Saussurean Linguistics Research Articles

Saussurean Linguistics between Lectures and Manuscripts: A Gap or Cognitive Integration?

يهدف هذا البحث إلى الكشف عن جوانب جديدة في فكر اللساني فردينان دي سوسير، وتسليط الضوء على تلك الفجوة المعرفية بين فكره الذي تم عرضه مع كتابه (محاضرات في اللسانيات العامة)، وفكره الجديد الذي ظهر مع اكتشاف مخطوطاته. وقُسِّمَ البحثُ إلى مقدمة ومبحثين رئيسين؛ مثّل الأول: مرورًا تاريخيًّا على الحركة النقدية التي تعرض لها كتاب (المحاضرات) بوصفها بداية جادة للتشكيك في صحة تعبيرها عن فكر سوسير، وتم التطرق إلى قيمة المخطوطات المكتشفة، في حين ركز المبحث الثاني: على ثنائية لسان/كلام، وكيف اختلف طرحها في المخطوطات، وتوصل البحث إلى أنّ سوسير كان بعيدًا عن الطرح البنيوي الذي يحجز الدرس اللساني في أسوار القاعدة والنظام، ويقصي مظاهر الاستعمال والكلام من الدراسة العلمية وتحليل الظاهرة اللغوية؛ كما توصل إلى أنّ سوسير كان على وعي بضرورة التناول الشامل للظاهرة اللغوية؛ فقد عنِي بالكلام كما عنِي باللسان أو النظام؛ الأمر الذي يؤهل لسانياته لأن تكون حاضنة للفكر التداولي كما كانت حاضنة للفكر البنيوي على حد سواء.

A Textual Study of Imagery Representing Female Characters in Little Women under the Theory of Signifier and Signified

As a symbol, feminine imagery carries the character traits and conveys the author’s own ideology. There are many distinctive female characters in Little Women, but related previous studies mostly focus on the superficial analysis of female images in the book. Guided by the theory of signifier and signified in Saussurean linguistics, this paper starts with the traditional and transformed female images in Little Women and the reasons for their use, explores how the use of traditional and transformed feminine imagery and their signifier and signified in Little Women by American female writer Louisa May Alcott helps construct the novel’s main characters and thus expresses the author’s own feminist views. This could help readers have a deeper understanding of the text and a more generalized view of the protagonist.

Had the Neogrammarians spoken Wolof or Basaa…

Abstract In this response article to Emmanuel Ngué Um’s piece published in Language, Culture and Society, I examine Ngué Um’s thesis that structural linguistics has no reality in the African context, which he presents in the form of a critique of Saussure and Western linguistics. Ngué Um imagines Saussure as a (native) speaker of an African language, who would have refrained from theorizing languages the way he did, namely as theoretical fictions, if only he had received a formation in linguistic anthropology. Against this, I argue that we must assess Saussurean thinking as part of the history of linguistics, i.e., in its proper historical context, and acknowledge that linguistics as we know it is the product of Western metaphysics. Saussure just carried forward the intellectual legacy of which he was a product. Ngué Um wishes to adapt Saussurean linguistics to the contemporary linguistic world and make it a fit for the postcolonial and posthuman paradigms. However, the notions of langue and parole have a precise function in Saussure’s theorizing, and it is questionable whether a decolonial linguistics should approach the African linguistic experience based on any of the Western metaphysical concepts. Doing so will, arguably, lead to a watered-down version of metaphysics and to a not fully emancipated southern linguistic theory.

