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Language & Communication 32 (2012) 205–215

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Language & Communication

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

Aristotle, Saussure, Kress on speech and writing: Language as paradigm

for the semiotic?
Edward McDonald
School of International Studies, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, NSW, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Aristotle famously defined writing in a way that made it dependent on speech; and Saus-
Available online 21 June 2012 sure, in mapping out a place for language as part of a new field of ‘semiology’, has been
seen as continuing this so-called ‘logocentric’ bias in Western thinking about signs. Kress,
Keywords: by contrast, in defining a new field of ‘social’ semiotics, emphasizes the differing material-
Speech ity of speech and writing ‘as modes with related yet importantly distinct affordances’. This
Writing paper will use Saussure’s many-sided questioning of language, to show that Kress’s theo-
Language
retical and descriptive project within Social Semiotics still needs something like Saussure’s
Social Semiotics
Multimodality
model of linguistic meaning, and to suggest that a clearer theorization of language has
Affordances positive implications for our understanding of other semiotic modes.
! 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction: Moving away from language

Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men
have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly
symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. (Aristotle: On Interpretation,
trans. Cook 1938: 16a 3)
Aristotle famously defined writing in a way that made it dependent on speech; and Saussure, in mapping out a place for
language as part of what he envisaged as the new field of ‘semiology’ (1916), has been seen as continuing this so-called ‘logo-
centric’ bias (Derrida, 1967) in Western thinking about signs. Kress, from the very beginning of his work moving out from
language (Kress and Hodge, 1979), used Saussure and the traditions deriving from him as the ‘structuralist’ counter-example
to his new ‘social’ semiotics. As Kress has come to focus increasingly on multimodality, to the point where he now regards
Social Semiotics as one tradition within the broader area of multimodal analysis (Jewitt, 2009), Kress has claimed that this
‘focus on materiality’ marks a clear break from Saussurean semiotics (2009, p. 57):
The focus on materiality marks two decisive moves: one is away from abstractions such as ‘language’, ‘the linguistic sys-
tem’ or ‘grammar’, towards specificity, the materiality of modes, developed in social uses. The other is linking modes as
means for representation with the bodyliness of humans: through the physiology of sound and hearing, of sight and see-
ing, of touch and feeling, of taste and tasting, a recognition that humans make meaning through all these means and a
realization that these means of engaging with the world are linked and make meaning jointly. That brings the possibility
of recognizing meaning as embodied and provides a means of getting beyond separations in abstractions such as mind
and body, affect and cognition.

This as a general program sounds all very well. But a supposed need to move ‘away from abstractions’ surely does not
mean that the theorist is also released from the necessity of defining the actual mechanisms whereby meanings are made
in different modalities; nor can an appeal to ‘bodilyness’ or embodiment, a popular theme in recent scholarship across a

E-mail address: e.j.mcdonald@unsw.edu.au

0271-5309/$ - see front matter ! 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2012.04.007
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206 E. McDonald / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 205–215

range of disciplines (though perhaps more as a general invocation than a detailed research program – see critique in Ruthrof
(2000)), make up for specific accounts of how bodily affordances are employed for semiotic purposes. Furthermore, as I will
show below, scholars such as Kress working within Social Semiotics exhibit an unthinking reliance on the meanings pro-
vided by language in order to ground their interpretations of other modalities, without acknowledging that the symbolic
mode of language, whether operating by itself or in concert with other modalities in multimodal texts, itself needs to be
theorised, including its key feature of arbitrary or unmotivated meaning.
Kress, however, seems to assume an unproblematically natural relationship between the meanings we want to express
and the means through which we express them, thus marking out his own Social Semiotics as clearly distinct from a ‘Sau-
ssurian semiotics’ which placed great importance on the conventional nature of semiotic resources (Kress, 2010, pp. 64–65,
original emphasis):
[I]n Saussurian semiotics, if I want to be understood, I do so by learning the social rules of use of the semiotic resources
which those around me know and use. If I don’t know them, I’m in trouble. In Social Semiotics, if I want to be understood,
by preference I use the resources that those around me know and use to make the signs which I need to make. If I am not
familiar with those resources, I make signs in which the form strongly suggests the meaning I want to communicate.
Many of us have found ourselves in the latter situation and survived, using signs of gesture, of drawing, of pointing. Those
signs however have to be as transparent, as ‘iconic’ as I can possibly make them.

Such a formulation, as well as confusing the employment of semiotic systems with their description by the analyst, seems
to be recommending an almost improvisational approach to the use of signs which ignores the highly conventionalised nat-
ure of much semiosis, particularly that involving language. Kress, however, is highly critical of Saussure’s notion of ‘arbitrar-
iness’ as taking away agency from the ‘sign-maker’ (2010, p. 64, original emphasis):
The notion of arbitrariness goes directly against the notion of the sign-maker’s interest in the making of signs and meaning.
Arbitariness (in Saussure’s conception of it) and motivation each point to social principles: arbitrariness points to the
strength of social power as convention and motivation points to plausibility and transparency of the relations of form
and meaning in the sign. The apt relation of material form and cultural meaning is an expression of the sign-maker’s inter-
est in two ways: ‘matching’ form and meaning satisfies the sign-maker’s wish for an apt ‘realization’ of their meaning and
that, in turn, is needed crucially in communication as a guide for the recipient in their interpretation. Convention points to
social agreement and power in sign-use. Motivation points to the need for transparency as a means towards shared rec-
ognition in the relation of form and meaning in communication.

