Semiotics, Semantics, and the Sentence

"The object of semiotics – the sign – is merely virtual. Only the sentence is actual as the very event of speaking. This is why there is no way of passing from the word as a lexical sign to the sentence by mere extension of the same methodology to a more complex entity. The sentence is not a larger or more complex word, it is a new entity. It may be decomposed into words, but the words are something other than short sentences. A sentence is a whole irreducible to the sum of its parts. It is made up of words, but it is not a derivative function of its words. A sentence is made up of signs, but is not itself a sign.

There is therefore no linear progression from the phoneme to the lexeme and then on to the sentence and to linguistic wholes larger than the sentence. Each stage requires new structures and a new description. The relation between the two kinds of entities may be expressed in the following way, following the French Sanskritist Emile Benveniste: language relies on the possibility of two kinds of operations, integration into larger wholes, and dissociation into constitutive parts. The sense proceeds from the first operation, the form from the second.

The distinction between two kinds of linguistics – semiotics and semantics – reflects this network of relations. Semiotics, the science of signs, is formal to the extent that it relies on the dissociation of language into its constitutive parts. Semantics, the science of the sentence, is immediately concerned with the concept of sense (which at this stage can be taken as synonymous with meaning, before the forthcoming distinction between sense and reference is introduced), to the extent that semantics is fundamentally defined by the integrative procedures of language" (Ricoeur 1976:7-8).

Ricoeur, Paul

1976 Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Forth Worth, TX: