A Brief History of Modern Linguistics

The revolutionary and remarkably simple idea that de Saussure came up with, is the splitting of the linguistic sign into concept and sound image, or, in his words, into signified and signifier. Hence, the sign ”Cat” is comprised of the signified, the furry thing that can either be remarkably cute or pee everywhere, and the signifier, ”C-a-t” (or Katze, chatte, gata). Importantly, there is no necessary link between the two, the only thing that is important is that there is a link. This came later to be known as the ”arbitrariness of the sign”. It could be perfectly conceivable that if we were to let every English speaking person on the planet know that cats were from now on called ”dogs” and dogs ”cats”, that we would still be able to communicate without problems. Through this, de Saussure was able to show that there is nothing cat-like about the cat, but we simply agreed to call it a cat.