What Does significant Mean
The first thing we are going to do before beginning to analyze the significant term in depth is to discover its etymological origin. In 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 “sign”.
• The verb “facere”, which is synonymous with “do”.
• The suffix “-nt”, which is equivalent to “agent”.
Significant is an adjective that refers to something that means . The verb mean , on the other hand, 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 of something material. To mean, moreover, is to manifest something.
For example: "The Argentine tennis player achieved a significant triumph for his career in New York" , "Political analysts considered that it was a significant speech that will bring consequences" , "The most significant work of the German artist will be exhibited at the Municipal Palace of Bellas Arts from next Tuesday ” .
The notion of the 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 . It is known as meaning, on the other hand, 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 inhabit . The signifier points or designates something, while the signified is that which is designated.
Many are the scholars of Linguistics, Semantics or Semiotics who, over the centuries, have studied and analyzed the significant term 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.
That last intellectual must be said that he started from Saussure's theories and concepts to give a twist to the term of 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 should pay special attention to the signifiers that he expresses since, although they apparently have one meaning, in reality they are raising others.