Umberto Eco's New Definition of the Sign

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Umberto Eco’s new definition of the sign, what it changes about meaning in literature. When French speaking Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure established his own theory of the linguistic sign and what it meant for meaning as we know it today. He sparked many other structualist and semiotitians to challenge his definitions and they came up with definitions and theories of their own. Italian semiotician, Umberto Eco is one of these and I will explore his theory and his new definition for the sign and what it allows us to explain about meaning in literature. I’ll start by touching upon what De Saussure first suggested about the linguistic sign. De Saussure begins his discussion by explaining what we first thought about language. Language is mostly thought of as a naming process. We learn as small children that specific objects have specific names. For example, a tree is named a tree it’s not named a box or elephant. De Saussure rejected this view and instead proposed that language is made up of signs. According to him (1960:66) “the linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image.” The sign as explained by de Saussure exists in two parts, one which is physical and one which is mental. De Saussure called them the signified and signifier respectively. The signified and the signifier together make up the linguistic sign, and cannot be separated. A signifier without a signified or concept attached to it cannot communicate meaning. For de Saussure you cannot speak of one without also speaking of the other. De Saussure points out that this relation between physical language and its meaning is arbitrary or unmotivated, because no natural link exits between them. We simply ‘know’ that the person who is talking about a tree is talking about a tree as we understand the thing to mean. To compensate for this we use codes. Codes indicate the special
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