Semiology

Semiology has its modern origins in the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, especially in the various versions of his Cours de Linguistique Générale [Course in General Linguistics] ([1916] 1971). Some of the basic principles expounded by Saussure are also discussed by classical writers such as Plato and Aristotle, although neither of these thinkers explicitly set out to develop a science of semiology as such. In the present discussion, the term semiology will refer to those developments that stem from Saussure in the early twentieth century and that have contributed to the further development of Saussure's thinking. The term semiology is to be distinguished from the term semiotics. The latter term, at least in its modern usage, is traceable to the work of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and will not be discussed here. Increasingly, the term semiotics, irrespective of the Peircean lineage, has become the more widely used term.

In Saussure's conception, semiology is the study of systems of signs. According to the notes compiled by Riedlinger and Constantin of Saussure's third Cours de Linguistique Générale (Saussure 1993), semiology is defined as “studies of signs and their life in human societies” [Page 688](p. 282), Saussure's inauguration of this new science depends on establishing an object of study—the language system, or la langue—in order that the language system may take its place among “the human facts” [les faits humains] (p. 282). For reasons that the various texts of the Cours do not make explicit, Saussure subsumes the study of the language system and of other sign systems (e.g., writing, maritime signals, sign language) under psychology, more particularly social psychology. It is interesting to compare Saussure's classification with the observations made by Claparède (1916) in his review of the Cours de Linguistique Générale Claparède, who was professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva, states: “Whereas Saussure recognizes that ‘all is psychology in the language system,’ he distinguishes, however, linguistics from psychology in an absolute manner” (p. 94). According to Saussure (1993), “The set of socially ratified associations [between acoustic images and ideas] that constitute the language system have their seat in the brain; it is a set of realities similar to other psychic realities” (p. 282). In this sense, an essentially social phenomenon—the language system—may be said to have a psychological reality for the individual by virtue of the associations between acoustic images and ideas that each individual stores in his or her brain. A further reason for locating semiology as a branch of (social) psychology may have to do with Saussure's concern to find an academic home for the newly launched semiological study of signs.

The most essential fact about the language system qua semiological system is that it is a system of signs. Saussure does not offer any systematic analysis of the other sign systems that he mentions as candidates for inclusion in his newly inaugurated science of semiology. He does, however, enter into a discussion of systems of writing in relation to the ways in which, according to Saussure, writing has impeded the development of the study of the la langue. Nevertheless, Saussure does not develop a corresponding semiology of writing (écriture), based on the visual-spatial character of written signs (see Harris 2001; Thibault 1996a, 1996b). For Saussure (1993), semiology is, above all, the study of “systems of arbitrary signs, of which the language system is the principal example” (p. 288). In Saussure's famous definition, “The linguistic sign rests on an association made by the mind between two very different things, but which are both psychic and within the subject: an acoustic image is associated with a concept” (p. 285). Rather than designating a material object (tree, horse), which is outside the subject, or a material sound that one hears, the sign is an association of the two terms—acoustic image and concept—linked by the same psychic association within the individual. This fact is demonstrated, Saussure points out, by the ways in which we can both “pronounce (and hear) an interior discourse” without moving the lips. Inner language [langage intérieur] (Saussure 1993:287) occurs because a socially ratified language system makes possible this relationship of association between the two immaterial terms that make up the linguistic sign in the minds of the individuals who speak a given language, either in silent inner speech or in externalised speech with others.

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