In an ideal semiotic world, individual ‘sign-makers’ might well be able to attain this degree of ‘transparency’ in satisfying
their ‘wish for an apt ‘realization’ of their meaning’, but a more ‘plausible’ analysis would surely have to recognise that indi-
viduals learn to operate within a large degree of conventionality. Furthermore, Kress sees Saussure as claiming a special sta-
tus for language among semiotic systems, a claim which went along with the ‘high era of abstraction’ in the social sciences in
which concepts like Saussure’s ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ were commonplace, as opposed to the ‘specific’, ‘material’ turn of a mul-
timodal Social Semiotics (Kress, 2010, p. 13, original emphasis):
Ferdinand de Saussure suggested, at the very beginning of the twentieth century, that Linguistics – in its theory and ter-
minology – as the then most advanced study of any semiotic system, might suffice to ‘furnish forth the wedding tables’ for
the semiotic feasts to come in the new century. This seemed a reasonable hope, given that that expectation was expressed
in the high era of abstraction in the Social Sciences: Linguistics and Semiotics included. In certain areas of the study of
language in particular, concepts such as ‘language’, ‘langue’, ‘parole’, ‘stood in’ for the tendency towards achieving a grasp
of the particular via very high degrees of abstraction. By entire contrast, the study of modes in multimodal social semiotics
focuses on the material, the specific, the making of signs now, in this environment for this occasion. In its focus on the
material it also focuses on the bodilyness of those who make and remake signs in constant semiotic (inter)action. It rep-
resents a move away from high abstraction to the specific, the material; from the mentalistic to the bodily.

This sense of reacting against the supposed imperialistic sway of language and linguistics also comes out in a recent col-
lection on multimodality edited by Jewitt (2009, p. 1) where Jewitt sees this field as moving out and away from language,
defining its ‘starting point’ as being ‘to extend the social representation of language and its meanings to the whole range of rep-
resentational and communicational modes or semiotic resources for making meaning that are employed in a culture – such
as image, writing, gesture, gaze, speech, posture’ (p. 1, emphasis added). While this stance from one point of view simply
reflects the historical background of much Social Semiotic work on multimodality in literacy studies (e.g. New London Group,
1996; Kress, 1997; Cope and Kalantzis, 2000), it does create the danger of other modalities being theorised as, in effect, dif-
ferent kinds of ‘languages’, rather than as modalities in their own right.

2. Language vis-à-vis other sign systems

So where did Saussure place language and the study of language within the human sciences? Not indeed in lofty isolation,
but as part of a new science of ‘signs as part of social life’ whose scope he set out in a seminal passage (1916/1957, p. 16,
original emphasis):
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E. McDonald / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 205–215 207

A science which studies the role of signs as part of social life is conceivable; it would be part of social psychology, and con-
sequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeion, ‘sign’). Semiology would show what
constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no-one can say for certain what it would
be; but it has a right to exist, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology;
the laws discovered by semiology will be laws applicable to linguistics, the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area
within the mass of anthropological facts.
When Saussure went on to explain why he saw language as having a special status within that field, he saw this status as
depending crucially on the ‘arbitrary nature’ of linguistic signs (1916/1957, p. 68):
[W]hen semiology becomes organized as a science, the question will arise whether or not it properly includes
modes of expression based on completely natural signs, such as pantomime. Supposing that the new science
welcomes them, its main concern will still be the whole group of systems grounded on the arbitrariness of the sign.
. . .Signs that are wholly arbitrary realize better than the others the ideal of the semiological process; that is why
language, the most complex and universal of all systems of expression, is also the most characteristic; in this sense
linguistics can become the master pattern for all branches of semiology although language is only one particular
semiological system.
As I read this, what Saussure is stressing here is the difficulty of accounting for language as a semiotic system: precisely
because of its high degree of arbitrariness, it presents the greatest challenge to a semiological account. Kress, however, is
highly critical of the whole notion of arbitrariness (2010, pp. 65–66, original emphasis):
Saussure’s mistaken assumption that the relation of signifier and signified is an arbitary one was, as is all theory, a
product and realization of the social conditions of his time. Here are three objections. First, arbitrariness takes no
account either of the patent facts of the histories (of change) of semiotic resources (see in this respect Raymond
Williams’s (1985) Keywords) nor of the facts of contemporary sign-making practice in every instance. Second it
rests on a confusion on Saussure’s part about the characteristics and the levels at which signifier and signified operate.
Third, it denies agency to those who make meaning in making signs: in wishing to buttress one pillar of his social
theory – the force of collective power; or the power of the collective – he ignored the source of that power, namely
the agency of individuals in their action collectively. For much the same reason – the wish for a plausible social theory
which does not negate the energy and significance of individual action – I stress the agency of socially formed indi-
viduals acting as sign-makers out of socially shaped interest with socially made resources in social interactions in
communities.
To accuse Saussure, the supreme historical linguist, of being unaware of ‘histories (of change)’, let alone taking the inven-
tor of synchronic linguistics to task for ignoring the ‘facts of contemporary sign-making’, seem more than a little paradoxical,
to say the least. Moreover, Kress seems to assume as unproblematic a transparent and highly motivated relationship be-
tween the forms of signs and their meanings, a relationship that ascribes the highest degree of agency to the individual
sign-makers, while seemingly ignoring the obvious fact, one which Saussure continuously grappled with, of the largely
unmotivated nature of linguistic signs.
Furthermore, even in the case of the seemingly most motivated kinds of signs such as icons, exactly how the icon signifies
is far from well understood, as pointed out by Machin (Machin, 2009, p. 183):
One of the major problems that has haunted traditional semiotic approaches from the start is the ‘icon’. At the root
of this problem is how much we can think of images as being like language or composed of abstract symbols that
are like words. . . .The problem is to do with whether the icon is a sign at all. And if they are not signs this raises
the problem of whether they work like language. Can we think of a photograph as a sign? Can we think of light
and dark in a photograph or movie still, a saturated colour on a design, thick or thin borders on a page layout in
the same way we think about words? All these things reference the real world rather than symbolising them in
the manner of words. For multimodality this has all sorts of implications for how we break down images into ele-
ments, think about them in terms of communicative functions, and to know at which level to place them into systems
of choices.
What is problematic with icons, which have a more or less motivated relationship to their referents, becomes even more
problematic with symbols, whose relationship to their referents is more or less wholly conventional; unless, of course, we
continue to hold, with Aristotle, that they are meaningful in relation to identical images of experience inside everyone’s
head. Saussure’s innovation was to replace this ‘commonsense’ view of linguistic meaning with a far less intuitive charac-
terization of language as not reflecting but rather constituting meaning through a mutual delimitation of concept and sound
(2002/2006, p. 60, original emphasis)
[E]xisting signs MECHANICALLY produce, by their simple presence and the accidental state of their DIFFERENCES at every
moment of the language, an equal number not of concepts, but of values understood to be mutually differentiated . . .This
contrasting of values, which is a PURELY NEGATIVE fact, becomes a positive fact, because as each sign forms an antithesis
with the sum of other comparable signs at a given time, progressing from general to specific categories, it quite indepen-
dently of us ends up delimited in its own value.
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208 E. McDonald / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 205–215

