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Saussure divides the sign into the signifier (the physical form—sound or image) and the signified (the concept or meaning). The relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary; there is no inherent reason why the sound 'cat' refers to a feline. Meaning emerges through difference within a system: 'cat' signifies what it does because it differs from 'bat,' 'mat,' and other signs.
Start with concrete examples: a stop sign, a word, an image. Practice identifying the signifier and signified separately. Then examine how the same signifier can have different signifieds across languages or cultures, reinforcing the arbitrary nature of the sign.
Assuming the signified is the actual thing in the world (a real cat) rather than the mental concept. Believing that some signs are 'natural' or iconic—even pictorial signs rely on learned codes and conventions.
Before Saussure, most people assumed that language worked by naming things that already existed in the world. The word "tree" referred to the object tree; meaning was a label pointing at a referent. Saussure's decisive break was to argue that language does not work this way. The sign is not a link between a word and a thing — it is a link between a signifier (a sound-image or written form) and a signified (a mental concept). The actual tree in the world — the referent — is outside the linguistic system entirely. Language deals in concepts, not things.
This may seem like a technical distinction, but its consequences are enormous. If the signifier "tree" points to the concept of tree rather than actual trees, then the relationship between signifier and signified is not determined by nature — it is arbitrary. There is no inherent reason why the sound-pattern "tree" should evoke the concept of a tall woody plant. In French, the same concept is evoked by *arbre*. In Swahili, by *mti*. Every language carves up the same continuous reality differently — the color spectrum, kinship relations, spatial prepositions — demonstrating that conceptual categories are not discovered in the world but constructed within the linguistic system.
From your work on semantic relations, you understand that words take on meaning partly through their relationships to other words: synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms. Saussure makes this relational logic fundamental to all meaning-making. Signs do not carry meaning by themselves; they mean what they mean because of how they differ from other signs. "Day" means what it does because it is not "night," not "dusk," not "morning." "Cat" is "cat" because it is not "bat" or "mat" or "rat." This differential structure of meaning — meaning through difference within a system — is the most radical and lasting of Saussure's contributions. It implies that there are no positive terms in language, only differences.
This insight is the foundation of structuralism as a broader intellectual method. If meaning in language is produced through differential relations within a system rather than by correspondence to external reality, the same logic might apply to other sign systems — myths, kinship structures, fashion, food. Lévi-Strauss applied it to anthropology; Barthes applied it to culture. And because the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary and maintained only by social convention, it is also potentially unstable — a point that later theorists like Derrida would exploit when they argued that the signified is never fully present but always deferred through an infinite chain of differences. Your work on Saussure is the entry point into the entire structuralist and post-structuralist tradition.
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