Is There Any Formula to Dream? Your Question Answered

In 1923, Freud tried to make a distinction between the two types of dreams. Those which are “from above” and those which are “from below”. From Below dreams are those which are triggered by the unconscious wish which has been repressed. Dreams from above correspond to thoughts or intentions of the day before which have contrived during the night to obtain reinforcement from repressed material that is debarred from the ego. The thoughts and intentions that appear in these dreams are those of the day before. They are designed to induce the body to behave in a certain way during the night. In 1929, Freud explained that dreams could have been formulated just as well as they could have been created during the state of sleep. They could have been derived only from certain parts of the brain that were relatively deep. In short, dreams may arise either from the Instinctual Desires (Ids) or from the ego. Classification of any dream as an ego dream, as one 'from above '-and perhaps even this genetic category itself might be reconsidered at least for some instances. In this light, any thorough dream analysis must take account also of a formalist, stylistic approach (dealing with the grammar, figurative language, semantic patterns, and the like)-an approach quite in harmony with psychoanalysis. That is to say, whereas the cornerstone of modern Saussurean linguistics is that the connection between the signifier and signified is arbitrary, the cornerstone of modern stylistics is that the connection is motivated, non-arbitrary; and in that sense, formalism is close to psychoanalysis and its study of the non-arbitrariness of human behaviour and psychic activity. Through this paper, the authors want to conclude whether there is any particular formula/s (Either mathematical or subjective) to dream exist or not and what are the situations and factors that contribute to the formation of one’s dreams. This paper also highlights the different theories on dreams given by different researchers.

Yuri Lotman: On problems of language and linguistics

We attempt to systemize Yu. M. Lotman’s views on language and linguistics. “Language” is one of his most used terms. Lotman’s vision is based on the postulates of Saussurean linguistics, mainly in the version of Prague structuralism. At the same time, Lotman off ers a new look at solving the language speech dichotomy. He outlines the possibilities of an alternative conception, where the function of meaning-generation (rather than meaning-preservation) is considered dominant in information transmission. Pointing out to the inadequacy of linguistic methods in describing the processes of textual implementation of the language system, Lotman proposes several solutions that create the possibility of a neo-structuralist version of linguistics. It develops the tradition of the system-structural approach to language; the formalism of such approach is complemented by constructivism to describe communication and meaning-production processes.

How Saussure is misinterpreted in Cognitive Grammar

Abstract As the father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure influences all aspects of linguistic development with no exception of Cognitive Grammar. A scrutiny of how Saussure is understood in Cognitive Grammar indicates that Saussurean linguistics is misinterpreted in terms of five core ideas: (1) langue, rather than parole, is given highest priority; (2) the internal relation of “signifier-signified” counts as the pairing of “form-meaning”; (3) “arbitrariness” is contradictory to “symbolicity”; (4) “arbitrariness” means “unmotivatedness”; (5) arbitrariness is not the inherent nature of morphological and syntactic structures. This paper is intended to reassess these five ideas and argue that they depart further from Saussure’s thought.

Deconstruction: A Misprision of Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce

Derrida’s creative misreading of Saussure and Peirce underpins the radical scepticism of deconstruction, an ideological movement that arose from the disillusionment of French Marxist intellectuals with Soviet communism in the late 1950s. They moved (via Saussurean linguistics) from Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s frontal attack on liberal capitalism to an outflanking movement, belatedly targeting scientific positivism seen as the philosophical underpinning of liberal capitalism; “belatedly” because the language philosophy of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle had already displaced Frege and Russell. A parallel disillusionment in America, prompted by the morass of Vietnam, created a welcoming literary culture for the anti-essentialist posture of structuralism and its heir, deconstruction.

New developments of Chinese interpretation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic thought

The introduction of Saussure’s linguistic ideas in China began in the thirties thanks to scholars such as such as Wang Li, Gao Mingkai, Fang Guangtao and Chen Wangdao. They were the first to disseminate and apply to the analysis of their language the constructs included in the Cours de linguistique générale. Masini (1985) has thoroughly investigated this issue, pointing out how troubled the first phase of Saussurean studies in China was. Completed in the 1960s but published only in 1980, the first translation of the Cours made by Gao Mingkai marked a new beginning of Saussurean studies in China, as confirmed not only by the debate raised by the reading of this work but also by the translations of other sources which have made the portrait of the Swiss linguist more accurate (Péi 2003; Zhào 2005; Mǎ 2008; Romagnoli 2007; 2012). Three Chinese translations of the Cours, several monographs on Saussure, hundreds of academic papers are now available to Chinese readers, whose linguistics knowledge and linguistic background have also changed compared to the first decades of the last century. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the most recent development of the debate regarding Saussurean linguistics in China. In order to do so, two issues are taken into account: the critical stances expressed by Chinese scholars toward the interpretation of the ideas of the Swiss linguist in China and the latest development of the debate on Saussurean semiology.