At the same time as apparently dismissing the notion of arbitrariness altogether, in his actual analyses Kress assumes an
understanding of the symbolic reference provided by language to underpin his interpretations, as shown in the following
discussion of the use of pitch in languages (2009, p. 56):
In tone-languages pitch is used – among other things – for lexical purposes: with the same syllabic (or multisyllabic)
form, difference in pitch – ‘tone’ – produces different words. In English, pitch-movement is used predominantly for gram-
matical purposes, for forming questions or statements, as well as for the expression of affect. In English, pitch is used for
lexical purposes too, but in a lesser way: try saying ‘yes’ to mean ‘are you really sure?’ or ‘maybe’ or to express sceptical
half-agreement. These variants use the same syllable – ‘yes’; in fact they are different words.
This analysis takes for granted an understanding of the linguistic meaning of the vocable yes, but does not explain how
this arbitrary combination of sounds gains this meaning: in other words, while depending on the symbolic reference pro-
vided by language – i.e. the meaning of yes – to ground his interpretation, Kress’s analysis renders this process of symbolic
reference itself entirely invisible.
David Machin identifies a similar paradox in many Social Semiotic analyses of the visual as involving ‘post hoc analy-
sis. . .[i]n other words we have an understanding of something and then construct our concepts round this’ (Machin,
2009, p. 188). Such a reliance on sources outside the semiotic text to interpret what is going on within the text stems, it
seems to me, from a failure to theorise explicitly how meaning is created in a particular modality. If there is no explicit link
theorised between contextual meanings and textual patterning, then the only thing analysts have to fall back on are their
own interpretative skills. On the one hand, this leads to the phenomenon dubbed by feminist scholar Donna Haraway
‘the God trick’, referring to that analytical sleight of hand whereby ‘the analyst poses as if in possession of an omniscient
vantage point from which to know the social world’ (quoted in DeNora (2000, p. 3)). On the other, it leads to language
willy-nilly being taken as the paradigm for other sign systems, since concepts originally developed for the analysis of lan-
guage are simply ‘transferred’ to the description of other modalities.

3. A science of signs as part of social life

In trying to resolve these contradictions, Saussure’s many-sided questioning of this thing we call language is still, it seems
to me, our best guide. This is particularly the case if we acknowledge that Saussure as a theorist was far more concerned to
raise the right questions than to come up with the right answers, something already pointed out by Bühler many years ago
(1934/1990, pp. 7–8):
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics is anything but an account of results. Instead, the Course reflects
throughout, and excitingly, the methodological scepticism of a researcher who knows his craft and its results just as well
as any other does, but cannot refrain from carrying out his own version of the purifying test of Descartes’s Meditations on
the linguists’ findings. His lectures, which were posthumously rounded out to form a book, must have been guided tours
through the working drafts of a creative mind of great stature, one still struggling with the problems. I am convinced that
we are only at the beginning of the historical influence of Saussure’s work, of his sketches on the topic of language theory.
Kress himself, in an earlier work, acknowledges this very dialogic and unfinished nature of Saussure’s ideas as they were
interpreted for most of the twentieth century (1985, p. 86):
Saussure’s text is constructed precisely out of and in the difference between contradictory discourses: the romantic nine-
teenth-century discourses of freedom, change and of the social (in this case language) as a species of the natural, and the
discourses (embodied in this case in the writings, for instance, of Durkheim) of the rule-governed system, of the social as
subject to its own laws, and of the individual as subject to the social. The fact that one reading proved predominant is
explained in my account by the predominance of the latter set of discourses at the time when Saussure’s lectures
appeared as a written objectified text. What seems to have been very much a live dialogue for Saussure himself became
for his readers a settled undimensional text.
In his more recent work, however, Kress seems to have reacted against what he sees as the rigidity of such interpretations
of Saussure by going to the other extreme, failing to accord much if any role to the collective, and privileging individual
agency to an extent that flies in the face of accepted understandings of human semiosis.
So what challenges does Saussure still present for a multi-modal Social Semiotics – for, in his own words, a ‘science which
studies the role of signs as part of social life’? The first challenge derives from a problem Saussure never ceased to grapple
with, that of accounting for the lack of a ‘natural relationship’ between sound and meaning in language (2002/2006, p. 147,
original emphasis):
[O]ther institutions are to various degrees all based on NATURAL relationships. . .. For instance, a nation’s laws, or political
system, or even fashion, even its whimsical sartorial fashions, which can never ignore the given [proportions] of the
human body. It follows that all changes, all innovations. . .are always dependent on the basic principle in force in this very
area, which is to be found in the very depths of the human soul. But language and writing are NOT BASED on a natural
relationship between things. There is never in any way a link between a certain sibilant sound and the shape of the letter
S, and similarly it is no harder for the word vache than the word vacca to refer to a cow.
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E. McDonald / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 205–215 209

