Theory
Saussure's Signifier and Signified
The two-sided sign that founded modern linguistics — sound-image and concept, joined by convention
Ferdinand de Saussure's signifier (signifiant) and signified (signifié) are the two faces of the linguistic sign as described in Cours de linguistique générale (1916). The signifier is the sound-image — not the physical sound itself but its psychological imprint. The signified is the concept evoked by that sound-image — not a physical thing in the world but a mental representation. The two are joined arbitrarily by community convention, and together they form a sign whose value (valeur) is determined by its oppositions to other signs in the system. The key contrast with the Ogden-Richards (1923) semiotic triangle is that Saussure's sign has only two terms; the referent (the actual thing in the world) is excluded from the sign itself. Roland Barthes extended the model to second-order signification (myth, ideology); Charles Sanders Peirce's parallel triadic semiotic developed independently.
- SourceSaussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916)
- Two halvesSignifiant (sound-image) and signifié (concept)
- ExcludedThe referent — the actual object in the world
- Key conceptValue (valeur) — meaning by opposition
- LevelsLangue (system) vs. parole (speech act)
- SuccessorsHjelmslev, Jakobson, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida
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The two-sided sign
Open Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (1916) at chapter 1 of part 1 and you will find a diagram: an oval cut by a horizontal line, with concept in the upper half and sound-image in the lower. The oval is the linguistic sign. The two halves are inseparable — like the two sides of a sheet of paper, you cannot cut one without cutting the other. Saussure named the lower half the signifiant (signifier) and the upper the signifié (signified).
The signifier is not the physical acoustic wave that hits an eardrum. It is the sound-image — the psychological trace, the representation in the mind that you can rehearse silently. When you say "tree" to yourself without moving your lips, that mental sequence is the signifier. Saussure stressed this distinction because he wanted linguistics to study mental representations, not raw acoustic events.
The signified is not the physical thing in the world. It is the concept — the mental category that the signifier evokes. The concept "tree" is not the oak in your garden; the oak is the referent, which Saussure deliberately excluded from the sign. The sign is a relation between two psychological entities, not between a sound and a worldly object.
The signifier-signified-referent triangle
To see what is distinctive about Saussure's dyadic sign, compare it to the triadic semiotic of C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning (1923). They proposed three terms — symbol, thought (or reference), and referent — arranged in a triangle. The symbol relates to the referent only indirectly, through thought.
Take the example most introductions use:
- Signifier (sound-image). The phonological sequence /tri:/ in your mind.
- Signified (concept). The mental category "tree" — woody perennial plant, branches, leaves, taller than a shrub.
- Referent (actual object). The specific oak tree growing in your garden.
Saussure's sign joins only the first two. The referent is irrelevant to the structure of language; what matters is the systematic relationship between sound-images and concepts within a community. Ogden and Richards keep the third term — for them, the relation of word to world is part of meaning. Charles Sanders Peirce's contemporaneous semiotic (sign, object, interpretant; icon, index, symbol) developed independently in the United States and was more philosophically rich. Modern linguistics tends to use Saussurean vocabulary for structural analysis and Peircean or Ogden-Richards vocabulary for reference and pragmatics.
Saussure's sign compared to alternatives
| Theorist | Year | Structure | Includes referent? | Where it dominates |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ferdinand de Saussure | 1916 | Dyadic: signifier + signified | No (referent is outside the sign) | Structural linguistics, semiology |
| C. S. Peirce | 1894–1907 | Triadic: sign + object + interpretant | Yes (object included) | Philosophy of signs, semiotics |
| Ogden & Richards | 1923 | Triadic: symbol + thought + referent | Yes | Philosophy of language |
| Roland Barthes | 1957–1967 | Two levels: language + myth (sign-of-sign) | No (extended Saussure) | Cultural studies, semiotics of mass media |
| Louis Hjelmslev | 1943 | Expression plane + content plane, each with form and substance | Partial | Glossematics, structural linguistics |
| Roman Jakobson | 1956–1960 | Six functions of language; sign with paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes | Implicit | Functional linguistics, poetics |
| Cognitive linguistics | 1980s onward | Form-meaning pairs (constructions); embodied concepts; frames | Yes (grounded in experience) | Modern linguistic theory, NLP |
Saussure's diadic sign survives as the cleanest analytical tool for studying form-meaning pairings within a system. The triadic models add a relation to the world, which matters for reference but introduces philosophical complications about what the "world" is. Modern hybrids use Saussure for structural analysis and Peirce or Ogden-Richards when reference is at stake.
