M.Gottdiener, 'Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life', (Blackwell, 1995). Chapter 1 considers Saussure's view of the sign as a "bifacial unity of signifier and signified", and that unity is "effected by culture.", and the discovery that language is "doubly articulated" in structure. Gottdiener explains this as:

That is, there were two distinct ways meaning was conveyed via structure. On the one hand, any utterance consists of a chain of words which unfolds over time or diachronically, according to the syntagmatic axis. Each of the words conveys the meaning of the sentence by existing within a context of other words. The set of rules governing the placement of words is known as syntax, and the meaning that emerges from the juxtaposition of each word in the sentence occurs metonomycally, which is another way of referring to the relations of the syntagmatic axis. The collection of words: boy, dog, the, the, fed, possesses meaning when we arrange them metonomycally, as "The boy fed the dog," for example, according to the socially prescribed rules of syntax.

In addition to the syntagmatic axis, each use of a word is an occasion to choose from a string of associated words. The presence of any given word, such as "boy", implies the existence of many absent words that could similarly have been deployed, such as "youth," "male," "tike" and so on. The absent but associated words are governed by the rules of semantics. Furthermore, because the meaning of words arises in part by contrast to what is absent as well as present, by what each word calls forth according to its associations, this axis is also know as the metaphorical dimension, or the synchronic aspect, i.e. it involves distinctions frozen in time.

ibid, pp 6 & 7.

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