Introduction

Abstract

Linguistic theory had its chief preoccupation with form and meaning in most of twentieth-century linguistics grounded in the Saussurean legacy of the pairing of the signifier and the signified. And with it came the division between langue and parole, the former being the abstract (but arbitrary) system of relations between signifiers (or simply, signs) and the signified (meanings), and the latter being the entire constellation of speech events. What Saussure bequeathed to the study of language influenced, whether in a linear or non-linear manner, much of the linguistic theorizing in the decades to come as well as in the subsequent century. A lot of what structuralism had to offer in the twentieth century was already inherited from the Saussurean legacy which posited, among other things, the primacy of langue over parole. But the relations between the signifier and the signified had by then captured the imagination of not just linguists but also philosophers, literary theorists and anthropologists, for the exact nature of relations between the signifier and the signified needed to be thoroughly understood in any sphere that has any purported liaison with language. As it turns out, if the relations between the signifier and the signified are arbitrary, this adds, rather than detracts from, the complexity of such relations between the signifier and the signified which have widely different and thus diverse manifestations in different languages across the world.