An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

that language involves images and concepts, so long as we bear in mind that the
images and concepts are mediated by words.
b Linguists use other terms to describe this dual character ot double articulation of
language besides signifiant/signifié and semiotic entities/semantic entities. Louis
Hjelmslev formulated the difference as involving expression and content. 3 Other
relevant paired correlates include sense versus reference and (intra-linguistic)
system versus (extralinguistic) referent. No matter how the two aspects of
language are viewed, Saussure’s [Page 46] insight that there are two aspects is
basic. Similarly basic is his observation that the relationship of the two aspects is
largely arbitrary: 4 there is nothing about the substance honey which leads to its
being called שׁבד or honey or (in French) miel or (in Chinese) mi-t’ang. In fact,
Saussure believed that the tie between signifier and signified was entirely
arbitrary, but this view is probably too extreme. 5
3.2.2 Grammar and Words
a Language can be analyzed into the broad categories of words (lexis) and their
relations (grammar). Grammar involves the closed set of determined systems
realized by intra-linguistic signs, the code; words are often signs pointing to extralinguistic
reality. A language’s code, or grammar, consists of at least three
systems: sounds, forms, and syntagms (i.e., relationships of words to one another
in the flow of utterance). The set of words, in contrast, is not “closed” but “open,”
though not infinite. New words may be coined, and new meanings emerge,
according to more or less established patterns. In general, speakers are not free to
reconstruct the grammar, but they are free to choose the words representing their
experience. M. A. K. Halliday refers to grammar as deterministic, in contrast to
vocabulary, which is probabilistic. 6
3 Louis Hjelmslev, Language: An Introduction. trans. F. J. Whitfield (Madison:
University of Wisconsin, 1970) 32–35. Hjelmslev was a major influence on the
French structuralist Roland Barthes.
4 The view that words are arbitrarily associated with their referents derives in the
Western tradition from Aristotle; one formulation of the contrary view is found in
Plato’s Cratylus.
5 See the discussion in Roman Jakobson and Linda R. Waugh, The Sound Shape of
Language (Bloomington: Indiana University. 1979) 177–215, for example: defenses
of Saussure’s position are given in the anthology of Robert Godel, A Geneva School
Reader in Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1969).
6 See G. R. Kress, ed., Halliday: System and Function in Language (London: Oxford
University. 1976) 85. The term grammar is sometimes used to cover all linguistic
phenomena, sometimes (as here) all except for the lexicon, and sometimes simply
morphology and syntax (and sometimes needlessly avoided as old-fashioned).