Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers : Jacques Lacan. New York: Routledge, 2004.
The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and is determined by social convention. But if language does not correspond to objects in the world then how does it become meaningful? According to Saussure, meaning does not reside in individual signs but in the relationship between signs in the language system itself. Language creates a differential system whereby any given sign acquires its meaning by virtue of its difference from other signs. When we speak we choose to use certain words and exclude others. For example, I may say ‘chair’ rather than ‘throne’ or ‘armchair’. Each word designates a piece of furniture I can sit upon but they all have very different meanings. This element of selection is called the paradigmatic axis of language.
But I cannot select and use any word I want. I must combine them in a syntactically correct way for them to make sense and this is referred to as the syntagmatic axis. The meaning of each word, each sign, also depends on the words that come before and after it in a sentence.
Let us take, for example, the sentence:
We will leave Paris tomorrow.
Each term in this sentence acquires its meaning on the one hand through its differentiation from other possible terms we could use in the same context and on the other through its place in the overall sentence structure. Thus, ‘We’ could be substituted by ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’ or ‘she’, or ‘tomorrow’ could be substituted by ‘today’. The sentence will still make sense if we substitute these terms but it will have a very different meaning. These alternatives are absent from the immediate situation of language use but are present as a background against which we understand specific terms.
Second, the meaning of a sentence arises from a specific combination of terms rather than its individual elements in isolation. Thus, if we rearranged this sentence we can still understand the individual terms but it does not make sense overall:
Paris leave will tomorrow we.
This is the function of syntax and grammar or the syntagmatic axis. Language works by combining these two functions; the meaning of what a person says depends not only upon the words they use and those they exclude but also upon the place of those words within an overall structure. Language exists as a complex network of signs. A given sign is defined not by virtue of an intrinsic value or meaning, but rather through its relative position within the overall system of signification and through its difference from all the other signs in that system.
A sign does not refer us to a specific object in the real material world, but rather to another sign which in turn refers us to another sign and so on. (39)