Hey Guys, I meant to post this in the middle of last week after I presented on these terms because I felt I didn't talk enough in class to offer anything of great insight. Hope this helps!
Sign: Ok so Sign as defined by the O.E.D. - An action, mark, notice, conveying information or instructions, and related senses. Or a signal acting as the prompt for a particular action.
Sign as defined in the Bedford Glossary- Something that stands for something else. In linguistics, Saussure argues "linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern." An example that was helpfully provided in the BG was the french word "pour", which means "for" in most cases. While this exact sign in English means "cause to flow in a continuous stream." (Bed Gloss 475-6). In this definition we begin to see this separation between sign (the word) and signification (the essence or thought behind the word).
We have seemed to come to agree that signs for Locke, and arguably for Ogden and Richards as well, are the words themselves. This became most apparent to me in Locke's discussion of the abuse of words, "First words fail... When men have names in their mouths without any determinate ideas in their minds, whereof they are the signs" (Locke 825). Locke is making the argument, here, that while words can work as signs for what the speaker means, they fall short if the connection is lost between work and thought or signification.
Signification (O.E.D.): That which is signified by something; meaning; imports implication. --> of a word of phrase. --> Of an action, event or material object.
Signification/ Significance (BG): A term used in hermeneutics to designate how readers relate the verbal meaning of a work ( or for our purpose, word) to other elements in their lives, such as personal experiences, values, beliefs, and general cultural mores.
While the definitions provided from these two sources are perhaps less concrete for the concept of signification, than for sign. We can draw that signification for Locke and other theorists is the weighted essence of a words behind the word itself. Using an example from Locke, someone might speak the word/ sign murder, but his audience may have a different signification for this word and therefore interpret or misunderstand the essence of his argument. "First, he that hath words in any language, without distinct ideas in his mind to which he applies them, does, so far as he uses them in discourse, only make a noise without any sense or signification" (Locke 825).
Hope this little outline helps!
1 comment:
Thanks Sophia! This is actually very helpful. Now if I could weave reference into all of this. So if I am reading this correctly the most important difference between sign and signification is the fact that the word itself is the sign, while the signification is the meaning the word carries (what the word is supposed to invoke in the mind of he who hears it). Looking over Locke and Ogden again, then, it seems to me that neither of them is really putting the blame on the concept of sign, but exclusively on signification. I find myself wondering, though, how the two can be separated in terms of their creation. Signification is too blame because it cannot truly capture the essence of the sign, but the sign itself is a human construct, being that it is simply a word. All of this seems to point to visual learning/ instruction as a superior form of education. Maybe the reason that graphs, charts, and the like are so helpful to children is that they help to eliminate some of the complexities that arise naturally in discourse. The visual representation of an object or action allows the viewer to form their own signification, at least to some extent. Hmmm. The question is whether the formation of individual signification is beneficial because it allows for the understanding of complex ideas, or detrimental because it simply furthers the problem that we already face by increasing the disparity between individual understanding of each sign. Anyways, thanks again for the overview, i really appreciate it.
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