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Puzzling over Saussure

scarborough
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Posted 05/09/09 - 11:06 AM: Subject: Puzzling over Saussure	#1
Friends, I am puzzling over Saussure. If I understand it correctly, he states that the arbitariness of the signifier explains the drift of meaning that words undergo. However, the signifier refers to a signified. It would therefore need to be the signified which drifts. If it is merely the signifier that drifts, this is of no consequence to the drift of meaning. In fact, in many cases of drift, the signifier remains the same (deer, tide, and so on). I don’t see that the arbitrariness of the signifier has anything to do with the drift of meaning. Any comments? With kind regards, Thomas.

makerowner
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Posted 05/10/09 - 06:06 PM:	#2
scarborough wrote: Friends, I am puzzling over Saussure. If I understand it correctly, he states that the arbitariness of the signifier explains the drift of meaning that words undergo. However, the signifier refers to a signified. It would therefore need to be the signified which drifts. If it is merely the signifier that drifts, this is of no consequence to the drift of meaning. In fact, in many cases of drift, the signifier remains the same (deer, tide, and so on). I don’t see that the arbitrariness of the signifier has anything to do with the drift of meaning. Any comments? With kind regards, Thomas. The term Saussure uses is actually "arbitrariness of the sign": the idea is that the relation between any given signified and any given signifier is arbitrary. Since there's nothing about the signifier necare that's essentially linked with the signified "to kill", there's nothing stopping it from linking to a different signified "to drown".
For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.

scarborough
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Posted 05/11/09 - 08:44 AM:	#3
Given that it's the arbitrariness of the SIGN that explains the drift of meaning, let's take an example. "deer" once had the meaning "beast", which today is preserved in other languages such as Dutch "dier" or German "Tier". In English, however, its meaning drifted to become "slender-legged ruminant". In English, the signifier drifted from deor to deer (one could just as well call a deer a cat and a cat a deer -- if it were not for convention). But the signified ALSO drifted, from beast to ruminant. That's a comparatively modest drift in this example, as some words have even REVERSED their meaning. But what accounts for the drift from beast to ruminant? How does the signified morph? How does Saussure's notion of the SIGN as arbitrary explain this?

makerowner
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Posted 05/11/09 - 09:19 AM:	#4
scarborough wrote: Given that it's the arbitrariness of the SIGN that explains the drift of meaning, let's take an example. "deer" once had the meaning "beast", which today is preserved in other languages such as Dutch "dier" or German "Tier". In English, however, its meaning drifted to become "slender-legged ruminant". In English, the signifier drifted from deor to deer (one could just as well call a deer a cat and a cat a deer -- if it were not for convention). But the signified ALSO drifted, from beast to ruminant. That's a comparatively modest drift in this example, as some words have even REVERSED their meaning. But what accounts for the drift from beast to ruminant? How does the signified morph? How does Saussure's notion of the SIGN as arbitrary explain this? The arbitrariness of the sign isn't supposed to explain why the meanings drift, but rather why nothing stops them from drifting. If there were something about the signifier "deer" intrinsically connected with the signified 'beast', then the meanings could never drift; but since there is no such intrinsic connection, they're free to change. I don't think Saussure ever specifically addressed the causes of language change; in fact, it's been rather taken for granted in linguistics ever since. Only in the past ten years or so has anyone seriously tried to answer the question. If you're interested, you could check out Juliette Blevins's Evolutionary Phonology, and Joan Bybee's Phonology and Language Use and Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language. (Those are all rather technical, so if you're not very familiar with phonology they'll probably be pretty obscure.)
For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.

scarborough
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Posted 05/11/09 - 11:07 AM:	#5
Ah, thank you makerowner for a useful reply. On the surface of it, I don't understand, though, how an evolution of phonology would relate to an evolution of meaning. I think it's a crucial issue, since we seem to be stuck with "static" theories that do not explain how language actually develops, not only over longer periods of time, but day by day. And if it could be shown how language develops,a closer link between language and culture might be shown.