From this it follows that the basic reality of language consisting not of elements but of relationships (2002/2006, p. 188,
original emphasis):
In linguistic phenomena, element and character are always the same thing. A characteristic of language, and of any semio-
logical system, is that it does not allow any difference between what distinguishes something and what constitutes it
(because the ‘things’ in question are signs, which have no other aim, essence, than to be distinct). Any linguistic fact con-
sists of a relationship, and nothing but a relationship.
One of the earliest major scholars to pick up on this emphasis on relationships rather than elements or components was
Hjelmslev, who saw this new conception as subsuming the traditional one (Hjelmslev, 1953/1961, p. 22):
[T]he important thing is not the division of an object into parts, but the conduct of the analysis so that it conforms to the
mutual dependences between those parts, and permits us to give an adequate account of them. . .. [B]oth the object under
examination and its parts have existence only by virtue of these dependences; the whole of the object under examination
can be defined only by their sum total; and each of its parts can be defined only by the dependences joining it to other
coordinated parts, to the whole, and to its parts of the next degree, and by the sum of the dependences that these parts of
the next degree contract with each other. After we have recognized this, the ‘‘objects’’ of naïve realism are, from our point
of view, nothing but intersections of bundles of such dependences. That is to say, objects can be described only with their
help and can be defined and grasped scientifically only in this way. The dependences, which naïve realism regards as sec-
ondary, presupposing the objects, become from this point of view primary, presupposed by their intersections.
A relational point of view poses a much greater challenge to the analyst to identify the networks of internal contrasts
through which a semiotic system makes meaning without seeking direct correlates for these contrasts in the world beyond
the text. This does not mean, a supposed deficiency for which Saussure has been roundly criticised (e.g. Ogden and Richards,
1923), that semiotic systems operate in isolation from their material and social contexts, but rather that, as Saussure points
out (2002/2006, p. 154), the fact that ‘the sign can only begin to be truly known when it is understood that it is something not
only transmissible, but intrinsically designed to be transmitted’ means that one of the prime tasks of the analyst is to reveal the
internal logic of the system, a logic which in the case of language depends crucially for its power on the fact that there is no
motivated relationship between its expressions and their interpretations (see further discussion on this point below).
The second challenge derives from the fact that Saussure was concerned in the first instance to lay the theoretical foun-
dations within semiology of a new kind of linguistics: in other words, he set himself the task of mapping out a new frame-
work for a general linguistics, not for a general semiology. Saussure does not, therefore, provide much explicit guidance for
those working on other semiotic systems; though one suspects he would have been less eager than many theorists working
within Social Semiotics to simply transfer the insights of linguistics across semiotic boundaries. As Machin notes in relation
to the ‘explosion’ in multimodal studies in recent years (2009, pp. 181–182):
In linguistics one justification for the need for become multimodal in our analysis is that communication itself has
become more multimodal (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001) leading to the demise of the authority of the written text. A
purely linguistic, or monomodal, analysis will, therefore, miss much of how texts create meaning. But if we are indeed
staring at the end of the domination of monomodal linguistic communication should we then be using models that were
designed to study language to think about everything else? Would this new state of affairs not suggest rather that lin-
guists should be looking outside of their own theoretical models rather than simply exporting their own? For several
thousand years there has been debate about the nature of images, how they represent, and what they have in common
with language, through Plato, Freud, Foucault, Goodman, and Habermas, not to mention a century of work in semiotics
since Charles Sanders Pierce. Should linguists not first consider this work and the problems that it has encountered, espe-
cially if these ideas have also frequently dealt with visual communication in terms of its similarity to, or difference from,
language?
Machin provides a roll call of thinkers whose contribution is crucial for understanding how to theorise non-linguistic
semiotic modes such as images. But even if, moving on from Saussure’s work, we concentrate on placing language within
a broader typology of semiotic systems, there are further issues which he only touched upon, or did not treat at all, that
are crucial for theorising the materiality and sociality of language in a way that puts it on a par with other semiotic systems.

4. The materiality of language

The first has to do with whether the material expression plane of language has any necessary relation to its interpretation
plane. In this regard, Saussure approvingly quotes an earlier contemporary who answered this question in the negative
(2002/2006, p. 150, original emphasis):
In one of the last chapters of Life and Growth of Language Whitney says that people have used voice to give signs to their
ideas, just as they might have used gesture or anything else, because they found it easier to use the voice. In our opinion,
these two lines, which seem a huge paradox, [represent] the most accurate philosophical idea about language yet, but
furthermore, our day-to-day experience of objects that we analyse would benefit greatly from this notion. This is because
it establishes the fact that language is merely one case of the sign among others and may not be judged independently.
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210 E. McDonald / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 205–215

