In his study of children’s literature ( Stars, Tigers, and the Shape of Words ), JH Prynne mounts a critique of Saussure designed to show that “the methodology of practical literary criticism habitually contradicts Saussure’s theory of language by assuming that acoustic or graphic properties of the sign do contribute to the apprehension of meanings.”

As summarized by Robin Purves, Prynne’s argument is as follows:

“Prynne first tests Saussure’s theory inside an extraordinary two-stage reading of ‘The Star’, a verse from an anonymous volume entitled Rhymes for the Nursery. This choice of text is motivated by the presence, in verse written for young children, of the repetition of sound-effects, which is said to provide an early rehearsal for the mature apprehension of semantic effects. This means, among other things, that there is a likeness between the active and alert child at play, and the no less active and alert adult reader of an adult text although it is explained that there is a considerable difference in their respective qualities of attention. The adult, according to Prynne, enjoys the ability to imagine or reckon the set of effects that are specifically designed for children (by an assumed adult author): these effects are said to be acoustic and/or rhythmic, with a discernible and minimal (because reduced) semantic content. And the adult, given that reduction, can also choose to reconstruct what would have been an adult-orientated cultural-historical matrix inside the text (as reference, allusion) and outside of it (available for reference, allusion). This description of the more extensive scope of a historically-aware, temporalized adult consciousness assumes a corresponding unhistorical presentness of the infant mind which is able only to apprehend the association of like sounds in their sequence: not so much unhistorical, perhaps, as minimally historical, taken up with a personal history measured in seconds (the time it takes to traverse the spaces between words in a sentence or stanza) and not years or centuries. Nursery rhymes, then, are in this argument the means by which early consciousnesses are exercised; it is the poem’s ‘persistent collocation’ of words and forms which ‘implants and reinforces semantic intuition by constructing these ordered patterns of sound’ (p. 10). And this acoustic recognition of regularity is barely an act of cognition, being a first step in training towards an independent, developed cognitive functioning which in turn enables the perception and interpretation of the panoply of textual details that can and do signify.”

For the child hearing the poem, “the star, because it has been denuded of an intrusive and complicating history, history being exactly that which complicates.” Yet, for the adult who has a history, “the star is the Star, the celestial body said to have appeared in the sky above Bethlehem to mark the birth of Christ.” While it is true that “the child is father/mother to the man/woman in the sense that it is obviously chronologically prior to its own matured state,” still, “the parent-text is parent to the child-text, being an implied, prior form which was then subject to reduction, the elision or suppression of symbolic meanings that are actively cultivated in the literary text written for an adult audience. This priority of the parent-text stands, despite its reconstruction’s dependence upon its prior child-text.”