Substance and Form

 Language symbols are Janus- like. Janus was an ancient Italian God, guardian of gates and doors, beginning and ends presented two face, on the face and the other on the back of his head. The language symbol faces two ways. According to Saussure, they have an extern fact the ‘significant and a semantic facet the ‘signific’. Some linguists consider this quality as ‘form’ and ‘meaning’ or ‘expression’ and content’.

          When a carpenter makes a table or a chair out of wood, the he tries to change raw material into finished goods. In other words, he tires to change substance into form. Thus wood is the substance, and furniture is the form. Similarly cotton is the substance. cloth is the form. Likewise in language we have both substance and form. All different sounds produced by human speech organ and languages are substance is called ‘Phonic substance’ and the visual substance is known as ‘the graphic substance’. We form language from these substances. 

          Substance and Form can be analyzed on two levels content and expression. On the expression level, linguistic gives importance to form and shape and not to meaning. From the expression point of view, ‘The bachelor gave birth to a baby’ is well formed, while from the content point of view it is a non sense sentence. The content levels deals with semantics the study of meaning a. the study of expression level is less complex than the study of content level.

          The content level deals wit the whole mass of thought, emotions, feelings, ideas and concepts without references to language. Language has two from, spoken and written. The spoken form represents sounds reproduced by human organs of speech. The sounds are transferred into the visual marks on paper, wood, stone or metal. These visible marks or graphs are the substance of the written form of language.

         

          The difference between form and substance is between the theory and the actual utterance. From include phonology, grammar morphology and syntax. By substance we means the elements that fill these component, the elements such as phonemes, morphemes, graphemes.

          The substance and form are a net work of the associations between meaning and sound. Form refers to any meaningful sequence of phonemes. Substance is the mass of thought and emotions