Talk:Sign (linguistics)

Stub tag
This article is very short, especially compared to the book which has apparently been written on the subject. A good starting place for expansion might be an example or two, an introduction to the notation used, and how this concept was/is or was/is not used in contemporary and modern linguistic theories. -- Beland 01:21, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Is this the same thing as sign (semiotics)? Ben Standeven 06:48, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is. --Sinatra 09:33, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Should there perhaps be a reference to phonaesthesia on this page? Or at least some linkage? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.192.215.122 (talk) 03:58, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes this is a specific Linguistic Concept separate from (but obviously related) to semiotics. In the field of Linguistics the 'arbitrariness of the linguistic sign' or 'Saussurean arbitrariness' are concepts used by researchers such as Noam Chomsky (for example, in his book "The Minimalist Program"). However the field of semiotics (as a whole) rarely gets a mention in any of the theoretical streams of Linguistics. Although it is true that researchers such as Noam Chomsky have argued against Saussure's Structuralist Linguistics as documented in this entry : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_in_General_Linguistics#Arbitrariness, it is still the case that 'Saussurean Arbitrariness' is a fundamental concept that all work in Theoretical Linguistics and Generative Grammar is built on. Discreteinfinity (talk) 15:27, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The information presented in this article would seem to indicate that signs in linguistic contexts are merely a subset of signs in semiotic contexts, where semiotic signs are "anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign" and a linguistic sign is a sign that is part of a language and communicates a meaning other than itself. Moreover, most of this article's content on Saussure's discourse on signifier and signified is effectively identical to the content of sign (semiotics). I would propose that these articles should be merged, with subsections explaining the intricacies of the term's usage in linguistic contexts vs. semiotic contexts. Rosguill (talk) 23:39, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Merge Proposal
As per my comment above, I propose that Sign (linguistics) should be merged into Sign (semiotics) with subsections describing any discrepancies of usage between the two fields, similar to how Semantics handles usage of the term in various fields. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rosguill (talk • contribs) 19:44, June 18, 2018 (UTC)