Daily Inspiration Quote by Ferdinand De Saussure

Saussure is doing something slyly radical here: he’s demoting the word from self-contained unit to a node in a system, meaningful less by what it “is” than by what it’s hooked to. In everyday talk we treat words like little parcels of meaning we unwrap. Saussure insists the real action is in the wiring. “Within speech” signals he’s not talking about dictionary definitions but about language in motion, where sequence and adjacency manufacture sense.

The phrase “subject to a kind of relation” is deliberately impersonal, almost bureaucratic. It frames language as governed by constraints that speakers don’t consciously author. That’s the subtext: you think you’re freely expressing yourself, but you’re operating inside an architecture of permissible combinations. “Independent of the first” quietly breaks with the older temptation to explain meaning by reference to things in the world (or to a speaker’s intention). Instead, meaning emerges from internal relations. “Based on their linkage” makes the mechanism concrete: the chain matters. “The dog bites” is not “bites dog,” and Saussure’s point is that the difference isn’t psychological; it’s structural.

Contextually, this lands in early 20th-century linguistics as Saussure’s push toward structuralism. By naming “syntagmatic relations,” he’s carving out one axis of meaning-making (combination in sequence) that will pair with the paradigmatic axis (selection/substitution). The aside “of which I have spoken” carries lecture-room authority, but also a pedagogical gambit: he’s building a toolkit, not offering a poetic insight. The intent is analytic control - a vocabulary for seeing how language generates meaning by arrangement, not essence.