"Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components"
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Jakobson slips a quiet grenade into an almost casual sentence: “Of course” isn’t humility, it’s boundary-setting. He’s telling you the debate is over. By the mid-20th century, serious linguistics had moved past the comforting fantasy that words simply point to things in the world. A “verbal sign” is not a label slapped onto reality; it’s a constructed unit, internally split, with meaning produced by the relationship between its parts.
The “unity of two components” is Jakobson aligning himself with Saussure’s foundational model of signifier and signified, but he’s also sharpening it for his own project. He’s less interested in metaphysical questions about what words “really” are than in what they do inside systems: how sound patterns, grammatical structures, and cultural codes conspire to generate sense. The subtext is methodological: if the word is already a two-part machine, then analyzing language means tracking correspondences, substitutions, and oppositions rather than hunting for some pure, original meaning.
Calling it a “unity” matters. Jakobson isn’t celebrating fragmentation; he’s insisting that the split is functional, even elegant. The word holds together precisely because it’s dual, like a coin whose value depends on both sides being stamped. That small insistence clears room for structuralism’s broader wager: culture itself can be read as a network of signs, where what looks natural is actually engineered by convention, history, and power.
The “unity of two components” is Jakobson aligning himself with Saussure’s foundational model of signifier and signified, but he’s also sharpening it for his own project. He’s less interested in metaphysical questions about what words “really” are than in what they do inside systems: how sound patterns, grammatical structures, and cultural codes conspire to generate sense. The subtext is methodological: if the word is already a two-part machine, then analyzing language means tracking correspondences, substitutions, and oppositions rather than hunting for some pure, original meaning.
Calling it a “unity” matters. Jakobson isn’t celebrating fragmentation; he’s insisting that the split is functional, even elegant. The word holds together precisely because it’s dual, like a coin whose value depends on both sides being stamped. That small insistence clears room for structuralism’s broader wager: culture itself can be read as a network of signs, where what looks natural is actually engineered by convention, history, and power.
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| Topic | Knowledge |
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