Summary of Ferdinand de Saussure’s, Chapter 3 of Course in General Linguistics

The key concept of this reading is the description of what semiology is. Semiology is nothing more than a different way to think about language. Since language is so natural and common, most people pay no attention to how language works. The central function of language is communication and Saussure defines the method of communication as a sign. A sign is composed of two things; a signifier and a signified. The signifier is the word used to reference a concept or a thing and the signified is the actual concept or image that appears in the brain. For example, what happens when a person reads the word “funny”? One reader may think of a humorous joke (insert stereotypical blonde joke here) and yet another person may conjure an image of classic hilarity such as a Roadrunner cartoon. The word “funny” is a signifier because when a person encounters a word they consciously or subconsciously have a concept of what that word is and what the word means in their minds (signified). Even though the signified concept may vary from person to person they still refer to the word “funny”. Signifiers and the signified are meaningless without one another. What would be the purpose of having a word for something while having no conceptual understanding of what the thing is or what would be the point of having a concept of a thing in mind if there is no formal signifier to communicate that concept to another person?
It may seem trivial at first but there is a reason to think about language in this way. Having a conscious method of describing language gives every person the ability to better understand the world around them and it also gives social creatures the ability to readily and intelligibly communicate with one another. Saussure’s primary goal in redefining language as a system of signs was to get past the linguistic definitions of how language works so that people could focus more on the why’s of language. Linguistics had before Saussure focused on specific aspects of specific languages rather than analyzing language as a whole. Semiology is simply Saussure’s method of helping the linguistic community move past traditional linguistics in an effort to gain a better educational understanding of what language is.