Eventually, post-structuralism rejected the static nature of the linguistic sign, forcing linguistics into relative isolation (since it held on to sign-based models of language). The Saussurean sign allowed French structuralists to revolutionize the methods of modern social science, eschewing the motives and intentions of human actors to focus on the system of oppositions that make signification possible in each domain. But close examination of the examples of inflectional morphology throughout the Cours brings Saussure’s ideas more in line with Process morphology, a model in which recurrent elements in word forms are exponents of content features, and realizational rules license a word form inferentially from the word’s content. Saussure’s notion of the linguistic sign as a unit of an acoustic image (signifier) and a concept (signified) immediately suggests such a model. In Item-and-Arrangement models of inflection, morphemes are associations of form and meaning stored in a mental lexicon.
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