Page 162 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
related to Saussure's rewriting of the sign (often pre- viously read as simply the name for a thing) as the union of a concept (signified) and a sound image (sig- nifier). This union, the relationship of sound and meaning, is arbitrary; the actual value or meaning of the sign depends on its relations of differential oppo- sition with other signs within a system or code. The signifier is not a 'thing,' but part of a relational struc- ture, and the signified is defined through relations of opposition, and not through being related to non- semiotic entities or the 'world.' The fact that the con- cept 'tree' is related to different sound images in different languages, for example, arbre (French), Baum (German), and tree (English), is adduced as evidence for the arbitrary nature of the sound- /meaning relationship that constitutes the unity of signified and signifier as sign. The fact that the sign for tree in English has the value it has, is due to its relationship to other signs that may share some aspects of its value or meaning but are significantly different from it: bush, vine, shrub,forest,fern, conifer, etc. Tree means what it does because these other signs
exist to restrict its meaning: the distinctive feature of being a tree is constituted by what they are not. A sign acquires its value within a code or system which is a set of formally structured oppositions and differences. This is the source of the notion of intrinsic linguistic meaning discussed in Sect. 3.1.4.
3.2.1 Phonological Opposition and Binarism Jakobson and Trubetskoy, in the area of phonology, considerably developed the idea of language as a sys- tem of conventional oppositions or differences, when they analyzed the system of sound contrasts in language. If one begins otherwise similar words with distinctively different sounds, one will produce dis- tinctively different words, different in meaning: for example, sin, din, tin. In other words, the contrasts between these sounds in English are functional. Such functionally different sounds are what Saussure, Jakobson, and Trubetskoy called phonemes. A central property of phonemes is that when one is substituted for another one gets contrasts in meaning. They are the contrastive and meaningful units of sound that constitute any particular linguistic system, dis- tinguished from one another by two-way or binary contrasts,likevoiced/unvoiced(s,tversusd\fricative and nonfricative (s versus t, d), etc.
This binary organization of the phonological sys- tem in Jakobson and Trubetskoy is a theoretical instance of what became a much more widely adopted principle in the structuralism of the 1940s and 1950s, associated with Jakobson and Levi-Strauss in New York and Paris. Structuralist analyses of anything from language to culture were characterized by this underlying principle of definition by contrast, so that the elements of a culture might be said to include such 'basic oppositions' as: male/female, culture/nature,
rational/irrational, right/left, reason/madness, and so on. The narrative or ritual or mythic practices of a culture, including verbal art, were seen as functioning to resolve or synthesize, or otherwise make sense of, these binarisms that were inherent to their structure.
There is a connection between this structuralist use of binarisms and narrative analysis, and later decon- structive methods and strategies developed by Jacques Derrida, and appropriated for feminism by Luce Iri- garay (1985). Structuralism accepted the binarisms as objective structuring principles, and used binary analysis as a methodology for understanding the nat- ure and function of cultural objects and narrative processes. Deconstruction sees binarisms as culturally biased and contingent ways of constructing what appear to be observed data. It points to the oppo- sitional value systems that are built into binary struc- tures: one term is defined in terms of the other (female is defined as what is not male); one term is positively valued and the other negatively. In the series above, in this culture, male, culture, rational, right, and reason would be valued positively against the elements that constitute the other sides of the pairs. Binarisms and narrative structures remain closely linked in decon- structive critique. Once these binarisms become constitutive of a culture and its texts, only certain narratives, plot structures, heroes, and denouements are possible. The focus of deconstructive work in later
critical cultural and semiotic analysis has been to unsettle the taken-for-granted nature of these bina- risms and the narratives they structure. The aim is not simply to reverse the value systems, nor to resolve the differences, as in structuralist methodology, but rather to question the very existence of the binary opposition itself as a structuring principle, and to attempt to show that the members of a binary pair are unique in their differences and not definable in terms of one another. Derrida's rewriting of Saussure, and Luce Irigaray's rewriting of Freud, are two typical examples of this deconstructive methodology. It is arguable that with- out structuralism's prior investigations of these issues they might not have been so early on the decon- structive and feminist agendas.
3.3 Syntagm and Paradigm: Versions of the Poetic Function
The syntagm/paradigm opposition in Saussure is con- cerned with relations of combination (one thing after another, the linearity of the signifier) and of choice (one thing instead of another at a particular point in the signifying chain). The horizontal axis of language, its chain relationships, is the syntagm. The vertical axis, the sets of choices which are available to fill particular slots in the chain, are called paradigms. The system consists of a set of paradigms or choices, and a set of rules which enable elements of these sets to be combined to form chains of signifying elements:
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