On de Saussure's theoretical construct of le signe: A neurolinguistic view

Abstract

de Saussure is known to have contributed many ideas and to have proposed many theoretical constructs in his Cours de Linguistique General. One of them is the notion of le signe. Although most of his ideas and constructs have been appreciated by linguists after him, his construct of le signe is not one of them. For instance, while Hjelmslev has proposed a related dichotomy, viz., Substance and Form, which is relatable to de Saussure's dichotomy of Content Plane and Expression Plane, Hjelmslev never thought highly of de Saussure's le signe; nor did Hjelmslev's contemporary, J.R. Firth, for that matter. One reason is that de Saussure confined the theoretical construct of le signe to individual words each of which is said to have two inseparable aspects: Concept (or signifie) which belongs to the Content Plane and Sound-image (or signifiant) which belongs to the Expression Plane. They are like two sides of a sheet of paper. The purpose of this paper, however, is to propose a modification of this important theoretical construct in two directions: (1) to expand the notion for the inclusion of materials other than individual words, whatever a word may be in any given language; (2) to separate Concept from Sound-image (or signifie from signifiant) since these two aspects are NOT really inseparable as de Saussure had thought them to be. The modification is extremely important because, unless it is so modified, the notion would remain useless, as Hjelmsleve had rightly pointed out. Thus, in this paper, I shall discuss in some detail how the modification is to be done, why the modification is needed, and what the theoretical implication will be as a result of the modification. The result will then be the change of the notion from a static construct to a highly dynamic construct which pertains to a very important process called Semantic Categorization and another important process called Grammatical Categorization in my theory of neurolinguistics.