Borrowing a Science
Between the 1920s and the 1960s literary theory borrowed its vocabulary from linguistics, and the loan shaped everything after it. Three ideas did most of the work.
1. The sign is arbitrary and relational
Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (1916) defines the sign as the union of a signifier (the sound-image) and a signified (the concept). The link between them is arbitrary: nothing about the sound tree resembles a tree, which is why other languages use other sounds.
The consequence is more radical than it looks. If signs are arbitrary, they cannot get their meaning from resemblance, so they get it from difference: in language there are only differences without positive terms. The value of a word is fixed by what it is not, by the other words available in the same slot. This is why translation is hard even between close languages, since the neighbouring words that cut up the field are different.
2. Langue and parole
Langue is the system, the shared code, finite and social. Parole is the individual utterance, unbounded and personal. Saussure's decision to study langue gave literary theory its structuralist ambition: describe the system behind the works, as Propp did for the Russian folk tale and Genette would for narrative.
The relation between the two is generative, and it is arithmetic. A language of twenty words with three-word sentences already yields sentences; a real lexicon of tens of thousands with unbounded sentence length yields a set that no speaker will exhaust. A finite langue produces an unlimited parole, which is why the system is the tractable object.
Saussure also separates synchrony (the system at a moment) from diachrony (its change through time), and insists a speaker uses the system without knowing its history. Etymology explains where a word came from, not what it now means.
3. Jakobson's six factors and six functions
Every act of verbal communication involves six factors, and each one, when the utterance orients toward it, produces a function:
| Factor | Function | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Addresser | Emotive | Ugh! |
| Addressee | Conative | Come here. |
| Context | Referential | The train leaves at nine. |
| Message | Poetic | I like Ike |
| Contact | Phatic | Hello? Are you there? |
| Code | Metalingual | What do you mean by "sign"? |
Six factors, six functions, and no utterance has only one, what varies is which dominates. The scheme is useful in criticism precisely because it lets you say which orientation a passage takes without claiming it takes only that one.
Peirce's alternative
Charles Sanders Peirce cut the sign differently, into three kinds by their relation to what they stand for: the icon resembles (a portrait), the index is really connected (smoke, a footprint, a pointing finger), and the symbol is conventional (a word, a flag). The trichotomy survives in film and image theory, where resemblance and physical trace matter in a way they do not for the arbitrary word.
Common pitfall: reading "arbitrary" as "random" or "individual". A speaker cannot decide that tree will now mean rain. Arbitrary means unmotivated by resemblance, and the sign is fixed for the individual precisely because it is a social contract, arbitrary at the origin, compulsory in use.