Deconstructing bond of signifier & signified: a corpus-based study of variation in meaning

Abstract

Submitted: 18 April 2020 Accepted: 09 May 2020 The study aimed at investigating a bond between the signifier and signified to explore and develop an in-depth understanding of meanings’ variation, by setting qualitative paradigm, textual examples were marked from text corpora and linguistic signifiers, believed to be representing the text were serialized using judgmental sampling. The key informant happened to be a text (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) taken as a unit of study, with the approach of Derrida’s deconstruction, signifiers were decoded and then qualitatively analyzed in terms of binary oppositions to mark variation in meaning. It resulted that words were not intrinsically meaningful but just types of sound or mark being meaningless in itself and they gave meaning by playing a role in something we did with them. The outcome of the whole endeavor was a play of meaning continued endlessly in connection with signifier and signified from one context to another. Stable meaning appeared to be a hopelessly unsuitable task in a text and with the contextual shift, it stood unnaturalized. The usefulness of analyzing text was adequate preparation for teaching turning contents into skill-oriented tasks and the process of meanings’ variation between signifier and signified widened the scope of developing Content Specification Charts concerning learners’ needs.