A Brief History of Modern Linguistics

De Saussure broke with most of those assumptions and especially with the way meaning was supposed to arise. Before it was assumed that a linguistic sign, like the word ”tree” represented an objectively existing part of reality. There was a necessity assumed that the tree was called ”tree” due to its ”tree-like” characteristics, such as roots, a stem and bark. This was variously described as the object ”motivating” its name or as ”Nomenclaturism”, where different languages simply happened to use different names to signify the same essential concept.