A.  Structuralist linguistics:
Saussure's langue and parole; signifier and signified binary opposition

1. Premise 前提--Anti-humanism
   1. The author is dead.
   2. Structuralism finds out the grammar of literary works.
      　
2. Saussure's Language Theory
   1. langue and parole
      langue and parole--the language system and the individual utterance
      <<--object of structuralist study: langue; the system of rules, the grammar, underlying literary works>>
   2. sign = signifier and signified
   How language refers to things
   sign = signifier--signified; the relation between is arbitrary (e.g. red = stop, green = go); meaning is not fixed. A signifier means by its difference from the other signifiers.
   (Green and LeBihan)-on signification
signifier + signified = sign--referent
Saussure "The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. . . The two elements are intimately united, and each recalls the other.
"The linguistic sign is arbitrary. It is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified."   What about Onomatopoeia, 象形文字?

signifier + signified -referent triad: The inclusion of the concept within the triad of signification suggests that there is no natural or immediate relation between the words and the 'thing.'

binary opposition

-- Underlying our use of language is a system, a pattern of paired opposites, or binary oppositions.--or a system of differences

-- Signs work not by referring to things but by taking up a position within a system of signs. No word has meaning on its own: there is always present in each word all the synonymous and antithetical terms in relation to which they are all used by speakers.

-- In Saussure's model, the arbitrary linking of signifier and signified is forgotten in the practice of actual speakers who behave as if a sign were a perfect unity, but in Lacan and others the signifier's arbitrariness determines the whole operation of signification.

e. g. the opposition between the old man and the river in

「公無渡河，公竟渡河，墮河而死，當奈公何?」

(external) Literary Criticism Databank: Structuralism and Semiotics