BTW it is worth mentioning that the arbitrariness of the sign was the one insight -- dodgy as it is -- that poststructuralism took from linguistics. You take that away from them and the whole edifice collapses, from Lacan to Derrida to Barthes to Althusser and the rest (perhaps not Zizek), as well as a generation of French semiotician-linguists from Benveniste to Greimas to Rastier and many many more. I have a certain respect for members of this latter group -- I had a very enlightening discussion with Rastier himself at a conference in Italy last year, in which he explained to me how it was that French structuralism had very little to do with the structuralist movement in the US, which was mainly a phenomenon of the 1930s, that rather "French 'structuralism' was in fact post-structuralism from the very beginning".
^^^^ CB: Yes, I was going to say, before there was post-structuralism , there was, of course, structuralism. As far as semiotic sociology mainly the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, and as you say modeled on structural linguistics.
See semiotics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
^^^
Now I don't mean to say that the arbitrariness of the sign is 'false'.
^^^ CB: The principle of the arbitrariness of the sign or in English, the symbol, is not only from structuralism. Leslie White, a founder of a main school of anthropology also articulated this principle. And symbols in this sense are a main characteristic of culture ( that which socially constructs , to put it in terms of a frequent refrain on this list.) as well as language. Both culture and language are systems of symbols (signs). And , importantly, the human species is defined by its possession of culture or custom or tradition. No other species has language or culture. So, signing or symboling , in the forms of both language and culture, is our species defining activity. And, importantly , also, most of human _learning_ is through symbols, culture, _not_ by imitating, like other species. Not by "monkey-see, monkey do" imitation. Most of our learning ( as opposed to inborn or genetically based knowledge) is through culture, not from experience. And cultural learning is learning from the experience of other people, including learning from people who are now dead.
Just to further explain the concept of arbitrariness, it refers to the relationship between the signifier and the signified. So, if the sounds d-o-g are used to refer to things that are dogs, we see that those sounds do not "imitate" or are not naturally related to dogs. The arbitrariness of a sign refers to the fact that in a sign something is used to represent something that it is not. Two _different_ things are arbitrarily identified, treated as the _same_. Note that this is a unity or identity of opposites of the dialectic.
So, culture or human social "constructivity" consists in an enormous system of signs or symbols.
I have theorized that the reason culture became our unique characteristic is that once some homind discovered them way, way back when, they were highly adaptive because they allowed past generations to pass on their experience to future generations across the "death barrier" .
Why ? Because a symbol represents something by something it is not ( the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified) So, a living generation can learn from a symbol about the experience of dead generations, when it could not learn from imitating the dead, since the dead aren't able to demonstrate things to be learned, obviously, because they are dead. But since a symbol uses something, a signifier, to represent something that it is not, the signified, because of this _arbitrary_ ( non-imitative) relation, the dead ancestor's "demonstration" can be learned by the living descendent through the signifier, through the thing (word or cultural object) that is _not_ the dead ancestor.
Cultural learning allows us to learn from the experience of many, many...many of our ancestors. This was its main adaptive advantage when our species originated in founding culture. Culture also allowed learning more from other living members of the species. Human children could learn a lot more from their parents than other species, who were restricted to teaching their young by demonstration and imitation. Other species have to "give a picture" or demonstration of what they are teaching. That a signifier is not what it signifies means it communicates by a non-picture or non-imitation of what it represents.
You heard it here first (smile)
I very much appreciate the rest of Tahir's discussion as a professional linguist below and above.
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