Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
sors are the instrument of labor. The operations of cutting can be based
upon visually detectable patterns alone, without reference to meaning or
semantics. Cutting can be accomplished computationally and assimilated
to modernity by replacing human labor with a syntactic machine process
that enables greater speed and a much more extended object of labor as
the line of writing.
For our purposes here, explicit concentration on the line of writing
replaces the analogy between the extension of oral speech in time and
writing in space, with its partly covert premises. The line of writing is
understood as materially embodied and extended across a surface, giving
the possibility of moving backward as well as forward along the line. In
language fully detached from its producer, the line of writing provides the
closest practical realization of the form from which the concept of the
syntagma can be abstracted.
The constituents of the understanding of the syntagma, word, and dis-
course demand consideration, including contrasts between written and
spoken discourse.
Word
The word is an essential constituent of the syntagma; its definition has
been disputed repeatedly in linguistics. For Saussure, “what a word is usu-
ally taken to be does not correspond to our notion of a concrete unit”
(1916/1983, 103-104):
To convince oneself of this, it suffices to consider the singular form
cheval
(“horse”) and its plural
chevaux
(“horses”). It is commonly said that these are
two forms of the same word. But, taking each as a whole, it is clear that we are
dealing with two quite distinct items, as regards both meaning and sound.
Understanding of the word can be sharpened by considering this passage.
As sounds and, more clearly evidenced, as sequences of letters, there is
both resemblance (the letters,
cheva
) and differentiation (
l
,
ux
), but not
the identity of a concrete unit between the two words. For meaning, or
semantics, there is contrast between singleness and plurality, but also
commonality of the constituents of reference (the horse as one horse and
as one of more than one horse). Saussure continues to acknowledge the
absence of “immediately perceptible entities” in language, but concludes
by regarding the word as “a unit which compels recognition by the mind”
