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Signs and Systems in Condillac and Saussure

The history of linguistics, not surprisingly, confirms the supposition that a theory of linguistic signs plays a fundamental role in the elaboration of a theory of language. A theory of the sign has figured prominently in almost every theory of language for over two millenia: from the Greeks to the Modistae, through the Cartesian and sensualist philosophers, then more recently in Whitney, Peirce, and Saussure. Chomsky, of course, Stands out äs the notable exception. Nevertheless, now more than ever, the understanding of the sign is feit to provide the key to understanding meaning in language and the meaning of language. Yet despite the obvious interplay between a particular theory of signs and a particular conception of language, the precise nature of that reciprocal influence still remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, in seeking to understand the long history of linguistic thought, historians of linguistics have sometimes pointed to earlier Statements about linguistic signs, e.g., that they are arbitrary, and have drawn parallels to similar modern assertions in order to inscribe them into a tradition. Coseriu (1967), for instance, has clearly documented that Saussure was not the first to develop the theory of the arbitrariness of the sign and has traced the idea back through the nineteenth Century to Condillac, Leibniz, Locke, and Port-Royal, among others, and finally to Aristotle. Saussure was, however, the first in linguistics to assert the priority of the whole over the parts; similarly, the Statement that the linguistic sign is arbitrary cannot be isolated from the accompanying theory of language äs a whole and still remain meaningful. In fact, the historical record reveals that a change in Status ofthat arbitrariness within a theory of language is related to a concomitant change in the conception of language äs a whole; this, in turn, alters the boundaries that a given theory of language marks offto be the proper field of language study. Our historiographical investigation, then, should not only discover how the theory of the sign interacts with the theory of language but also determine the different domains of language study that distinguish one era from another.