Aristotle, Saussure, Kress on speech and writing: Language as paradigm for the semiotic?

Aristotle famously defined writing in a way that made it dependent on speech; and Saussure, in mapping out a place for language as part of a new field of ‘semiology’, has been seen as continuing this so-called ‘logocentric’ bias in Western thinking about signs. Kress, by contrast, in defining a new field of ‘social’ semiotics, emphasizes the differing materiality of speech and writing ‘as modes with related yet importantly distinct affordances’. This paper will use Saussure’s many-sided questioning of language, to show that Kress’s theoretical and descriptive project within Social Semiotics still needs something like Saussure’s model of linguistic meaning, and to suggest that a clearer theorization of language has positive implications for our understanding of other semiotic modes.

► Much recent work in multimodality claims to move away from language, but leaves language untheorised. ► Multimodal analyses often depend on language to ground interpretations of other modalities. ► Need for a double focus on the sociality (Saussure) and materiality (Burrows) of language. ► Work towards an inclusive semiology that treats language on par with other semiotic systems.