Notions of arbitrariness

Abstract

Arbitrariness is a distinctive feature of human language, and a growing body of comparative work is investigating its presence in animal communication. But what is arbitrariness, exactly? We propose to distinguish four notions of semiotic arbitrariness: a notion of opaque association between sign forms and semiotic functions, one of sign‐function mapping optionality, one of acquisition‐dependent sign‐function coupling, and one of lack of motivatedness. We characterize these notions, illustrate the benefits of keeping them apart, and describe two reactions to our proposal: abandoning arbitrariness‐talk in favor of the newly introduced conceptual vocabulary, or feeding the distinctions back into the parent concept.

What made us “hunter-gatherers of words”

“…It made it possible for words to be detached from the bounds of reality (truth, reference), thereby allowing for human language to achieve a level of flexibility and creativity (world-making) that makes our system of communication and thought quite special. In other words, self-domestication created an ecology that made it possible for users (learners, communicators) to abandon the need to rely on “credible signaling” (an important function of past communicative systems, Mehr et al, 2021 ), in effect allowing them to suspend their disbelief in the face of “honest fakes,” and setting the stage for the strongest meaning of “arbitrary” signals in the sense of Planer and Kalkman ( 2020 ) (see also Gasparri et al, 2022 ; Watson et al, 2022 ). I thus concur with Rossano ( 2010 ) that social factors were critical in the evolutionary emergence of symbolism, but disagree with him that symbols impose special cognitive demands.…”