From Latin articulus, meaning joint or divided.
In the most general sense – any process of division or segmentation; in linguistics, articulation usually means double articulation, a feature often attributed to being unique to human speech.
Ferdinand de Saussure held that “Attached to speech (parole), articulation means either the subdivision of the speech chain into syllables or the subdivision of the chain of meanings into meaningful units” (10).
At the first level of articulation, a sentence or message is divided into significant units (often called sememes and by Andre Martine – monemes, usually this French scholar is credited with formulating the principle of double articulation);
at the second level, it is divided into distinct but insignificant sounds (phonemes).
In written language, graphemes are the units corresponding to phonemes in speech.
The connection between language and articulation from ancient times has cast doubt on our ability to speak about reality without distorting or destroying it. At the level of meaning, articulation involves the articulation or segmentation of reality into multiple classes or species. But in the early history of both Eastern and Western thinking, the question arose as to whether, when we make articulations — the classes we recognize or construct — they really correspond to the way the world exists.
It is sometimes argued that reality is enduring or indivisible in itself, and thus any articulation or segmentation is in principle a distortion, and perhaps even an act of violence. Other times, it was simply assumed that there was no way to know whether our division of the world corresponded to the way it was actually structured or segmented.
Aren’t classification schemes just useful fiction? Or do they have a basis in reality? Skeptics and nominalists argue that our classifications reflect our goals and perspectives, not the signs and outlines of reality. In contrast, realists maintain that some of our classifications of reality are useful precisely because they articulate it in the way it actually divides.
A map that does not in any way relate to the terrain it is intended to depict could not, in principle, perform its functions. Not all scientific fiction is fiction; some of the theories and taxonomies we come up with are more or less reliable maps of world orientation. This means that in some way they respond to certain measures for the world. At least that is the central statement of Peirce’s and other forms of realism.