scarborough
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Posted 05/11/09 - 11:34 AM:	#6
P.S. I took a cursory look at the books that makerowner refers to, yet I don't find a substantive answer there. To take one example, it would seem that "frequency of use" may explain the emergence of words with new meanings, yet not shifts of meanings.

makerowner
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Posted 05/11/09 - 12:00 PM:	#7
scarborough wrote: Ah, thank you makerowner for a useful reply. On the surface of it, I don't understand, though, how an evolution of phonology would relate to an evolution of meaning. I think it's a crucial issue, since we seem to be stuck with "static" theories that do not explain how language actually develops, not only over longer periods of time, but day by day. And if it could be shown how language develops,a closer link between language and culture might be shown. Phonological evolution is important because it's much easier to study than semantic evolution. This new approach to phonology fits into the functionalist and cognitive schools of linguistics, one important element of which is that they blur the boundaries between the different sub-fields of linguistics. Bybee's Phonology and Language Use is just as much about morphological change as phonological. I haven't studied semantics as closely as I have phonology, but maybe Eve Sweetser's From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure is in the right vein for you. (I haven't read it though, so I'm not sure.) One of the key principles of functionalist and cognitive linguistics (broadly speaking) is the rejection of Saussure's langue/parole and Chomsky's competence/performance distinctions. In phonology, that means studying sound change not as the property of an abstract phonological system, but as something that happens when people actually speak. It seems to me that the same approach would be effective in semantics; I don't know how much this has been studied yet.
For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.

scarborough
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Posted 05/11/09 - 01:01 PM:	#8
This last one is a really fascinating book. On the surface of it, it would seem to describe THAT meanings change, yet not WHY meanings change. Although it describes in detail the typical ways in which meanings change, it still is a THAT book rather than a WHY book. I feel a bit bad about pressing further for an answer, after your excellent replies.

makerowner
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Posted 05/11/09 - 07:06 PM:	#9
scarborough wrote: This last one is a really fascinating book. On the surface of it, it would seem to describe THAT meanings change, yet not WHY meanings change. Although it describes in detail the typical ways in which meanings change, it still is a THAT book rather than a WHY book. I feel a bit bad about pressing further for an answer, after your excellent replies. Don't feel bad about pressing, that's the whole point of philosophy! It's inevitable in any explanation that something be taken as a "that", upon which the "whys" rest; as Wittgenstein says, "explanations come to an end somewhere". This doesn't mean, of course, that any one coming-to-an-end is satisfactory or natural or final. For example, in the usage-based phonology that I mentioned in a previous post, a word's frequency of use is taken as an explanans on the basis of which we can understand its phonological history, but there's no explanation (or even investigation, as far as I've seen) of why a given word has the frequency of use it does. I don't really see how you could study that for a language as a whole, rather than just a few words, though of course I'm not saying that it's impossible. It seems to me that there can't be one answer to why meanings change; rather you'd have to look at the individual "thats" of semantic change in hundreds of languages over thousands of years and try to find patterns. One pattern that has been studied fairly well is what one could call "de-metaphoricization", that is, an expression that is at one time metaphorical becomes "dead" and a regular part of everyday language. This process is especially visible in our words with Classical roots, eg. the word 'metaphor' itself, originally meaning "carrying across". So I would suggest that one reason for meaning change is that words lose their power, and new ways of speaking are needed to regain that power. Of course this suggestion leaves unexplained why words should lose their power, and I think an attempt to answer that has more to do with philosophy than linguistics. Heidegger's discussion of "idle talk" in Being and Time deals with this issue, and it ultimately comes down to what it is to be human. I'm sorry that I don't have a lot of answers for you, but this is a very interesting line of questioning that I don't think has been pursued very much yet.
For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.

scarborough
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Posted 06/20/09 - 12:41 AM:	#10
As a postscript to this conversation, yesterday I came across the definition of "linguistic sign" in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics (2007): "A word, morpheme, or other unit of a language system, seen as the union of an invariant form with an invariant meaning." There would seem to be something fundamentally wrong with this definition.

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