Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, was one of the founders of modern linguistics. He established the structural study of language, emphasizing the arbitrary relationship of the linguistic sign to that which it signifies. Saussure distinguished synchronic linguistics (studying language at a given moment) from diachronic linguistics (studying the changing state of a language over time). He perferred what he named langue (the state of a language at a certain time) to parole (the speech of an individual). Saussure's most influential work is the Course in General Linguistics (1916), a compilation of notes on his lectures.

His views revolutionized the study of language and inaugurated modern linguistics. His theory also has profoundly influenced other disciplines, especially anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism. The central belief of structuralism is that the phenomena of human life, whether language or media, are not intelligible except through their netw

A common mistake is to construe the signifier and the sign as the same thing. Another common mistake, perhaps related to the first, is to speak of a signifier without a signified or a sign, or to speak of a signified without a signifier or a sign. Used in reference to Saussure's original formulations, both locutions are irrational. In language, a lone signifier would be an utterly meaningless sound or concatenation of sounds. But it is even more absurd to speak of a signified without signifier or sign: It would have to be a sort of half thought, something never thought before, a thought that exists solely outside the domain of language, a fleeting, private, chaotic thought that makes no sense even to the thinker -- an un-thought. Yet, another mistake is to endow a sign with meaning outside the presence of other signs. Except as part of the whole system, signs do not and cannot exist outside of the overall system.

In Saussure's theory of linguistics, the signifier is the sound/image and the signified is the concept. The linguistic sign is neither conceptual nor phonic, neither thought nor sound. Rather, it is the whole of the link that unites sound and idea, signifier and signified. The properties of the sign are by nature abstract, not concrete. Saussure states ‘that the sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified ‘(67). The relationship between the signifier and the signified is referred to as 'signification'. “A sign must have both a signifier and a signified. You cannot have a totally meaningless signifier or a completely formless signified” (Saussure 101-03). A sign is a recognizable combination of a signifier with a particular signified. The same signifier could stand for a different signified (and thus be a different sign). The signifier is now commonly interpreted as the material (or physical) form of the sign - it is something which can be seen, heard, or touched. For Saussure, both the signifier and the signified were purely 'psychological' (12, 14-15, 66). Saussure continues by stating:

At least two other terms are used for signifier and signified:

In conclusion, one might note that the use of Structuralism in linguistics and literary studies and a significant branch of Semiotics have found their major starting point in Saussure’s work at the turn of the twentieth century. It has even been argued that the complex of strategies and conceptions that has come to be called "post structuralism”—the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and others—is suggested by Saussure's work in linguistics

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