To some extent, this may seem simply to be a restatement of the claim put forward by Bacon, citing Aristotle, over four
centuries ago (1605, Book ii, original emphasis):
For the organ of tradition, it is either speech or writing: for Aristotle saith well, WORDS ARE THE IMAGES OF COGITA-
TIONS, AND LETTERS ARE THE IMAGES OF WORDS; but yet it is not of necessity that cogitations be expressed by the med-
ium of words. FOR WHATSOEVER IS CAPABLE OF SUFFICIENT DIFFERENCES, AND THOSE PERCEPTIBLE BY THE SENSE, IS IN
NATURE COMPETENT TO EXPRESS COGITATIONS. And therefore we see in the commerce of barbarous people, that under-
stand not one another’s language, and in the practice of divers that are dumb and deaf, that men’s minds are expressed in
gestures, though not exactly, yet to serve the turn. And we understand further, that it is the use of China, and the king-
doms of the high Levant, to write in characters real, which express neither letters nor words in gross, but things or
notions; insomuch as countries and provinces, which understand not one another’s language, can nevertheless read
one another’s writings, because the characters are accepted more generally than the languages do extend; and therefore
they have a vast multitude of characters, as many, I suppose, as radical words.
The obvious difference here is that Saussure’s model expressly denies the existence of cogitations separate from their spe-
cific means of expression, which would seem to imply that there is some necessary relationship between the sounds of which
words are made up and the concepts which they express.
We may begin to broach this complex question by taking up the two examples cited by Bacon of means of expression
which do not depend on sound: what would now be called sign languages, and Chinese characters. In both cases, we need
to distinguish (a) the origin of signs in (more or less motivated) iconic or indexical expressions from (b) their functioning as
(more or less unmotivated or ‘arbitrary’) symbols in a semiotic system. The role of gesture in sign languages may seem to
provide an ‘iconic’, ‘natural’ mode of expression similar to what has been claimed for Chinese characters. In fact, gesture
in signed languages has been shown to play exactly the same role as sound in spoken languages: although many ‘signs’
are clearly iconic or indexical in origin, as elements of a sign language they have exactly the same symbolic function as
sounds in spoken languages (Johnston and Schembri, 2007, pp. 22–26).
The case of Chinese characters may seem to present an iconic system of representation that is not directly linked to, or
dependent on, speech – as hailed by one sinologist: ‘something unique among the literary languages of the world, a system
by which ideas are presented directly to the mind by visual images, with little assistance from the phonetic principle’ (Creel,
1936, p. 105). More than one sinologist since (e.g. Ames and Rosemont, 1999, pp. 289–290) have joined Creel in arguing that
Chinese characters do not in fact represent ‘speech’, in the sense of spoken language, but some more abstract form of ‘lan-
guage’, one mediated through images rather than sound. Such arguments depend on, as a critic of Creel’s has observed, the
‘basic assumption that a Chinese graph is a more or less eternal symbol for an idea, from which it follows that the most useful
information about it is given through an analysis of its technique of ideal representation’ (Kennedy, 1953, p. 490). Unfortu-
nately for such claims, any sustained examination of Chinese characters as part of a writing system, as opposed to ‘Just So
Stories’ about the composition of individual characters (McDonald, 2009), shows that the character script represents units
of the (spoken) language. Generally speaking in the Chinese writing system, each Chinese character represents a syllable,
which in most cases is at the same time a morpheme. This syllabic-morphemic nature of the script shows up very clearly
when Chinese characters have been borrowed for other languages: such as in Japanese, where simplified forms of certain
characters developed into the individual symbols of the kana syllabaries; or for the traditional Vietnamese system known
as Chu Nom where specially devised indigenous characters were used to represent native Vietnamese syllabic-morphemes.
Nevertheless such examples do raise the issue of what is the influence of the expression plane of languages, whether spo-
ken or signed, on their interpretation plane; and what exactly it is that remains constant when the expression plane is ‘trans-
posed’ from a sonic/aural one to a graphic/visual one, as in the transfer between spoken and written language. Kress, for one,
would draw the boundary between the two very sharply, claiming that (2009, p. 56)
the differences between speech and writing may be as or more significant than the similarities. This makes it surprising
that speech and writing are subsumed under one label, ‘language’. From a social semiotic perspective, the shared label
obscures their distinctness as modes with related yet importantly distinct affordances. . ..
However, when it comes to characterizing their similarities, his description is more gnomic than enlightening (2006, p.
56):
In alphabetic cultures, speech and writing share – even though in significantly different ways – features of syntax and
lexis; with that go the distinctly different material potentials for meaning of sound and of graphic ‘stuff’, both also socially
shaped.
Kress’s vague formulation that spoken and written language ‘share. . . features of syntax and lexis’ begs the question of
how such features are shared. By rendering invisible the symbolic reference of language, at the same time as depending
on it to ground his interpretations, Kress effectively takes the naïve philosophical stance criticized by Saussure as ‘nomen-
claturist’ (1916/1957, p. 50) by assuming the existence of pre-existing ideas to which spoken words or written graphs may
be attached. The radical implication of Saussure’s alternative position, something he characterised as the ‘Dual Nature of Lan-
guage’ to use the title of his recently discovered manuscript (included in Saussure (2002/2006)), is that there are in fact no
pre-existing ideas to which words, or graphs, may attach themselves: there are only sounds and concepts mutually delimited
into meanings. In Saussure’s terms, then, what is shared by both written and spoken forms of a language is precisely the
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E. McDonald / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 205–215 211

same langue, to repeat part of an earlier quotation ‘an equal number not of concepts, but of values understood to be mutually
differentiated’ (2002/2006, p. 60, original emphasis). The written form of a language corresponds to a spoken language, not in
the sense that it is a ‘transcription’ of spoken discourse, but in that it shares the same linguistic system, that is, the same
network of mutually differentiated sounds and meanings. The fact that in written language, these sounds are, as it were,
‘translated’ into graphic form does not negate their essential differentiating function with respect to the meanings of a
language.