Thinking Thinking Literature Across Continents Across Generations

Thinking <i>Thinking Literature Across Continents</i> Across Generations

Derrida e a Linguística Estrutural – uma leitura do capítulo 1 de Gramatologia

Em sua leitura do Curso de Lingüística Geral, Derrida ressalta a grande contribuição de Saussure ao afirmar a natureza arbitrária e diferencial do signo linguístico. Derrida também percebe, porém, que, se por um lado o conceito de diferença foi fundamental para Saussure romper com a concepção “natural” de linguagem, por outro, ao introduzir o conceito de valor e hipostasiar a superioridade da fala sobre a escrita, Saussure reproduz o pensamento metafísico binário e hierarquizado. A partir da linguística saussuriana, Derrida propõe, então, uma ciência geral do “grama” como desconstrução da violência originária fundada na noção de valor.

Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, readers of Saussure

In this article, I discuss the structuralist dimension in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze. Their common interest in and reference to Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics is one of the arguments in favor of a continuity between these philosophies that are all too often considered antipodes. I argue that both Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s interests in Saussurean linguistics evolve around the latter’s immanent and differential conception of linguistic structures. Moreover, there is also a resonance between both authors’ criticism of Saussure and structuralism. However, it cannot be denied that, in comparison with Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze’s criticism of structuralism is more fierce, especially from the moment he starts collaborating with Guattari. I claim that Deleuze and Guattari were able to think through to the end the problem Merleau-Ponty already detected in Saussurean linguistics. While Merleau-Ponty made a beginning in solving Saussure’s problem, Deleuze and Guattari developed the theoretical tools to finish this attempt.

Revolution of the Ordinary. Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell by Toril Moi

Reviewed by: Revolution of the Ordinary. Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell by Toril Moi Brian O'Keeffe Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary. Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. pp. 290. The main claim of Toril Moi's book is that ordinary language philosophy can transform our prevailing understanding of language, theory and reading in literary studies. To make good on this claim, Moi invites us to step back in time, and visit the courts of Wittgenstein's Cambridge, and the quads of J.L. Austin's Oxford. A revolution was brewing in philosophy: Wittgenstein contemplated the big questions of philosophy—the nature of free will, the idea of God etc.—and concluded that philosophy had mystified itself by posing the questions badly. Philosophy, too long mired in abstruse language, needed to spell out its difficulties in plain English. Wittgenstein did just that, and cut—with almost terrifying lucidity—through the Gordian knots of philosophy. It was less an exercise in proposing new answers to the big philosophical questions so much as showing why, in many cases, philosophy really didn't need to consider them questions at all. Such was the revolution: translating philosophy's fuddled discourse into plain, crisp English. Winnowing commonsense from philosophy's arcane confusions. Paying attention to the ordinary, the commonplace, life and language as it is normally lived, rather than preferring the thick mists of the noumenal. The fomenters of this revolution, for Moi, were indeed Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin. The third member of this triumvirate came later—Stanley Cavell. Cavell identifies with "Emerson's and Thoreau's emphasis on the common, the near, and the low" (7). Austin wants to know how we use ordinary language. Wittgenstein says "what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (7). What, though, did this revolution have to do with literary studies? Clearly, Cavell, whose investments in literature are evident, will be one useful guide here, and the use of Austin's speech act theory in literary studies is familiar enough, but what about Wittgenstein? Moi deploys him in various ways, but one way involves simply adopting the spirit of Wittgenstein: let's get clear on the besetting problems of literary studies, less in a bid to solve them, and more in an exercise to see whether they really need be considered problems at all. The targets now come into view: literary theory, High Theory, post-Saussureans, Derrideans, and de Manians. [End Page 368] To cut through those Gordian knots, Moi takes us on a journey divided into three parts: section 1 addresses Wittgenstein's vision of language and theory; section 2 juxtaposes ordinary language philosophy and Saussurean linguistics; section 3 examines the implications for reading literature in "the spirit of the ordinary" (3). What does ordinary language philosophy think philosophy should be? In Themes out of School, Cavell says that philosophy should be a "willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about." In Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell registers what might be shocking about such a view of philosophical enquiry: "That what we ordinarily say and mean may have a direct and deep control over what we can philosophically say and mean is an idea which many philosophers find oppressive." Philosophy's neglect of such things, Cavell suggests, is such that its general attitude to ordinary lived life can sometimes amount to an outright rejection of the human. So ordinary language philosophy wishes to reclaim ordinariness—in life, in language use—from philosophy, and in a sense, save philosophy from itself. As Richard Rorty puts it (in the name of pragmatism, however, rather than ordinary language philosophy), the best hope for philosophy is to not practice Philosophy. For when philosophy selects as its privileged topics of enquiry things like truth, goodness, beauty and so forth, its zealous effort to turn them into concepts, or (in Plato) to attach an eidos to them, already shows that the game is up, since such...

