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Introduction: The Student's Question Is a phoneme a concrete sound or an abstract entity? The question seems straightforward, but it becomes difficult as soon as we ask what we mean by phoneme . The same phoneme can be realized in somewhat different ways, while a relatively small difference between two sounds may be enough to distinguish two phonemes within a particular language. What, then, is the thing we are calling a phoneme?   Part of the difficulty is that phoneme does not designate exactly the same object in every linguistic theory. The term has a history, and its meaning changes with the theoretical system in which it occurs. This is particularly important from a Saussurean perspective. Just as the value of a linguistic sign depends on its relations to other signs, a theoretical term derives much of its value from the concepts and distinctions surrounding it. We might therefore think of a linguistic theory, for the purposes of this discussion, as a kind of “mini- langu...

Introduction Why can a familiar word become difficult when it enters a theoretical framework? A reader encountering Derrida for the first time may understand text as a written document and writing as the production of marks on a page. In Lacan, signifier may initially seem to refer to one component of the linguistic sign, paired with the signified. Barthes's myth , meanwhile, may evoke a traditional story, a legend, or a widely held but false belief. Yet none of these familiar meanings is sufficient to determine what the terms are doing in the theories in which they appear. The difficulty, then, may not lie simply in the complexity of the argument. It may begin earlier, at the level of vocabulary. A theoretical text can take a word that already has a history of uses and place it within a new system of relations. The word remains recognizable, but its conceptual function changes. What makes the experience disorienting is precisely that the reader recognizes the word without y...