5. Sound as a semiotic medium

Such a formulation, however, still leaves unanswered the question of the nature of sound as a semiotic medium. Linguists,
from Saussure onwards, have shown little interest in the question of ‘why sound’, and if they are only concerned with lan-
guage, there is perhaps no obvious reason why they should. We have to look to musicology for guidance here: specifically to
those scholars seeking to characterize the use of sound in music, who tend to do so in explicit contrast with language, since
for both systems the paradigmatic means of expression is the human voice. One of the most penetrating thinkers in this area,
Burrows, in his Sound, Speech, Music sees the contribution of sound as essential and determining (1990, p. 9):
Chief vehicle of thought is speech, and of speech, sound, and I will argue that sound is far more to speech than a passive
conveyance. I suggest rather that human thought has evolved its expansiveness and freedom in large part through
exploiting the unique capacity of vocal sound for rapidity of articulation in detachment from the world of enduring spatial
objects.

Burrows explains how the physiological characteristics of vocal sound become semioticized in a way that provides the
individual with a strategically advantageous ‘sonic mining of its situation in the world’ (1990, p. 30):
Vocalization may be thought of as a freely manipulable representation and advertisement of the life that underlies it. . .. In
the most blandly literal sense, the voice is expression, a pressing outward past the partially yielding obstacle of the vocal
folds. The dialogue between diaphragm and larynx can be thought of as a symbolic displacement to the body’s interior of
the interface between self and world, a displacement that has a strategic advantage over its original because, in this
wholly embodied form, outside and inside are both inside where the self gets to play both sides of the game. . .. The resul-
tant signal, the sound of the voice, can be read as the self’s sonic miming of its situation in the world.

Burrows then goes on to identify the specifically semiotic ‘power’ of vocal sound in economically representing objects, in
contrast to the iconic visual mode (1990, pp. 51–52):
The loss of one kind of power, the kind inherent in the resemblance of a token to its referent, is more than made up for by
gains that are also attributable to detachment from appearances: nonlikenesses are both more generalizable and more
freely combinable in novel configurations than are likenesses, and speech exploits both possibilities in reaching for a
new kind of power. Precisely because the sounds produced by the voice have no spatial characteristics of their own, they
can, if we choose, stand for anything in space, or for any place, or for everywhere or nowhere. . . .Breaking with the look
and the heft of things is a necessity in vocal communication, and on a massive scale we have made a virtue of it by cap-
italizing on a whole new range of manipulative possibilities that it opens up.

It is at this point that Burrows’ thesis intersects with Saussure’s description of the limits of langue or the ‘language sys-
tem’, limits which are at the same time the ‘source of its power’ (2002/2006, pp. 50–51):
[I]t hardly needs pointing out that the differences between terms making up a language system in no way correspond,
even in the most perfect language, to the relationship between things. . . .[T]he impression left by a material object will
never be sufficient to create a linguistic category. There are thus only ever negative terms, in each of which an object in
imperfectly housed; by the same token, the object will be parcelled out into several terms. Complaining about the inac-
curacy of language, however, suggests ignorance of the source of its power. It is quite impossible to prevent a single, spe-
cific thing being variously referred to as a house, a construction, a building, a structure (a monument), a block, a dwelling, a
residence. . . The existence of material facts, then, like the existence of facts of another order, has no bearing on langue.
Langue is ever on the move, pressed forward by its imposing machinery of negative categorization, wholly free of mate-
riality, and thus perfectly prepared to assimilate any idea that may join those that have preceded it.

Burrows’ arguments could, it seems to be, easily be transposed mutatis mutandis to the case of sign languages, since the
manipulatory and combinatory potential of expressions produced by the hands and the face in signed languages approaches
if not equals those produced by the tongue and lips in spoken languages, an analogy that is especially compelling in view of
the known evolutionary link between the development of manual dexterity in the human species and the development of
language (Arbib, 2002). Both media allow for a large repertoire of distinct expressions that at the same time are easily com-
bined to compose complex messages. Both media, when utilised semiotically, also exhibit the characteristic feature which
has variously been named ‘structural order’ (Tesniere, 1959, p. 16), or ‘structure in depth’ (Hockett, 1987: 16), in other words,
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212 E. McDonald / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 205–215

that we can recognize (layers of) relationships between meaningful elements that are not simply a function of their relative
sequence. Jakobson saw such features as characteristic of both language and music as sonic semiotic systems (1967/1971, p.
341):
[B]oth music and language present a consistently hierarchized structure, and. . .musical as well as verbal signs are resolv-
able into ultimate, discrete, rigorously patterned components which, as such, have no existence in nature but are built ad
hoc.
These hierarchical relationships between linguistic units – reflected in folk linguistic notions of syllables forming words
which form phrases which in turn form sentences – are commonly understood in terms of Saussure’s distinction of associa-
tive – now more commonly called paradigmatic – relationships of substitution from syntagmatic relationships of combination
(1916/1959, p. 123), and Firth’s distinction of colligation between grammatical categories from collocation between lexical
items (1956/1968, pp. 179–181).

