2024/06/13 by Bogdana Paskaleva
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Linguistics and Language Studies #Linguistics and Discourse Analysis #Semiotics and Representation Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/sem-2023-0114
crossref issued 2024/06/13 · crossref published 2024/06/13 · crossref published-online 2024/06/13 · openalex publication_date 2024/06/13 · crossref created 2024/06/13 · crossref deposited 2024/08/13 · crossref published-print 2024/09/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Abstract Taking the manuscript On the Dual Essence of Language as a starting point, the article follows the scholarly tradition of reexamining the position of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics regarding twentieth-century semiotics and structuralism. After half a century of research on Saussure’s manuscript legacy, the manuscript discovered in 1996 and published for the first time in 2002 develops aspects of Saussure’s linguistic thought that cannot be inferred on the basis of previously known texts. One of these aspects concerns the crucial question of the nature of the linguistic sign and the process of signification, as well as the role of linguistic science in understanding such problems. The current text aims at reconstructing Saussure’s ideas on these points through an analysis of the notion of final quaternion , claiming that this notion presents an alternative concept of the linguistic sign and signification process that hasn’t been explored so far. It involves a five-sided relationship of non-pregiven elements in one signifying complex that is neither signifier, nor signified, and in the end, brings to the fore the material dimension of verbal language.