Halliday describes how, for many years, writings on linguistic “behaviour” opened by criticizing linguists who limited themselves to the “code.” This limitation, he notes, had been “accepted as a fact of life,” even though it resulted from a specific historical phase in which code and behaviour were “rigorously held apart.” Only recently had the two…
Tag: Linguistics
Umberto Eco, Code and Message: Two Fundamental Notions
Umberto Eco recognizes in Roman Jakobson a central role in clarifying and disseminating the notions of code and message, extending them from the field of information theory to the whole of semiotics. The adoption of these categories made it possible to unify the analysis of linguistic and non-linguistic systems, providing a coherent methodological framework for describing the…
From Saussure to Structuralism: The Roots of Semiotic Thought
European structuralism finds its roots in the theoretical horizon opened by Ferdinand de Saussure. Yet, as Anne-Gaëlle Toutain and Ekaterina Velmezova observe, this origin is as much historical as it is problematic: “while such a conception corresponds to a historical reality, it nevertheless constitutes a theoretical and epistemological error.” The structuralists, they explain, misunderstood the content…