Boleswa Writing And Weathercock Aesthetics Of African Literature

SummaryPostmodernist “thinking about thinking” allows for speculative reflection which avers that “Boleswa literature” like “African literature” is non-existent. Basic to this kind of proposition is the suggestion by Saussurean linguistics of systemic differential and oppositional relation in language between sound image and concept and the Barthesian postulation of a semiological associative distinction between signifier, signified and sign in the study of myth where myth is defined as speech but a peculiar type of discourse. Literature is speech comprising different types of discourse – poetry, prose – based on a primary mode of discourse that is language but which also manifests variously as forms of metalanguage. Boleswa literature does not exist, not because “Boleswa” is only an acronym from three southern African countries: Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and is no geographical entity in a strict legal sense, but because arguably it names a part of African literature which itself does not exist. This supposition is premised in part on an ideational extension of the problematic and identification and identity crises in the African cultural experience. Literary history reveals how a search for a suitable poetics, an ideal aesthetics of the African literary terrain often has lapsed into an exercise in the circuitous, enigmatic and contradictory. Still, the discursive pursuit, despite its potential for futility, can, in its dynamics, also be exciting: this essay attempts a speculative review of the study based on African literature using the weathercock as a trope to probe the bizarre, the paradoxical, and the engaging, in the African literary landscape, with reference to Boleswa as signifier, signified and sign.

J. Flowerdew (ed.): Discourse in Context

Numerous works have been published that are concerned in some way with the analysis of discourse. However, there are to date few that concentrate specifically on context from a discourse analytic perspective. Discourse in Context presents a collection of research papers that focus particularly on the discourse–context relation. ‘Context’, as the editor explains in his opening chapter of this recent addition to the Bloomsbury series in Contemporary Applied Linguistics, operates on different levels, and ‘discourse’ is interpreted both in its ‘little d’ and ‘big D’ forms as language use in context and as systems of knowledge and beliefs ( Gee 1999 ). This edited collection constitutes a much-to-be-welcomed addition to the existing literature on discourse analysis and applied linguistics in general. The volume comprises 15 chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction where John Flowerdew provides the reader with a comprehensive yet succinct account of some important notions related to the study of context in the analysis of discourse. In addition to examining critically concepts such as those listed above, he discusses the dynamic nature of context and contextualization. Following this, he outlines some important approaches to the study of context, from the code model of communication, Saussurean linguistics, and Chomskyan linguistics to Gricean pragmatics, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and multimodal discourse analysis. This opening chapter prepares the ground for the chapters that follow, where studies are presented using a broad variety of approaches to the discourse–context relation.

