Derivation and the Lexicon
The Saussurean Sign
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), one of the first modern linguists, believed that language was a system of signs. He defined a linguistic sign as an arbitrary pairing between what he called the signifiant ‘signifier’, a particular sequence of sounds, and the signifié ‘signified’, the concept that is denoted by the sound sequence. These three terms, sign, signifier, and signified, are still standard in linguistics.
Saussure (1969) distinguished between motivated and unmotivated signs. A sign is motivated to the extent that by inspection you can get clues as to what it means. A walk signal at a crosswalk is an example of a motivated sign, because the stylized image of a person walking indicates whether you should or should not cross the street. A stop sign is partially motivated. The fact that it has eight sides is arbitrary, but its red color is not. In our culture, red is often associated with danger and a call to alertness. Red is also the color lit up on a traffic light when drivers are required to stop. The numeral 8 is an unmotivated sign. Nothing about its form represents the number eight.
Signs can lose their motivation: consider the name of the basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers. The team started out in Minneapolis, Minnesota – the land of a thousand lakes; so it made perfect sense to call it the Lakers. Once the team moved to LA, then Lakers made no sense at all, though they kept the name and some have tried to make something of it by reinterpreting the first two letters of Lakers as having something to do with Los Angeles.
Motivation is not all-or-nothing, and signs can be partially motivated. The name of the Ithaca Lakers of central New York, a local baseball team, is not a fully motivated sign. After all, when we hear the name the Lakers, we think first of basketball. But we don’t want to say that the name Ithaca Lakers is completely unmotivated, either, because it is obvious that this particular name was chosen because the Ithaca Lakers is a sports team and because Ithaca, like Minneapolis, is set in a region of lakes. Since people can still see the lake in Lakers, and even see it from the field where they play, on a good day, we say that Ithaca Lakers is a partially motivated sign.
