Ferdinand de Saussure’s research while affiliated with Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and other places

... Other branches of science have also been influenced by Saussure's theory amongst which one can refer to anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism as the main ones. Basically what structuralism proposes as its central tenet is that, whether language or media, the phenomena of human life can only be intelligible when it is only studied through the consideration of the network of relationships which is present among them by making the sign and the system the primary concepts in which the sign is embedded in (De Saussure & Baskin, 2011). Moreover, the signifier and signified in Saussure's linguistics theory are the sound and the thought respectively (Tavin, 2000). ...

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A Study of the Semiotic Understanding of Land Art

... A fundamental assumption in structuralist linguistics is the distinction between signifier and signified as introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure (Saussure, 2001) in the early 20 th century. Computational linguistic approaches, when using character strings as the only representatives for word meaning, implicitly assume identity between signifier and signified. ...

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Does BERT Make Any Sense? Interpretable Word Sense Disambiguation with Contextualized Embeddings

... Major exponents of 20th century linguistics had construed the building blocks of speech as purely symbolic units without any motor or acoustic substance. It was one of the major achievements of structuralist phonology that it divested the speech sounds from their " flesh and blood " (Jakobson, 1937, Lecture 1) and transformed them into purely contrastive, " immaterial " units, which are " keineswegs lautlich [not sound-like in any way] " (De Saussure, 1967, p. 142). Later, generative phonology conceived phonological representations of words as " feature matrices of an abstract sort, " figuring solely as the arguments of a set of algebraic rules (Chomsky & Halle, 1991, p. 9) Likewise, in some of the more recent computational models of word production, the phonological forms of words were construed as linear strings of abstract segments, generated through activation flows in a network of equally abstract syllabic and subsyllabic nodes, without any acoustic or motor constraints influencing the functioning of this machinery (e.g., Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997). ...

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Apraxia of Speech: Concepts and Controversies

... The synchronic view considers language from a static perspective; it focuses on how language is used by its speakers at a given moment in time. The diachronic view, on the other hand, concentrates on the historic evolution of words, on how their meaning evolves (de Saussure 1967). Even though arbitrariness has long been considered as one of the key features of the linguistic sign, a purely symbolic construal of language can only be entertained from a synchronic perspective. ...

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To stay, remain or leave: how verbal concepts as response options in political referendums such as the Brexit polls might bias voting outcomes

... Motamedi et al. (2019) offer a functional definition that states that iconicity is a feature of a signal that enables its meaning to be predicted from its form. Iconicity, together with its complementary force, arbitrariness (De Saussure, 1983), are widely considered to be present across all spoken and signed languages . The question is, can iconicity be created artificially? ...

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Iconicity in Large Language Models

... In other words, signifiers of meanings and the expected signified do not correspond as they keep breaking apart. Derrida (1976) argued against traditional and structured sign systems such as de Saussure's (1974) linguistics that depends on structural relationship between signifier and signified which is arbitrary in nature, thus suggesting that linguistic signs represent ideas based on convention and norm as the logo centricity. To Derrida, this is problematic because first, there is no standard rule to refer a signifier to a specific signified; second, meaning making requires the signifiers as a mark to show at what it means. ...

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Revisioning History: A Deconstructionist Reading of a Learner’s Multimodal Text, Revenge

... La arbitrariedad del signo lingüístico, del que nos enseñó Saussure ([1916] 1978) hace ya más de un siglo, implica que no hay un vínculo inmanente y necesario entre un significante y un significado. Por lo que cambiar un significante (la palabra raza por cultura) no implica un desplazamiento de sus significados más nefastos (como el del esencialismo naturalizado desde determinismos biologicistas o culturalistas). ...

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Racialización, etnización, blanquidad: Horizontes de historicidad y lugarización de la diferencia/ desigualdad

... Tomando a Merleau Ponty (1957) como punto de articulación teórica, se considera este esfuerzo como relevante para el entendimiento de el cuerpo, ya que, de acuerdo con el autor, ni los conceptos ni las palabras son arbitrarias ni inmutables en el tiempo, puesto que están íntimamente ligadas a la propia experiencia. Así lo afirman, aunque desde diferentes perspectivas, tanto la tradición estructuralista (Saussure, 2018) como la post-estructuralista (Derrida, 1985). ...

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Aproximaciones teóricas desde la comprensión del cuerpo como construcción socio-cultural hasta la experiencia del cuerpo sujeto

... En efecto, sería más fácil escudarse en el hecho más general, constatado por Saussure (1973Saussure ( , 2004, de que, contrariamente al caso de otras disciplinas, en la lingüística el objeto de estudio no está dado de una manera inequívoca. En una nota para su proyectado libro De la doble esencia del lenguaje, ya se pregunta Saussure: ¿Hay un objeto primero e inmediato, un objeto dado ante el que se encuentra la lingüística, un conjunto de cosas que aparecen ante los sentidos, como en el caso de la física, la química, la botánica, la astronomía, etcétera? ...

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Las unidades del análisis lingüístico en la modalidad viso-gestual