Toward a Second Phase of Postclassical Narratology

David Herman, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2012, xiv+280 pp. When David Herman coined term postclassical narratology, (1) he did it with aim of describing contrast between structuralist narratology, as practiced by Barthes, Greimas, Genette, Todorov, and others, and approaches to study of narrative that draw on frameworks for that were either inaccessible to or ignored by structuralist (Herman and Shang 98). The term was further identified and recognized in Herman's edited collection Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (1999). As title of this groundbreaking volume suggests, owing to rise of its postclassical counterpart, narratology is no longer used in singular sense, but instead it takes on plural form narratologies, which is aptly evidenced in Ansgar Running's classification (249-51). Like Nunning, I am also interested in plurality of postclassical narratology, which in my view exists at level of both media and approaches. In terms of media, postclassical narratology goes beyond literary narrative, which leads to flourishing of studies on digital narrative, narrative in music, narrative in paintings, narrative in law, etc.; while in terms of approaches, postclassical narratology goes beyond Saussurean linguistics, leading to boom of cognitive narratology, rhetorical narratology, feminist narratology, postcolonial narratology, etc. To put it another way, what we are encountering now is not one postclassical narratology but multiple postclassical narratologies. In Herman's view, this proves to be one of achievements that postclassical narratology has reaped in its first phase of developments by integrating new concepts and methods into field of narrative inquiry (Herman and Shang 99). I agree with Gerald Prince, who keenly observes that the distinction proposed by Herman was compelling enough to acquire mainstream ('historical') status in less than ten years (115). What is more, this distinction has already led quite a few scholars (Fludernik, Nunning, Shen, Prince) to compare classical narratology with its postclassical counterpart and discuss relations between them. What seems to have been inadequately done in current narrative studies is to investigate relations among various postclassical approaches. Until quite recently, some narrative theorists devoted their attention to this issue. For instance, Herman attempts to classify postclassical narratology into two phases, arguing that if postclassical narratology in a first phase involves incorporating ideas that fall outside domain of structuralist theory, in order to reassess possibilities as well as limitations of classical models, new challenges emerge in a second phase. What is now required is to bring into closer dialogue full variety of postclassical approaches--feminist, transmedial, cognitive, and other. In this connection, my suggestion is that by juxtaposing descriptions of narrative phenomena (narration, perspective, character, etc.) made possible by these approaches, testing for overlap among descriptions, and then exploring degree to which descriptions' non-overlapping aspects might complement one another, theorists can begin to map out interrelations among postclassical approaches. (Herman and Shang 99) Herman's initiation of two phases of postclassical narratology finds its echo in Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik's edited collection Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses (2010), which claims to be sister volume of Narratologies. For Alber and Fludernik, Shklovsky and Russian Formalists' models of narrative analysis represent infancy of narratology, and structuralist models of 1960s and 1970s its adolescence. Herman's volume Narratologies represents first adult phase in a. …

Strange Life of a Sentence

SAUSSUREANISM AND STRUCTURALISMWithin twentieth-century philosophy and human sciences, Course in General Linguistics attributed to Ferdinand de functions primarily as a site of official doctrine closely associated with structuralism, that is, as a statement of familiar oppositional pairings between signifier and signified, la langue and la parole, synchrony and diachrony. Barthes argued that a reliance on these oppositional pairings in process of mapping out many aspects of human reality (such as kinship arrangements, neurotic symptoms, literary genres) may in fact be a hallmark of activity, one which distinguishes it from other traditions of inquiry (Barthes 1972, 213). Structuralism can therefore be defined as direct application of 'Saussurean doctrine' to many fields of study dealing with cultural signification in a social context. Considering hold that had on Saussure's linguistics within twentieth-century European philosophy and related fields, it is usual to consider these oppositional pairings as a distinctive feature and a shared trait of Saussureanism and structuralism. They figure as general principles that were applied to linguistic study in Course in 1910s, and then extended to broader field of philosophy and human sciences within post-Second World War French (and then challenged within post-structuralism, notably by Derrida).This assumed continuity between a 'proto-structuralist' doctrine and properly so-called can also be rendered by fact that it is usual in scholarship to define proper as an intellectual movement with a distinctive Saussurean lineage, and to exclude strands of scholarship that do not share in Saussurean legacy. Hence, it is usually allowed that term structuralism covers a large and varied territory of knowledge, and arguably one finds elements throughout written history of Western philosophy in many attempts to characterize objects in terms of a combination of structural elements within a system (Culler 2006, 5). However, it is standard to qualify as in proper sense of term movement that displays a direct lineage to Saussurean linguistics as presented in Course only; a number of scholarly works devoted to testify to this trend. Culler notes that the term is generally used to designate work that marks its debts to structural linguistics and deploys a vocabulary drawn from legacy of Ferdinand de Saussure. . . . There are many writings, from Aristotle to Noam Chomsky, that share propensity to analyze objects as products of a combination of structural elements within a system, but if they do not display a Saussurean ancestry, they are usually not deemed structuralist (Culler 2006, 5). Sturrock states that, The founding father of structural linguistics in Europe, and man frequently looked on as patron of whole Structuralist movement, was Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (Sturrock 2003, 26). And Dosse observes that structuralism's (in proper sense) central core, its unifying center, is model of modern linguistics and figure of Ferdinand de Saussure, presented as its founder (Dosse 1997, 43). (The return to Saussure would belong to period's prevailing theme of returning to foundational figures, like Marx and Freud [Dosse 1997, 43]). In sum, structuralism's identity is widely recognized as closely bound up with its historical foundation in Great Book authored by Ferdinand de Saussure.The shared Saussurean/structuralist commitment to familiar oppositional pairings between signifier and signified, la langue and la parole, synchrony and diachrony was made possible by production, replication, and reception of Course as a site of official doctrine. …

