Mr. Saussure packed a lot of information in this excerpt from “Course in General Linguistics.” One of my roommates is a Communications Disorders major, and I remember sitting down with her on the couch while she was doing homework. It wasn’t all that different from the content of Saussure’s essay. I remember telling my roommate good luck, and that I was glad I wasn’t in that major. Anyway, enough bitching. Since there was a lot of information to handle in one sitting, and since some of the vocabulary was a little overwhelming for someone with no background in linguistics, I’m choosing to focus on a little piece of the essay that piqued my interest. Oh, first, let me say that I enjoyed the diagrams and schematics he threw in. Broke up the reading a little bit, and sometimes I need visuals to help me comprehend difficult concepts. He also gave several creative examples which, as you all know, I rely on (maybe a little too heavily) to get me through readings like this. So kudos to you, Saussure, for acknowledging your audience.
In language, he says, there are only differences. Words, thoughts, visuals, sounds–all separate. “Language,” he says, “can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor throught from sound…” (967) (Are you allowed to use a colon and two semi-colons in a sentence? But I digress…) That’s a pretty vivid image, and I got it right away. I actually sat there and tried to counter him, thinking, I’ve thought without words and sound before. But I was thinking of when I feel things, and about emotions–feelings and emotions are not thoughts, although sometimes it’s hard to pry the two apart and differentiate between them. And when you think, you talk to yourself, literally using words and recognizing the way they would sound if you were to speak them aloud. And when you remember things, you think of a situation, and a setting, and what people were saying, and all the sensory images that go along with that. Later on, Saussure says that “their [sound and thought] combination produces a form, not a substance” (967). I want to know what that form is, and what is conveyed through it.
February 1, 2007 at 1:46 pm |
I realized that we never got to your last question yesterday, Kellie–the one about producing a form rather than a substance. This fits into Ferdie’s larger point about language as a universal system that supercedes specific languages (English, Swahili, etc.), as well as the product of a speaking person (a particular utterance). For him, the sign (as pairing of signifier and signified) is a form, a structure, an architecture—not a particular word/idea that one person might convey to another (i.e., substance).
I hope that makes sense.