Pulling these analytic resources postmodernists have attempted to develop an appropriate technology for a critical analysis of the dynamic play of signs and the economy of the signifying traces which this play institutes. The bedrock of Saussure's semiotics is the discovery that within the integrated system of signs the reality of each element is constituted by its relationship with the other elements, and not by anything intrinsic to it. Strictly speaking, there is nothing positive in the meaning of a sign. The meaning of a word is inseparable from its capacity to integrate the other words. Each syntagma in a series defines the others, as it is defined by them.
Meaning is differentiation.
The 'syntagma' is the lexical unit that engages in the work, or play, of signification. It is the what it is, not because of anything that inheres in it positively but because of the system of negations that it participates in founding. Semiotics is addressed to an analysis of the means of making sense, where these means are recognized to exceed the control of the speakers whose collaboration constructs the system. The system establishes its own aesthetic, ethical, and hermeneutic proscriptions, which the participants discover as one might inherit an estate. The syntagma, precisely, are nothing.