Value And Saussure's Theory Of Meaning

This research is a study of the notion “value” proposed by Saussure in Course in General Linguistics(the Course)from the perspective of philosophy of language.As a core term in the Course,value or the value of a linguistic sign has been considered of prime importance for it contains the notions of unit,concrete entity,and reality.In Saussure's eyes,value is a kind of meaning that derives from a language system and is realized at various levels of the system.Based on this,three research questions are proposed:(1)What linguistic units are identified and described in Saussure's theory of general linguistics?(2)In Saussure's linguistic system,how do these linguistic units acquire and realize their values as their meanings?(3)From the perspective of philosophy of language,why has Saussure conceptualized these values as the meanings of his linguistic units?As a qualitative study,the research mainly relies on the interpretation of the Course,from which a conceptual framework is established,enveloping the assumption of arbitrariness,the issue of identity,the definition of value,and two systematic relations.Within the conceptual framework,the realization of values at each linguistic level has been analyzed.During the discussion and the analysis,the three research questions have been gradually clarified and represented as the following three findings.Firstly,linguistic units are identified as “a slice of sound which to the exclusion of everything that precedes and follows it in the spoken chain is the signifier of a certain concept”(Saussure 2011:104)and are described at three linguistic levels: the phonemes or the combinations of phonemes at the phonological level,the linguistic forms that express the grammatical categories such as gender,number and case at the grammatical level,and the words,compounds,phrases,and sentences at the semantic level.These descriptions of linguistic units cover units,subunits and larger units.Secondly,the value of each linguistic unit is acquired through its opposition to other units that surround it.The value of a phoneme in a syllable is determined byother phonemes around it.Besides,the choice of the implosion and explosion for a phoneme depends on the language system the phoneme belongs to.As for the grammatical value of a certain grammatical form,it is obtained through the opposing relation with the co-existing grammatical forms of the same grammatical category of the language.As for the semantic value,it is classified into the semantic values of words,word-parts and groups of words(compounds,phrases and sentences).Their semantic values come from the language system that is comprised of the associative and syntagmatic relations.The semantic values of words are produced by their associative opposition to other words;the semantic values of the word-parts are created by both their associative opposition to other word-parts in the language system and their syntagmatic opposition to the co-existing word-parts.The semantic values of compounds,phrases and sentences are also generated from the language system containing the associative and syntagmatic relations.Among them,the sentence value on one hand is determined by the sentence structure chosen by the language system and the semantic values of its constituents resulting from their associative and syntagmatic oppositions;on the other hand it is affected by its associative opposition to other sentences in the language system and its syntagmatic opposition to other sentences in the linguistic context.Thirdly,the principle of arbitrariness reveals that the meaning of a linguistic sign does not come from the external world.Thus the conceptualization of values as meanings actually provides a new systematic way for explaining where the meaning of a linguistic sign ontologically derives from.The general concept of “meaning” only concerns the relation between words and the external world,thus not sufficient to explain the question above.However,the concept of “value” raised by Saussure implies the whole language system and reveals that the meaning of a linguistic sign is generated from its opposing relations or its interrelation with other signs that exist simultaneously in the language system.