What is Semiotics? Saussure on Langue/Parole and Signifier/Signified

The Living Philosophy

Semiotics came into being with the publishing of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics in 1916. It contained distinctions such as langue vs parole as well as the signifier and signified that make up the Sign — Saussure’s fundamental unit of language.
The Semiotics school of thought would go on to be a major influence on the Existentialists such as Sartre, the Structuralists such as Jacques Lacan, Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes and the Poststructuralists Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
In this episode we examine what the Semiotics theory is through Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, his distinction between langue and parole. With this foundation in place we will explore his contributions to this new science of language and what these explained — his definition of a Sign as being a signifier and a signified, the arbitrary nature of these and also the fact that language is a matter of difference and relations between signs in the system rather than naming. All of this will serve to have the basics of Semiotics explained.
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⌛ Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
1:45 Diachronic vs Synchronic
3:01 Langue vs Parole
6:06 Sign: Signifiers and Signifieds
8:40 Arbitrary Language
12:04 Language: Differences & Relations
13:37 Summary