Saussure offered a 'dyadic' or two-part model of the sign. He defined a sign as being composed of a 'signifier' (the form which the sign takes) and the 'signified' (the concept it represents).
The sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified. The relationship between the signifies and the signified is referred to as 'signification', and this is represented in the Saussurean diagram by the arrows. The horizontal line marking the two elements of the sign is referred to as 'the bar'.
If we take a linguistic example, the word 'Open' (when it is invested with meaning by someone who encounters it on a shop door way) is a sign consisting of:
- a signifier : the word open;
- a signified concept: that the shop is open for business
A sign must have both a signifier and a signified. You cannot have a totally meaningless signifier or a completely formless signified. A sign is a recognizable combination of a signifier with a particular signified. The same signifier could stand for different signifies. Similarly, many signifiers could stand for the same signified. (As in the case of the words, water, vellam, thanni, paani)
Saussure noted that his choice of the terms signifier and signified helped to indicate 'the distinction which separates each from the other'. Saussure stressed that sound and though (or the signifier and the signified) were as in separable as the two sides of a piece of paper. They were 'intimately linked' in the mind 'by an associative link' 0 'each triggers the other'. Saussure presented these elements as wholly interdependent, neither pre-existing the other. Within the context of spoken language a sign could not consist of should without sense or of sense without sound.
