General language

General language

Use this category for general terms related to languages.

Contributors in General language

General language

Tropes are rhetorical 'figures of speech' such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. Poststructuralist theorists such as Derrida, Lacan and Foucault have accorded considerable importance to ...

unarticulated codes

Language; General language

Codes without articulation consist of a series of signs bearing no direct relation to each other. These signs are not divisible into recurrent compositional elements.

universalism

Language; General language

Structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss argues that there is a universal mental structure based on certain fundamental binary oppositions. This structure is transformed into universal structural ...

univocality

Language; General language

In contrast to polyvocality, this is the use of a single voice as a narrative mode within a text. Univocal texts offer a preferred reading of what they represent.

unlimited semiosis

Language; General language

Whilst Saussure established the general principle that signs always relate to other signs, within his model the relationship between signifier and signified was stable and predictable.

valorization

Language; General language

Loosely, the term refers to the attribution of value, but it is also used more specifically to refer to its attribution to members of binary semantic oppositions, where one signifier and its ...

value

Language; General language

For Saussure language was a relational system of 'values'. He distinguished the value of a sign from its signification or referential meaning. A sign does not have an 'absolute' value in itself - ...