The Sound-Image : Plato And Saussure

Philosophy of Language
1

One of the more exciting concepts in Saussure is the sound-image of a word. Why should the spoken word, which needs time for its expression, have a frozen image ?

Plato’s keyword ἰδέα (idea) may help us here.

The word idea comes from Greek ἰδέα, romanized: idea, ‘form, pattern’, from the root of ἰδεῖν idein, ‘to see’.[3]

I would like to use ἰδέα not to discuss the “meaning” of words —where it is also and more obviously relevant — but instead something “deeper” than that, which allows for a word to be a word.

Consider, for instance, the word “mother” in the context of spoken language ( remembering Saussure’s phonocentrism). Forget, for now, the meaning of this word. Consider instead its (oxymoronic) “sonic form.”

All the billions of the vocalizations of this word so far are plausibly unique. Mother has never been said in exactly the same way twice. Yet the word mother has been said in each case.

In his famous Course in General Linguistics, Saussure tells us that

[I]t is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to belong to language. It is only a secondary thing, substance to be put to use. A coin nominally worth five francs may contain less than half its worth of silver. Its value will vary according to the amount stamped upon it and according to its use inside or outside a political boundary. This is even more true of the linguistic signifier, which is not phonic but incorporeal —constituted not by its material substance but by the differences that separate its sound-image from all others.

Elsewhere:

The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses.

Finally:

Putting it another way, language is a form and not a substance (see p. 113). This truth could not be overstressed, for all the mistakes in our terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language, stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance.

I suggest that the sound-image as “form and not a substance” can be understood in terms of Plato’s ideas. Or, equivalently, Saussure’s sound-image is a promising way to understand Plato’s use of ἰδέα.

While Plato used ἰδέα in a more general way, is this special case if the sound-image helpful for understanding Plato’s emphasis more general on forms ?

2

For Saussure, the signifier is the sound-image. The sound I make to say “hello” causes a “psychological imprint” which is form rather that substance.

The signifier, being auditory, is unfolded solely in time from which it gets the following characteristics: (a) it represents a span, and (b) the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line.

The signifier, though an “image,” is auditory in some psychological or formal sense. It is “unfolded solely in time.” The signifier is idealized sound.

The signifier, the sound-image, is the ἰδέα that is instantiated in a teeming plurality of “material” vocalizations. Etymologically, the ἰδέα is optical rather than auditory. An image is static or timeless. Why does this matter ?

In this context, the ἰδέα effects the “penetration” of the timeless into time. Or rather the sound-image, as ἰδέα, is the timeless within time itself.

Let us consider, as a phenomenologist might, the ἰδέα or sound-image of a tune that can be played on many instruments at different times and places. Is any performance of this tune the tune itself ? No. But we only have a performance of the tune if the sound “participates” in its ἰδέα or sound-image.

What is this “participation” ? Is it something so fundamental that we can only try to point at it ?

I hope I’m establishing the relevance of Plato here. Some may be eager to dismiss Plato’s use of ἰδέα as otherworldly and “metaphysical” in a pejorative sense. But Saussure needs his own version of this Platonism to account for the saying of a word.

Note that we have not discussed the “meaning” or “value” of the word, the signified. We have only looked at the signifier, the “material” side of the sign. This “material” side turns out to be “form rather than substance.”

For instance, we speak of the identity of two “8:25 p.m. Geneva-to-Paris” trains that leave at twenty-four hour intervals. We feel that it is the same train each day, yet everything — the locomotive, coaches, personnel — is probably different. Or if a street is demolished, then rebuilt, we say that it is the same street even though in a material sense, perhaps nothing of the old one remains. Why can a street be completely rebuilt and still be the same? Because it does not constitute a purely material entity; it is based on certain conditions that are distinct from the materials that fit the conditions, e.g. its location with respect to other streets. Similarly, what makes the express is its hour of departure, its route, and in general every circumstance that sets it apart from other trains. Whenever the same conditions are fulfilled, the same entities are obtained. Still, the entities are not abstract since we cannot conceive of a street or train outside its material realization.
…
Let us contrast the preceding examples with the completely different case of a suit which has been stolen from me and which I find in the window of a second-hand store. Here we have a material entity that consists solely of the inert substance—the cloth, its lining, its trimmings, etc. Another suit would not be mine regard- less of its similarity to it. But linguistic identity is not that of the garment; it is that of the train and the street. Each time I say the word Gentlemen! I renew its substance; each utterance is a new phonic act and a new psychological act.

3

Does he though? Why can’t saying a word just be producing a new token (i.e. utterance in the sense of sound event) of it, the word itself just be the equivalence class of tokens, and the class just be the calling of any and all the tokens by the same word-name?

4

I can understand the reluctance to drag in Plato’s ἰδέα. It’s not really needed, but it makes Plato more interesting to me and fits in with an interpretation of his “unwritten doctrine.”

I would put equivalence class in a semantic/role equivalence class with ἰδέα. Or include equivalence class in the ἰδέα of ἰδέα. But now this takes beyond a focus on the sound-image. I do very much like to generalize the point made in this thread, but I thought it prudent to stick to a vivid example of the general phenomenon.

When you say the same word-name, what do you mean exactly ? As I understand the situation, we have to “instantiate” the word to try to point at the class.

In speech, I might say “the word mother.” Then I might say “the word mother is a pragmatic-role equivalence class of sounds.” This seems good, but then this “class” looks like a synonym of ἰδέα ( as I use it in this context).