Why do you know that a "dark and stormy night" in a novel suggests something bad is coming, but the same sentence in a weather report is just a fact?

The word "Rose" (the sound/ink) is the signifier . The concept of a flower is the signified .

There is no "natural" reason why the word "rose" means that flower; it’s just a social agreement.

Structuralism takes its cues from , the "father of modern linguistics". He proposed that language is a system of signs where nothing has meaning on its own—only in relation to other things.