Worked example: French "mouton" vs. English "sheep"
Saussure's most cited illustration of the value (valeur) of a sign concerns French mouton and English sheep. In the world, both languages name the same animal. But the value of the signs differs because the systems of oppositions differ.
- French. One signifier mouton covers two domains — the live animal and the meat on the table.
- English. The signifier sheep covers the live animal; mutton (a Norman French borrowing) covers the meat.
The two languages have the same potential referents, but the values are not equivalent. Sheep means "animal-not-mutton"; mouton has no such opposition because no separate signifier carves it out. The lesson: a sign's meaning is determined not by what it points to but by its differences from neighboring signs in the same language. This is what Saussure called valeur.
The same principle holds for grammatical categories. Russian distinguishes perfective and imperfective aspect for nearly every verb; English does not. The English present tense and the Russian present-imperfective do not have the same value, even when they translate the same situation, because each sits in a different system of oppositions.
Counterarguments and revisions
Three major lines have refined or challenged the dyadic sign:
- Cognitive linguistics. George Lakoff (Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 1987), Ronald Langacker (Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, 1987), and Charles Fillmore (frame semantics, 1976) replaced the abstract signified with embodied, image-schematic, and frame-based concepts. A signified is not a clean discrete category but a structured cognitive frame with prototypes, fuzzy edges, and metaphorical extensions. The clean signifier-signified diagram becomes a richer cognitive map.
- Construction grammar. Adele Goldberg (1995, 2006) extended the sign concept to grammatical patterns: a construction like the ditransitive ("She gave him a book") is itself a form-meaning pair — an abstract sign — with the meaning "agent causes recipient to receive a thing." The Saussurean sign extends from words to grammar.
- Post-structuralism. Jacques Derrida (Of Grammatology, 1967) argued that the signified is never present without further signifiers (différance) — meaning is endlessly deferred. Jacques Lacan reworked the sign psychoanalytically. The result was a destabilized but enduring vocabulary.
Most modern linguists use Saussure's vocabulary as a useful analytical framework while rejecting the assumption that signifiers and signifieds are bounded, discrete, or psychologically real in the strict structuralist sense.
Variants and extensions
- Hjelmslev's glossematics. Louis Hjelmslev (Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, 1943) split the signifier into expression-form and expression-substance, and the signified into content-form and content-substance — a four-cell grid that influenced later structuralism.
- Barthes's second-order signification. A first-order sign (a photo of a saluting soldier) becomes a signifier of a second-order signified (French imperial pride). Mythologies (1957) reads cultural artifacts as compound signs.
- Lacan's algorithm. "The signifier over the signified" with the bar resisting penetration — Lacan's reworking of the unconscious as structured like a language (Écrits, 1966).
- Eco's code theory. Umberto Eco (A Theory of Semiotics, 1975) treated signs as products of cultural codes that map signifiers to signifieds, allowing for sign-systems beyond language (cinema, fashion, architecture).
- Pictorial signs. Visual semiotics (Sonesson, Kress) extends the dyadic sign to images, where the signifier is visual rather than phonological.
Common pitfalls
- Confusing the signified with the referent. The signified is a mental concept; the referent is the worldly object. Saussure's sign explicitly excludes the referent.
- Confusing the signifier with the sound. The signifier is a sound-image — a psychological imprint — not the physical wave hitting the ear.
- Treating the sign as a label for a pre-existing thing. Saussure's point is that the concept is itself shaped by the language's structure of oppositions; thoughts do not pre-exist the language that names them.
- Forgetting value (valeur). A sign's meaning is differential. Without the system of oppositions, the sign has no content.
- Equating signifier-signified with phoneme-meaning. Saussure's sign applies at the word level (the morpheme); phonemes are smaller units of the signifier and have no signified of their own.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is the signifier?
