“Before my teacher came to me,
I did not know that I am.
I lived in a world that was a no-world.
I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious,
yet conscious time of nothingness.
Since I had no power of thought,
I did not compare one mental state with another.”
Helen Keller
When I was a child maybe six, or seven years old, around 1960, started to wonder from where words acquired their meaning, it strike me that meaning had no relation to the word in question, and that by use, and habit words had the power to bring a mental image of the word in question, like if I said watermelon a compose word of two different elements= water + melon the fruit we associate with would appear in our minds, so soon I played with my father at deconstructing words, an using antonyms to bring a new word like earthmelon, firemelon, or aircucumber, dirtbanana, etc. My father was amused with the game and indulged me in my silliness, a sleeping bag would become a waking envelope, a horseshoe a donkeyhat, etc. Years before I ever heard of Jacques Derrida or he published his book, I played to deconstruct words.
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading.Heidegger’s term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word, and the history behind them.Derrida opted for deconstruction over the literal translation destruction to suggest precision rather than violence.
Ferdinand de Saussure a Swiss linguist now considered the father of twenty century Linguistics said:
“In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. […] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.”
semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically Semiotics is often divided into three branches:
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Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
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Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
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Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them
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No words.
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