6. The sociality of language

It is when we acknowledge this high order of complexity that we ‘read into’ the acoustic signal which is the physical man-
ifestation of language that Saussure’s insistence on both sides of the linguistic sign – the sound image or signifier and the
concept or signified – being conceptualized as psychological entities becomes comprehensible. At the same time, as suggested
by his definition of the broader field of semiology in which he envisages linguistics taking its place as the ‘study of signs as
part of social life’, this fundamentally psychological nature of the linguistic sign is part of a linguistic system whose function-
ing is inextricably social (2002/2006, p. 120, original emphasis):
Language is always being considered within the human individual, a false viewpoint. Nature gives us man ready made for
articulated language, but not actually in possession of it. The language system is a social fact. The individual, organized with a
view to speaking, may only use the vocal apparatus in the context of his community – moreover, the individual only feels
the need to use it when interacting with that community.
Nor is it justified to accuse Saussure of being unaware of discourse, or of unduly privileging the abstract system over the
concrete manifestations of that system (2002/2006, p. 197, original emphasis):
Langue is created only with a view to discourse; but what separates discourse from the language system, and what allows
us to say that a language system enters into action as discourse at any given moment[?]. . . What is needed in order for us to
get the idea that someone wants to signify something by using the terms that are available in a language system? This is
the same question as asking what is discourse, and at first sight the answer is simple: discourse consists, even if only in a
rudimentary way, and in ways of which we are unaware, of confirming a link between two of the concepts that appear
cloaked in a linguistic form, while the language system at first consists only of isolated concepts that are waiting to be put
into relation with each other so that meaningful thought may be expressed.
He elaborates further on this point, emphasizing both the temporal priority of discourse and the semiotic primacy of the
‘internal store’ that is langue (2002/2006, p. 81):
The ‘educational’ fact that we may learn sentences before knowing words is of no real consequence. It is like observing
that langue first enters into our internal store via discourse; this is something we have said, and which is indisputable. But
just as the sound of a word, something which also entered our mind this way, becomes an impression which is wholly
independent of discourse, so our mind continually abstracts from discourse what is necessary so that the word alone
remains. The way the word came to be fixed is unimportant, once the operation is completed, as long as we accept that
it is the dominant unit.
It is true that Saussure’s insistence on langue, the language system, as the fundamental principle of classification in lin-
guistics may be understood as taking away agency from the speaking subject (2002/2006, p. 64):
All modifications, be they phonetic or grammatical (analogical) occur exclusively within discourse. At no time do
individuals revise their inner mental store of langue, and detachedly create new forms. . .with the intention. . .of ‘insert-
ing’ them into future discourse. All innovation comes about through improvisation, when someone speaks, and from
there enters either into the inner store of the listener or the speaker, being thus produced in relation to discursive
language.
However, it is clear from this account that Saussure does recognize individual agency, at least in the ‘improvisation’ of
new forms, but that these must be socially accepted among speakers in order to function as part of the linguistic system.
From one point of view, this is simply acknowledging the fact that language use depends on a more or less agreed set of con-
ventions which cannot be wilfully modified by individual speakers without risking a breakdown in communication. But from
another point of view, it stresses the ineradicably social nature of language (2002/2006, p. 64):
[L]angue flows between people, it is social. If I ignore this condition, if for instance I sit down at my desk to make up a
language, nothing that I shall say about language will be true, or necessarily true.
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E. McDonald / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 205–215 213

7. Towards an inclusive semiology

If we now move forward from the picture provided by Saussure for the study of language, what might an inclusive but not
linguistically-biased semiology look like? Saussure provides some useful pointers here (2002/2006, p. 54, original emphasis):

1. Language is merely a specific case of the theory of signs. But this very fact alone totally prevents it from being something
simple (or something whose nature the mind can grasp directly), even though in fact, within the general theory of signs
the specific case of vocal signs might not be incalculably more complex than all the specific known cases, such as writing,
numerals etc.
2. The crucial response of the study of language concerning the theory of signs, and the eternally new horizon it will open
up. . ., will be to impart to that theory a whole new aspect of the sign, the fact that the sign can only begin to be truly known
then it is understood that it is something not only transmissible, but intrinsically designed to be transmitted.

One interesting trajectory in this regard is that sketched out by Ruthrof in his Semantics and the Body, putting forward an
‘intersemiotic’ interpretation of the key concept of meaning, building particularly on the work of Peirce, which attempts to
put all semiotic behaviour, including the linguistic, on a equal footing (Ruthrof, 1997, p. 24):
From this perspective, meaning is regarded as a virtual event in which at least two, and normally several, sign systems are
associated with one another, such that visual, tactile, haptic, and other non-verbal signs are engaged in the activation of
linguistic expressions. Non-linguistic meaning is likewise conceived in this way. This requires a redescription of percep-
tion in significatory terms. . . .Reference. . .is regarded as a specific link between sign systems, rather than as a relation
between two incompatible domains: the signs of language, and a non-semiotic external world. In this way, the world
as we know it is significatory, rather than a physicalistically given.

Ruthrof goes onto argue for a conception of meaning based on acts, rather than the ‘objects or states of affairs in the world’
of traditional semantics, acts which moreover are meaningful in a certain community, a model he indeed later dubs a kind of
‘social semiotics’ (p. 36), whose ‘axiomatic assumptions’ he sketches out as follows (Ruthrof, 1997, p. 33, original emphasis):
Suppose meaning is not in any way a feature of language but a broader feature of social doing, of which language is a part.
Let us say that social doing of any kind is regarded as either meaningful or meaningless by a community. . . .A community
knows its world because its members have imposed and continue to impose a significatory matrix on whatever there is.
. . .[M]eaning is the realization by a community of the relation between different sign systems. Members of the commu-
nity are defined primarily by their ability to negotiate such relations according to the community’s recipes for interpre-
tation. . . .[R]eality is the result of the corroboration of one sign system by at least one other sign system.

Ruthrof’s insistence here on meaning-making as taking place in communities, as well as what we might call his semiotic
democratism – in contrast to what he dubs the ‘linguistic imperialism’ (1997, p. 186, 2000, p. 22) characteristic not only of
most theories of semantics, but I would argue, of many multimodal approaches – are both useful emphases to maintain.
A complementary approach is taken by Norris in the context of multimodal interactional analysis with her identification
of the fundamental unit of analysis as being the mediated action (2005, p. 13, original emphasis):
In multimodal interactional analysis, the mediated action is the unit of analysis, and since every action is mediated, I will
simply speak of action as the unit of analysis. . .. This use of action as a unit of analysis may seem confusing at first sight.
However, let us think about the specific example of a meeting among three friends – to illustrate the usefulness of this
unit of analysis. The meeting is taken to be a higher-level action. This higher-level action is bracketed by an opening and a
closing of the meeting and is made up of a multiplicity of chained lower-level actions. All intonation units that an indi-
vidual strings together become a chain of lower-level actions. All gesture units that an individual performs become a
chain of lower-level actions. All postural shifts that an individual completes become a chain of lower-level actions. All
gaze shifts that an individual performs become a chain of lower-level actions, and so on. Consequently, all higher-level
actions are made up of multiple chains of lower-level actions.