Saussure's signifier (signifiant) is the sound-image — the psychological trace of a spoken word, not the physical acoustic event. He emphasized this distinction repeatedly in the Cours de linguistique générale (1916). When you silently say "tree" to yourself, the mental sequence /tri:/ that you experience is the signifier. Saussure called it an "imprint" or "acoustic image," a representation in the mind. The choice of phonological substance is what distinguishes one signifier from another within a language; the signifier exists only differentially, by contrast to other signifiers in the same system. In writing, the signifier extends to the visual form of letters — but Saussure considered written language a derived system, secondary to spoken language.
What exactly is the signified?
The signified (signifié) is the concept evoked by the signifier — not the physical referent in the world but a mental category. The concept "tree" is what English /tri:/ points to. Saussure was emphatic that the signified is not the actual tree standing in the garden; the actual tree is the referent, which lies outside the sign. Two languages can carve up conceptual space differently — French "mouton" covers both "sheep" (animal) and "mutton" (meat), where English uses two separate signifieds. The boundaries of signifieds are determined by the system of oppositions in each language. Concepts have no positive content of their own; they are defined negatively by what they are not.
What is the difference from the Ogden-Richards triangle?
C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards's The Meaning of Meaning (1923) proposed a triadic semiotic — symbol, thought (or reference), and referent — where the symbol relates to the referent only indirectly through thought. Saussure's sign is dyadic — signifier and signified, both mental, with the referent (the worldly object) excluded from the sign itself. The Ogden-Richards model is closer to philosophy of language; Saussure's is closer to structural linguistics. Charles Sanders Peirce's contemporaneous triadic semiotic (sign, object, interpretant) developed independently in the United States and is more philosophically rich. Most modern linguistics uses some hybrid: a Saussurean sign for analyzing language structure plus an Ogden-Richards or Peircean treatment of reference for analyzing how words pick out things in the world.
What does Saussure mean by value (valeur)?
Saussure's notion of value (valeur) is that a sign's meaning comes not from positive content but from its place in a system of oppositions. The value of a chess piece is fixed by the rules and positions of the other pieces, not by its material. The English "sheep" has the value it does because of contrast with "mutton," "lamb," "ram," "ewe." French "mouton" has a different value because French does not lexicalize the same distinctions. Value is what makes signs system-internal — a sign cannot be defined in isolation. Roman Jakobson and Louis Hjelmslev developed this into structural phonology (distinctive features) and structural semantics. Value remains the most influential of Saussure's analytical tools even as the philosophical claims have been refined.
What is the langue versus parole distinction?
Saussure distinguished langue (the abstract system of signs shared by a speech community) from parole (individual speech acts performed by speakers). Langue is collective, social, structural; parole is individual, psychological, executive. The signifier-signified bond is a property of langue. Linguistics, Saussure argued, must take langue as its object — parole is too variable. Chomsky's competence (the speaker's internal knowledge) and performance (actual production) inherit Saussure's distinction with a cognitive shift. Modern usage-based linguists (Bybee, Tomasello) reject the sharp split, arguing that langue emerges from accumulated parole. The langue-parole pair remains a foundational analytical lens despite the empirical refinement.
How did Barthes and post-structuralism extend the sign?
Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957) and Elements of Semiology (1964) extended Saussure to second-order signification. A first-order sign (e.g., a photo of a French soldier saluting the flag) becomes a signifier at a second level, signifying "French imperial pride." Barthes called this connotation or myth. The structuralist project — applying Saussurean tools to fashion (Système de la mode, 1967), narrative (S/Z, 1970), and cultural analysis broadly — peaked in the 1960s. Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967) deconstructed the signifier-signified opposition, arguing the signified is never present without further signifiers (différance), undermining structuralist closure. Lacan's reworking in psychoanalysis treated the unconscious as structured like a language. Post-structuralism keeps the Saussurean vocabulary while problematizing its stability.
Has cognitive linguistics replaced the Saussurean sign?
Cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1987, Langacker 1987, Fauconnier 1985) replaces the abstract signified with embodied, image-schematic, and frame-based concepts. A signified is not a clean discrete category but a structured cognitive frame with prototypes, fuzzy edges, and metaphorical extensions. Construction grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2006) treats grammatical patterns themselves as form-meaning pairs — abstract signs at the syntactic level. The Saussurean two-sided sign survives as a useful analytical heuristic, but the assumption that signifiers and signifieds are bounded, equal, and arbitrary has been replaced by gradient, embodied, contextually grounded representations. Most modern linguistics still uses the vocabulary while disagreeing with the underlying structuralist metaphysics.