[Kristeva's] graceful and lucid history of language ranges over vast intellectual territory—Egyptian hieroglyphs to psychoanalytic discourse, Crates of Mallos to Benveniste to Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. Guaranteed jargon-free.
Voice Literary Supplement
It is a pleasure to read a study that maintains a sophisticated theoretical stance with such clarity, care, and intellectual brilliance.
- Lawrence Kritzman,
Stimulating and eminently readable.
Signs
Part I. Introduction to Linguistics
Introduction
1. Language, La Langue, Speech, and Discourse
2. The Linguistic Sign
3. The Materiality of Language
Part II. Language in History
Introduction
4. Anthropology and Linguistics: The Knowledge of Language in So-Called Primitive Societies
5. The Egyptians: Their Writing
6. Mesopotamian Civilization: The Sumerians and Akkadians
7. China: Writing as Science
8. Indian Linguistics
9. The Phoenician Alphabet
10. The Hebrews: The Bible and the Cabala
11. Logical Greece
12. Rome: The Transmission of Greek Grammar
13. Arab Grammar
14. Medieval Speculations
15. Humanists and Grammarians of the Renaissance
16. The Grammar of Port-Royal
17. The Encyclopédie: La Langue and Nature
18. Language as History
19. Structural Linguistics
Part III. Language and Languages
20. Psychoanalysis and Language
21. The Practice of Language
22. Semiotics
Conclusion
Notes
Works Principally Relied On
Index