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virtual series, and gives rise to other relations. The conclusion I should like to draw from this is as follows: in whichever order of relations a words functions (it is required to function in both), a word is always, first and foremost, a member of a system, interconnected with other words, sometimes in one order of relations, sometimes in another. This will have to be taken into account in considering what constitutes value. First, it was necessary to consider words as terms in a system. As soon as we substitute term for word, this implies consideration of its relations with others (appeal to the idea of interconnections with other words). We must not begin with the word, the term, in order to construct the system. This would be to suppose that the terms have an absolute value given in advance, and that you have only to pile them up one on top of the other in order to reach the system. On the contrary, one must start from the system, the interconnected whole; this may be decomposed into particular terms, although these are not so easily distinguished as it seems. Starting from the whole of the system of values, in order to distinguish the various values, it is possible that we shall encounter words as recognisable series of terms. (Incidentally: associatively, I can summon up the word dominos just as easily as domino, domine, domin-?; syntagmatically, I have to choose either dominos or domini.) Attach no importance to the word word. The word word as far as I am concerned has no specific meaning here. The word term is sufficient; furthermore, the word word does not mean the same in the two series. Chapter V. Value of terms and meanings of words. How the two coincide and differ. Where there are terms, there are also values. The idea of value is tacitly implied in that of term. Always hard to keep these two ideas apart. When you speak of value, you feel it here becomes synonymous with sense (meaning) and that points to another area of confusion (here the confusion will reside more in the things themselves). The value is indeed an element of the sense, but what matters is to avoid taking the sense as anything other than a value. It is perhaps one of the most subtle points there is in linguistics, to see how sense depends on but nevertheless remains distinct from value. On this the linguist's view and the simplistic view that sees the language as a nomenclature differ strikingly. First let us take meaning as I have represented it and have myself set it out: The arrow indicates meaning as counterpart of the auditory image In this view, the meaning is the counterpart of the auditory image and nothing else. The word appears, or is taken as, an isolated, self-contained whole; internally, it contains the auditory image having a concept as its counterpart. The paradox - in Baconian terms the trap in the 'cave' - is this: the meaning, which appears to us to be the counterpart of the auditory image, is just as much the counterpart of terms coexisting in the language. We have just seen that the language represents a system in which all the terms appear as linked by relations. At first sight, no relation between the a) and the b) arrows. The value of a word will be the result only of the coexistence of the different terms. The value is the counterpart of the coexisting terms. How does that come to be confused with the counterpart of the auditory image? Another diagram: series of slots: the relation inside one slot an