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But as a student of Sanskrit, Saussure of course knew Pāṇini,^§MS0.4a and this much older idea of doing grammar in order to explore the structures of meaning.¹⁸ The Arabic grammarians of intellectual Islam went beyond Pāṇini to say for the first time things about the connections of structures of meaning in language and the meaning of these structures in the logic of the world. Saussure brings us to these questions again.

Saussure creates a series of dichotomies. Where Al Fārābī had distinguished logic from vocal form,^§MS3c Saussure distinguishes a concept from its manifestation in a spoken word. The concept, Saussure calls “signification,” and the sound pattern of the spoken word, its “signal.” Together, these two components form a “sign.”

Then come some large generalizations. First, the relationship between signal and signification is arbitrary: the sound pattern “tree” in English or “arbre” in French is purely a conventional relationship to meaning (Ibn Jinnî’s notion of “agreement”^§MS3.0a). Mattâ ibn Yûnus had called the relation of meaning to expression “accidental.”^§MS3b

And a second generalization: the meaning of language is in its systematic patterning of contrasts, where different sounds in speech mark out conceptual distinctions, akin to Al Fārābī’s “logic.”^§MS3c So, “a language is a system based on psychological contrasts between these auditory impressions.” And: “a language is a system in which all the elements fit together, and in which the value of any one element depends on the existence of all the others; … all the words which express neighbouring ideas help define one another’s meaning.” From this perspective, “in language itself, there are only differences, … phonetic differences matched with a series of conceptual differences.”¹⁹

Over this, Saussure layers some more dichotomies: the meaning-value of signification is immaterial, though the sound of the signal is material; the system of language is collective, though speech is individual; the language system is a site of social passivity, repeating received meanings, though its vocalization is a matter of individual will; the structure of language has a coherence at a single moment in time, though speech changes over time, affecting the system in evolutionary ways that are accidental and not noticeable to its speakers.²⁰

In each of these dichotomies, linguistics is more interested in the immaterial, social conformity, system, and coherence in a moment of time than the materiality of meaning, individual agency, change, and history. These, in the last analysis, were also the proclivities of the Islamic grammarians, in their case for reasons of divine revelation and in order to privilege the textual powers of an imperial elite.

In our notion of “design,” we want to suggest something different. We are as interested in structures where unique meanings can be made by persons, where change is as important as replication, and where we enact our meanings in a history whose future remains open. In our notion of “transposition,” we want to track patterns of dynamic change, tracing microhistories of meaning within meaning functions and across meaning forms. The imminent transformability of one meaning into another is just as important as the paradigmatic logic of a stable system-in-the-moment.

Saussure’s ambition was to found a science that went beyond language. He proposed that such a science might be called “semiology,” anticipating a possibility with the scope of our multimodal, transpositional grammar. “A language is a system of signs expressing ideas, and hence comparable to writing, the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, symbolic rites, forms of politeness, military signals, and so on. It is simply the most important of such systems.” Semiology was to be “a science which studies signs as a part of social life. It would form a part of social psychology.”²¹

“Comparable to writing” is a revealing statement, showing Saussure’s bias towards speech. “Deaf-and-dumb alphabet” is a strange notion when deaf signing is ideographic rather than phonemic, another indication of his bias towards speech. Language in the form of speech is for him unapologetically the “most important of such systems” of meaning as a consequence of the extent of its arbitrariness, its abstract, immaterial autonomy from the world of materialized meanings.

For this reason, onomatopoeia presents Saussure with a problem, or the non-arbitrary relation of the sounds of speech to the sounds of actions they reference – the “rustle” of leaves, the “chirp” of a bird, the “bang” of a colliding object, the “click” of a computer mouse, the “tap” on a door. Then there are what M.A.K. Halliday calls “phonaesthetic series,” where a particular sound is associated with an area of meaning, so displaying another kind of non-arbitrariness – for instance the “-ump” in “hump,” “bump,” “lump,” “rump,” “plump,” “stump,” and “clump.”²²

For this reason, Saussure has to say that onomatopoeia is never an organic element of the linguistic system²³ – but surely, that can only be the case because he has positioned arbitrariness so centrally in his conception of the system, meanings that dissociate themselves from material reality by virtue of the strength of their structural relations. He privileges language as the highest form of meaning because so much of it is arbitrary, and so symbolic-abstract.

Meanwhile, many of the meanings represented in the unlanguaged world are arbitrarily connected to their referents – wedding rings, clothing styles, gestures, or visual conventions on maps, for instance. Or, considering by way of example the difference between chopsticks and a fork, the relations of object form to eating function are relatively arbitrary. So if we want to make arbitrariness the measure of semiotic sophistication, this is by no means the exclusive preserve of speech.

In this perspective, language has no special place in meaning, or at least not one that is distinguished by its arbitrariness. And for that matter, what is so special about arbitrary compared to non-arbitrary meanings? We discussed this earlier as a distinction between meanings-in and meanings-of.^§MS0.3.3 We have no reason to privilege the one kind of meaning over the other.

Saussure dismisses writing. At best, the purpose of writing is to represent speech, where “a spatial line of graphic signs is substituted for a succession of sounds in time.”²⁴ At worst, says Saussure, writing “obscures our view of language,” with, for instance, “irrational spellings” – as if writing were ideally a mere transliteration of speech.²⁵ No, we would respond, text is very different from speech, non-linear in much of its writing and reading in ways that speech can never be.

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¹⁸ Ferdinand de Saussure, 1881 [2017], On the Use of the Genitive Absolute in Sanskrit, translated by A. Sukla, Champaign, IL: Common Ground Research Networks.

¹⁹ Ferdinand de Saussure, 1916 [1983], Course in General Linguistics, translated by R. Harris, London, UK: Duckworth, pp. 67, 33, 113–14, 118.

²⁰ Ferdinand de Saussure, 2002 [2006], Writings in General Linguistics, edited by S. Bouquet and R. Engler, translated by C. Sanders and M. Pires, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 201, 209.

²¹ Ferdinand de Saussure, 1916 [1983], Course in General Linguistics, translated by R. Harris, London, UK: Duckworth, p. 15.

²² M.A.K. Halliday, 1977 [2003], “Ideas About Language,” pp. 92–115 in On Language and Linguistics, The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, Volume 3, edited by J.J. Webster, London, UK: Continuum, p. 108.

²³ Ferdinand de Saussure, 1916 [1983], Course in General Linguistics, translated by R. Harris, London, UK: Duckworth, pp. 69, 175.

²⁴ Ibid., pp. 24, 70.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 29.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 266–268. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics” §MS3d