What you will get from this article
- What “linearity” means and why Saussure counted it among the two great principles of the sign
- How word order, particles, and ambiguity in where a sentence breaks follow from it
- Where the principle does not apply (sign languages, for example) and how to handle that
The answer first. Spoken sounds move only through time. You cannot utter two elements at once; they must come one after another. Saussure named this the “second principle” of the sign and said “the whole mechanism of language depends on it.” Word order, grammar, and many sources of ambiguity can be explained from here.
Quotations are from the 1916 French original (Part 1, chapter 1, §3). English renderings are ToL’s.
The original text
The second principle comes right after the explanation of arbitrariness. Its opening sentence is a short definition.
Le signifiant, étant de nature auditive, se déroule dans le temps seul et a les caractères qu’il emprunte au temps : a) il représente une étendue, et b) cette étendue est mesurable dans une seule dimension : c’est une ligne.
ToL translation The signifier, being auditory in nature, unfolds in time alone and has the characteristics it borrows from time: (a) it represents an extent, and (b) that extent is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line.
The next paragraph states how weighty the principle is.
Ce principe est évident, mais il semble qu’on ait toujours négligé de l’énoncer, sans doute parce qu’on l’a trouvé trop simple ; cependant il est fondamental et les conséquences en sont incalculables ; son importance est égale à celle de la première loi. Tout le mécanisme de la langue en dépend (voir p. 170). Par opposition aux signifiants visuels (signaux maritimes, etc.), qui peuvent offrir des complications simultanées sur plusieurs dimensions, les signifiants acoustiques ne disposent que de la ligne du temps ; leurs éléments se présentent l’un après l’autre ; ils forment une chaîne. Ce caractère apparaît immédiatement dès qu’on les représente par l’écriture et qu’on substitue la ligne spatiale des signes graphiques à la succession dans le temps.
ToL translation This principle is obvious, but it seems always to have been left unstated, no doubt because it was found too simple. Yet it is fundamental and its consequences are incalculable; its importance equals that of the first law (arbitrariness). The whole mechanism of language depends on it (see p. 170 of the original). In contrast to visual signifiers (maritime signals and the like), which can present simultaneous complications in several dimensions, auditory signifiers have only the line of time; their elements appear one after another; they form a chain. This character appears at once as soon as we represent them in writing and replace the succession in time with the spatial line of graphic signs.
Commentary 1: what is the “line of time”?
- Speech flows in time and vanishes. Say “tree” and the first sound comes before the last.
- Two sounds cannot be produced at the same moment in the same place. (Chords sung by several people are a different matter; the point concerns one speaker building a word.)
- So a sequence of sound-images is a one-dimensional line.
The contrast is with visual signifiers. A maritime flag signal can use colour, shape, and position at once; maps and charts use two dimensions. Spoken language cannot.
Commentary 2: writing makes it visible
The last sentence of the quotation notes what writing does. It converts temporal succession into a line on the page, left to right. That is why “language is a chain” can be checked by eye. (How writing relates to speech is taken up separately in Are writing and speech different things?.)
Commentary 3: accent is not an overlay
Saussure raises a possible counterexample himself. If I stress a syllable it seems I pile different meaningful elements on one point. He says that is an illusion: the syllable and its stress make a single act of phonation, with no duality inside it, only various oppositions with what lies beside it.
Japanese pitch accent shows this. In Tokyo speech, hashi “chopsticks” and hashi “bridge” differ in where high and low fall. The pitch is not a separate layer added to the sounds; it is a relation of height between neighbouring moras, fixed by comparison with what comes before and after.
Commentary 4: what the principle explains
“The whole mechanism depends on it” is a strong claim. Here are cases we can check.
1. Why word order exists. Because sounds line up, a language must decide in what order to put words. Japanese puts the predicate last and uses particles (ga, o, ni) to mark roles independent of position; that is why its word order looks relatively free.
2. Why ambiguity arises. A sound chain runs on without breaks, so where to cut it is left to the hearer. The famous example is kokode hakimono o nuide kudasai:
| Segmentation | Meaning |
|---|---|
| koko de / hakimono o / nuide kudasai | Please take off your footwear here |
| koko de wa / kimono o / nuide kudasai | Please take off your kimono here |
In writing, the characters settle it. In speech, hearers supply the breaks.
3. Earlier words constrain later ones. On hearing “Yesterday, he, at the station…” the hearer starts predicting the rest. The chain is processed from front to back.
Commentary 5: where it does not apply
The principle is stated for auditory signifiers, as the quotation says. What about the following?
- Sign languages. Handshape, location, movement, and facial expression can be used at once. (ToL’s note.) Several elements are expressed simultaneously in space, so Saussure’s principle cannot be applied as it stands. Saussure does not discuss sign languages in this passage, so the principle should be read as a feature of spoken language.
- Overlap within speech. Pitch, intonation, and sentence tone are realized together with the word chain. Saussure’s answer for accent, as above, is “oppositions within one phonatory act.”
Safest is to use the principle not as a universal law of all languages but as a tool for describing the constraints on signs in spoken language.
Summary
- The signifier of spoken language lines up in time; two cannot be produced at once.
- This property underlies word order and the ambiguity of sentence breaks, among much else.
- The next article reads, in the original, the two kinds of relation that work on this chain.
Next
- The relations on the chain: What is the difference between “side-by-side” and “brought-to-mind” relations?
- Previous: What are the signifier and the signified?