In this approach, language is simply one communicative mode among many (2005, p. 2):
Previously, language has been viewed as constituting the central channel in interaction, and nonverbal channels have
been viewed as being subordinate to it. While much valuable work on the interplay between the verbal and the nonverbal
has been established, I believe that the view which unquestionably positions language at the center limits our under-
standing of the complexities of interaction. Therefore I will step away from the notion that language always plays the
central role in interaction, without denying that it often does. Language. . .is only one mode among many, which may
or may not take a central role at any given moment in an interaction. In this view, gesture, gaze, and head movement
may be subordinated to the verbal exchanges going on as has been shown in much research. However, gesture, gaze,
and head movement may also take the superior position in a given interaction, while language may be subordinated
or absent altogether.

Or more pithily (2007), ‘Sometimes we use language, but always we communicate’.

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214 E. McDonald / Language & Communication 32 (2012) 205–215

Nevertheless, an emphasis on the material affordances of the expression plane cannot replace a detailed understanding of
the means by which meanings are distinguished on the interpretation plane, a challenge Kress seems to gloss over (2009, p.
55, original emphasis):
Alphabetic writing is a border category in this respect: it is spatially displayed, yet it ‘leans on’ speech in its logic of
sequence in time, which is ‘mimicked’ in writing by the spatial sequence of elements on the line on which writing is dis-
played. . .. However, while the relations of elements of an image can usually be ‘read’ in an order shaped by the interest of
the ‘viewer’, the reading of writing is governed by linearity and directionality – left to right or right to left – and by the
ordering of syntax. Unlike image, writing is not, dominantly and finally, organized by the logic of space; as readers we
are bound by the orderings of syntax and the directionality of the line. In alphabetic cultures, speech and writing share
– even though in significantly different ways – features of syntax and lexis; with that go the distinctly different material
potentials for meaning of sound and of graphic ‘stuff’, both also socially shaped.

A full semiotic account of written language needs to take account not only of ‘the directionality of the line’ but also of ‘the
ordering of syntax’, understanding the latter as a multi-dimensional kind of patterning that goes beyond, though it never
escapes from, the linearity of the linguistic sequence (Tesnière, 1959, pp. 16–18). Again, the implied contrast with Chinese
writing here is misplaced: whether in the traditional convention of vertical lines of characters read from top to bottom, right
to left, or the modern Western-influenced convention of reading horizontally from left to right, Chinese writing obeys the
same directionality as the written form of any other language.
So to finish up by attempting to answer the question posed by the title of this paper: in what sense, if any, may we mean-
ingfully regard language as being ‘paradigm for the semiotic’? To repeat the careful formulation of Saussure already quoted
above (2006, p. 54):
Language is merely a specific case of the theory of signs. But this very fact alone totally prevents it from being something
simple (or something whose nature the mind can grasp directly), even though in fact, within the general theory of signs
the specific case of vocal signs might not be incalculably more complex than all the specific known cases, such as writing,
numerals etc.

Saussure, unlike many linguists and semioticians since (e.g. Barthes, 1964/1968), shows himself agnostic on the question
of whether language actually is ‘incalculably more complex’ than other systems. However, to repeat a point made earlier,
although we cannot fault Saussure, the linguist, for being primarily concerned with language, from the point of view of a
general semiology, it is the very difficulty of accounting for the largely symbolic, unmotivated nature of linguistic signs that
makes a clear understanding of linguistic meaning very hard to attain. At the same time, whether or not we regard language
as functioning as the (potential) interpreter of all other semiotic systems, it is undeniable that it tends to be used that way by
many semioticians, especially Social Semioticians, very often in the same breath as denying that language has any special
status.
A refocusing on communication as multimodal may well be being forced on us by developments in communicative tech-
nologies, as Machin suggests, but it also represents a long overdue recognition of the importance of embodied semiotics in
much human interaction, as Ruthrof shows. However, the bodily cannot be taken as an unquestioned positive whose mean-
ings are ‘natural’ and therefore open to easy explanation: its semiotic affordances as employed in systems as diverse as gaze,
movement, gesture – not to mention speech and singing – still need to be theorised so that the particular network of neg-
ative distinctions created in each case may be understood (Thibault (2004) represents an interesting step in this direction).
Much multimodal work in the Social Semiotic tradition seems curiously visually-biased, and at the same time largely
unproblematically ‘analogising’ concepts from linguistics for the analysis of other semiotic systems, without seemingly feel
much need, as Machin notes, to engage with existing scholarship in those areas. If multimodal studies is to be anything more
than simply a new field for linguists or ex-linguists to play in, it will need to face up to the challenges of theorising all semi-
otic systems on their own terms, as well as in interaction with each other, within a overall field for which Saussure’s recom-
mendation for a ‘study of the role of signs as part of social life’ still provides the best pointer.

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Edward McDonald is senior lecturer in the School of International Studies at the University of New South Wales, and has taught Chinese language, music,
linguistics, and semiotics at universities in Singapore, China, and New Zealand. His research interests lie in the areas of embodied performative semiotic
systems – in particular language and music, multimodality and systemic functional theory, translation and cross-cultural communication, Chinese grammar
and discourse, ideologies of language, and the history of linguistics. His most recent publication is Learning Chinese, Turning Chinese: challenges to
becoming sinophone in a globalized world (Routledge, 2011).