The signified (signifié) is one half of Saussure’s dyadic model of the sign. It is the concept evoked by the signifier — not a referent in the world but a mental concept within a language system.
Saussure’s signified is defined differentially: it gets its value not from what it is but from how it differs from other signifieds in the same language. The concept “tree” in English is not the same as the concept “arbre” in French, because the boundaries each language draws around the concept differ. Meaning, for Saussure, arises from a system of differences rather than from a relationship between word and thing (de Saussure, 1916).
In Peirce’s triadic model, the closest corresponding concepts are the object (what the sign stands for) and the interpretant (the meaning produced), though neither maps cleanly onto Saussure’s signified. The signified is simultaneously “what the sign means” and “what the sign refers to within the system,” a conflation that Peirce’s tripartite distinction separates.
Related terms
- signifier — the form paired with the signified
- interpretant — the Peircean concept closest to “meaning produced by a sign”
- sign — the union of signifier and signified
Source: Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959 [1916].