Definition of Linguistic Sign

The linguistics is the discipline studying the faculty of language of human beings and the system of signs they use to communicate. The founder of linguistics was the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who conceived language in its different dimensions: as a reality that is part of the whole of the society, as a mental abstraction that allows us to identify what surrounds us and what happens to us and, finally, as a series of codes and conventions (for example, the rules grammatical).

Consequently, linguistics studies language as an instrument of communication and as a system of signs.

The fundamental idea of ​​the linguistic sign

The idea of ​​a linguistic sign encompasses two closely linked mental dimensions: it is a concept and, in parallel, a sound associated with it. Thus, the concept is the abstract part of the linguistic sign, while sound is a mental imprint that remains in our brain. Between the concept and the sound there is a reciprocal relationship.

In other words, the concept or signified and the sound or signifier interact in the mind of a speaker. Let's imagine a cloud, the signifier refers to the succession of sounds that I use to refer to the cloud (we have a memory about how this word sounds that already we have heard on occasion) and, at the same time, the meaning of cloud refers to the set of general characteristics that constitute a cloud (its color, shape and size).

The role of linguistic signs when we speak

When we speak, three different phenomena take place. The first is the psychic process, in which the concepts trigger an image or acoustic trace (in this process the brain transmits to the organs of phonation a impulse correlative to the acoustic image). Then a physical process takes place, by which sound waves propagate from the mouth to the ear and when an acoustic image is heard, the brain identifies the sound and associates it with the concept. In the last process, the mental concept goes the other way, that is, from the mind to the utterance of a word.

According to Saussure, the linguistic sign is the association of an idea or a concept with a sound or written form. Thus, anyone who speaks Spanish associates the word pencil with a certain image. In this way, when we say the word pencil we are thinking of a series of ideas linked to each other (an elongated piece of wood with a piece of graphite inside and that serves to to write).

The mental process by which we associate a meaning to a signifier has a series of features:

1) there is a linearity, since the words are not pronounced simultaneously,

2) there is an articulation of sounds (monemes, morphemes and lexemes) and

3) there is a arbitrariness (the relationship between signifier and signified changes in each language, in such a way that the signifier is different in each language but its meaning remains the same).

Photos: Fotolia - Agsandrew / Lorelyn Medina