the.com/signified
the thing a word points at, forever chased but never caught by the word itself.
means in linguistics, the concept or mental image a sign refers to, as opposed to the sound or letters used to express it.
from coined by swiss linguist ferdinand de saussure in his early 1900s lectures, published posthumously as course in general linguistics in 1916; he split the sign into signifiant (signifier, the form) and signifie (signified, the concept).
not the thingsignified is the idea, not the actual object
arbitrary linksaussure insisted the bond to signifier is unmotivated
structuralism's enginethis split powered decades of literary theory
derrida's targetdeconstruction attacked the stability of the signified
for instance
the word tree — signifier tree points to your mental concept of tree-ness, the signified
barthes on wine — roland barthes read wine as signifying frenchness itself
derrida's critique — 1967 book of grammatology dismantled the fixed signified