How and Why Saussure is Misread in China: A Historical Study

As father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure has been known in China for more than eighty years. A historical review of Saussurean studies in China indicates that some misunderstandings on Saussure need to be cleared up. This paper mainly focuses on how Chinese scholars misread Saussure from the perspective of the arbitrary nature of language and points out that motivation or iconicity is not contradictory to arbitrariness in Saussurean linguistics. It also shows that Chinese historical developments have had profound effects on the reception of Saussure. To some extent, politics, culture, and education in China are responsible for the misinterpretations of Saussure. Misreading Saussure just reflects that there is still a long way to go for the study of Saussure in the Chinese linguistics world.

Fleshing out Language and Intersubjectivity: An Exploration of Merleau-Ponty’s Legacy to Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract This paper examines how recent cognitive linguistic work on conceptualization and intersubjectivity (Verhagen 2005, 2008; Langacker 2008) echoes Merleau-Ponty’s older reflection on the notion of intersubjectivity, a key factor in embodiment and language. Three topics are explored in this respect. First, the largely implicit references to Merleau-Ponty in Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) are related more explicitly to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh. Second, the discursive status of usage events is shown to be directly connected to the linguistic consequences of Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporality, as it brings together living bodies in intersubjective experiences. The third objective is methodological: the focus is not only on Merleau-Ponty’s often quoted Phenomenology of Perception 1945, 1958), but shows lines of continuity with the explicit philosophy of language in his later work, like Eloge de la philosophie (1960,1963), Signes (1960, 1968b), Conscience et acquisition du langage (1964, 1973a) and La prose du monde (1969, 1973b). This discussion includes Merleau’s relation to Saussurean linguistics, and gives rise, perhaps surprisingly, to a dynamic view on language as a locus of intersubjective creativity, which reaches beyond the individual basis of perception, gesture and incorporated language.

The passion of Saussure

Perhaps the best known and most influential of Jacques Derrida’s early, linguistically-oriented critiques concerns the relationship between writing and speech. This inquiry is directed towards a certain thread in the history of philosophy in which priority is given to spoken language over the written. It is Saussurean linguistics in particular that allows Derrida to posit the interdependence of phonocentrism, or the privilege of speech over writing, with logocentrism, or the desire for a true and universal experience of the world in the mind prior to the introduction of language. However, a close reading of this engagement suggests that Saussure might be phonocentric but not logocentric, and indeed, that it is possible to be phonocentric but not logocentric.

BEYOND THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE

This essay scrutinizes the theoretical foundations of Laclau's notion of rhetoric and the rhetorical. It juxtaposes to Laclau's reliance on Saussurean linguistics, especially its elementary vocabulary of the signifier and signified, a model of rhetoric based on non-linguistic and linguistic modes of rhetoric and interpretation.