Semiology: in the light of Saussure’ words
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Rossana De Angelis
Abstract
What does Saussure really mean by “semiology”? This is the question we try to answer in this text. In fact, reading his writings and notes, we realize that Saussure uses the term “semiology” in different contexts and with different meanings. So the notion of “semiology” issued from his works is more complex than it seems because it undergoes several transformations throughout the development of Saussurian thought. The term “semiology” never appears in the texts published during in his lifetime, but we find several mentions of this notion in the manuscript sources that make up the Saussurian corpus. While this term appears first during the period between 1881 and 1891, especially in all the documents known under the title of Phonétique (1881–1885), in the Gothic lessons (1885–1886), and in the manuscript “De l’essence double du langage” (1891), the notion of “semiology” is presented to the public in the Cours de linguistique générale with a very precise meaning that has been taken up in Adrien Naville’s Nouvelle Classification des sciences (1901). Then, after the publication of a large part of Saussure’s autograph writings, Ecrits de linguistique générale (2002), we can return to this notion not only to trace its genesis, but also to better understand its complexity. And this is what we propose to do in this article.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The visual gamut and syntactic abstraction
- Significations et éléments centraux versus périphériques des représentations visuelles
- Text-image complementarity and genre in English as foreign language textbooks
- Crowning, rotating, and emanating hierophanies with elevatio aspect in wayside shrines
- La passion du café dans les publicités de Carte Noire : analyse sémiotique du goût et du désir
- Semiology: in the light of Saussure’ words
- A semiotic analysis of multiple systems of logic: using tagmemic theory to assess the usefulness and limitations of formal logics, and to produce a mathematical lattice model including multiple systems of logic
- Semiotics East and West: an aesthetic-semiotic approach to translating the iconicity of classical Chinese poetry
- The role of semiotics in the unification of langue and parole: an Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar approach to English modals
