Would Saussure have agreed with Barr’s challenge to the notion that there is a difference between Greek and Hebraic mentalities evident in the differences between the languages? Barr appeals to Saussure at one or two points in his book ( Semantics ), and his project as a whole is reliant on Saussure’s structuralism.

Yet, it seems that Saussure’s theory actually goes in the opposite direction. Below is a summary and brief (tentative) analysis of one section of Saussure’s Course , arguing that Saussure would not have agreed with Barr’s conclusions.

When he turns directly to semantics, the differences with Barr become evident. He focuses not on meaning but on “value,” which he explains using an economic analogy. Linguistic signs, which are unified dualities of idea and “sound pattern,” are like coins or currency (pp. 113-4). Idea and sound pattern are like two sides of a sheet of paper, and you can no more cut the idea and sound pattern apart than you can cut only one side of a sheet of paper (p. 111). They can be “substituted” for something else (a dollar for a donut), but their value is not merely in what they purchase but in their relation with other values in the currency system (a dollar is 100 pennies and 10 dimes). Linguistic signs “substitute” for ideas or concepts, but their value is also dependent on their “simultaneous coexistence” with other signs in the system. In one sense, the meaning of a sign is the conceptual “counterpart of a sign pattern”; the sound pattern “dog” means the idea dog. Yet on the other hand, value depends on a signs relation to other items in a system of signs. But he has noted that value and meaning are often treated as synonyms.

This creates a paradoxical situation. Meaning is the conceptual counterpart of a sound pattern (related “vertically” in Saussure’s diagram), but meaning is also dependent on “horizontal” links between different signs in the system of signs. He asks, “how does it come about that value, as defined, can be equated with meaning, i.e. with the counterpart of the sound pattern?” (p. 113). He argues that values are always governed by a “paradoxical principle,” involving both “something dissimilar which can be exchanged for the item whose value is under consideration” and “ similar things which can be compared with the item whose value is under consideration” (p. 113). These features are “necessary for the existence of any value,” and he illustrates with the monetary analogy described above.

Saussure concludes that a word’s “value is therefore not determined merely by that concept or meaning for which it is a token. It must also be assessed against comparable values, by contrast to other words. The content of a word is determined in the final analysis not by what it contains but by what exists outside it. As an element in a system, the word has not only a meaning but also – above all – a value. And that is something quite different” (p. 114). What is differential, at this point, is not “meaning” but “value,” and value has to do with the linguistic status of a word and not its semantic weight. Saussure, in short, distinguishes value from meaning, and defines “meaning” in terms a word’s conceptual dimension while defining value as something differential. But even value is not entirely differential (notice the “not onlies” in the quotation). He makes the same point at the end of the section. Saying that a word “means” the “concept associated with that particular sound pattern” is saying something “in some respects accurate” and in some respect will “succeed in giving a correct picture.” But this sort of definition does not “capture the real linguistic fact,” which is the value of the word in its sign system (p. 116).

He gives a number of illustrations. In French mouton “may have the same meaning as the English word sheep ; but it does not have the same value” (p. 114). The difference in value is apparent because English has a different word for sheep-meat, while French uses the same mouton for both the animal and the meat. Similarly, “the value of a French plural . . . does not match that of a Sanskrit plural,” since Sanskrit has a dual form lacking in French (p. 114). Words do not have the “job of representing concepts fixed in advance”; if they did, “one would be able to find exact equivalents for them as between one language and another.” Clearly, though, there are not exact equivalents (pp. 114-5).

As a result, some concepts are more difficult for some languages than for others: “The Slavic languages regularly distinguish two verbal aspects: the perfective aspect represents an action as a whole, as a single point . . . whereas the imperfective aspect represents the same action in the process of development, taking place in time.” For French speakers “these categories are difficult . . . because his language does not recognize them” (p. 115).

After offering these examples, Saussure argues that concepts as well as values are differential, now using the phrase “purely differential.” Instead of “predetermined categories” or “ ideas given in advance,” languages show “ values emanating from a linguistic system” (p. 115). These values may “correspond to certain concepts,” but these concepts are “purely differential. That is to say they are concepts defined not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively by contrast with other items in the same system” (p. 115). Here “concept” is used in a somewhat different way than earlier in the section. At the beginning, Saussure defines a concept as “the counterpart of a sound pattern,” but here he describes concepts to which values correspond. Thus, there is a “concept” associated with the “value” of mouton in French, a concept that covers both the living sheep and the meat for Easter dinner. The concept associated with sheep in English must be different, since the sign has a different value. Again, there are not pre-existing concepts that get expressed in various ways by various languages. Concepts are linked to the values of signs in a particular language, and thus different languages would seem to have a different conceptual, as well as a different value system.

At the end of the section, Saussure returns to his definition of a “sign” as a dual reality, composed of a signification/concept and a signal/sound pattern. This shows “what the word means,” but Saussure insists that the concept has no priority in the dual structure. It’s not as if there were a delimited concept prior to its association with a sound pattern; it comes to be a delimited concept precisely by the association with a sound pattern. He describes this concept as “a value which emerges from relations with other values of a similar kind. If those other values disappeared, this meaning too would vanish” (p. 116). This is somewhat confusing, since it appears to suggest, contrary to the direction of Saussure’s argument, that concepts exist in a system of values in advance of the association of those concepts with sound patterns.

All this is consistent with his contention (pp. 110-11) that signs (that is, the product of an “arbitrary” association of concepts with sound-patterns) are necessary to give shape to the “vague, shapeless mass” that is thought. According to Saussure, “philosophers and linguists have always agreed that were it not for signs, we should be incapable of differentiating any two ideas in a clear and constant way.” And he insists that “the characteristic role of language in relation to thought is not to supply the material phonetic means by which ideas may be expressed. It is to act as intermediary between thought and sound, in such a way that the combination of both necessarily produces a mutually complementary delimitation of units. Thought, chaotic by nature, is made precise by this process of segmentation.”

If this is the case, though, then it seems that different sign systems, which assign different values to their signs, will segment thought in different ways. Barr’s argument is that we cannot read differences in mentality off from the linguistic facts, from the grammar and vocabulary of a language. But Saussure’s argument tends in the opposite direction. Thought is organized by language, and different languages have different systems of organizing thought.