Something that signifies is qualified as significant.
The first thing we are going to do before beginning to analyze the significant term in depth is to discover its etymological origin. When doing so we come across the fact that it is a word that comes from Latin, more precisely from the word “significantis”. This is made up of three parts:
• The noun “signa”, which can be translated as “signal”.
• The verb “facere”, which is synonymous with “do”.
• The suffix “-nt”, which is equivalent to “agent”.
Concept of signifier
Significant is an adjective that refers to something that means . The verb mean , for its part, can be linked to a thing that is a representation or indication of another thing or to the phrase that is an expression or sign of an idea or something material. To signify, furthermore, is to manifest something.
For example: “The Argentine tennis player achieved a significant victory for his career in New York” , “Political analysts considered that it was a significant speech that will have consequences” , “The most significant work of the German artist will be exhibited in the Municipal Palace of Fine Arts Arts starting next Tuesday.”
The union of a signifier and a signified produces a linguistic sign.
The notion in linguistics
The notion of signifier also appears in linguistics . It is a phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that constitute a linguistic sign when associated with a meaning .
The linguistic sign, then, is the minimum unit of the sentence and is composed of a signifier and a signified, inseparably united through signification . Meaning, on the other hand, is known as the semantic content of a sign, which is conditioned by the system and the context. The meaning is established from its link with the signifier in the linguistic sign.
We can consider the case of the word “house” . It is a set of articulated phonemes ( /k/ , /a/ , /s/ , /a/ ) whose signifier designates a specific meaning: the mental concept of what a “house” is, that is, a building to live in . The signifier points to or designates something, while the signified is that which is designated.
Contributions of various thinkers to the idea of the signifier
There are many scholars of linguistics, semantics or semiotics who, over the centuries, have studied and analyzed the term signifier in depth. However, among the most relevant figures who contributed the most in this regard are the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
It must be said that this last intellectual started from Saussure's theories and concepts to give a twist to the term signifier within what would be Freud's theory of psychoanalysis. Thus, he created what he called the logic of the signifier which, among many other things, made it clear that a signifier can be a symptom, an object, a relationship or a word.
In the same way, Lacan established that signifiers continually change their meaning. Hence, when a psychoanalyst was in a session with a patient, he had to pay special attention to the signifiers that the patient expresses since, although they apparently have one meaning, in reality they are proposing others.