuralist work (natural morphology; linguistic functionalism), the perspectives for a semiotic approach of morphology are promising. The final part of the paper formulates some requirements for a rigid approach of the morpheme as a linguistic sign.
About the author
Pierre Swiggers (b. 1955) is a professor at the University of Leuven and the University of Liège 〈pierre.swiggers@arts.kuleuven.be〉. His research interests include descriptive linguistics, historiography of linguistics, methodology of comparative studies, and name theory. His publications include Grammatical theory and philosophy of language in antiquity (ed. with A. Wouters, 2002); Aux carrefours du sens (ed. with M. Riegel, C. Schnedecker & I. Tamba, 2006); Edward Sapir: General linguistics (2008); and Linguistic identities, language shift and language policy in Europe (ed. with B. Cornillie & J. Lambert, 2009).
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Linguistics through its proper mirror-glass: Saussure, signs, segments
- The interrelation of metaphors and metonymies in sign systems of visual art: An example analysis of works by V. I. Surikov
- Information-theoretic confirmation of semiotic structures
- An information-based semiotic analysis of theories concerning theories
- An integrational response to Searlean realism, or how language does not relate to consciousness
- Peirce, meaning, and the Semantic Web
- The puzzling world of Harry Potter
- The sign system of human pretending
- Place and subjectivity in contemporary world: An analysis of Lost in Translation based on the semiotics of passion
- Peirce and the specification of borderline vagueness
- Marks as masks: A study of traditional African occupations and their visual indices
- The linguistic sign at the lexicon-syntax interface: Assumptions and implications of the Generative Lexicon Theory
- Presence of la femme: The semiotic silence
- On trans-semiosis
- Individual variation in participants' account of their own interaction
- From funeral to wedding ceremony: Change in the metaphoric nature of the Chinese color term white
