Re: Michael Shapiro • Redefining Arbitrariness in Language

MS:

The matter of arbitrariness in language is primarily associated with the work of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), whose book of lectures, Cours de linguistique Générale, is widely recognized to have laid the foundations of European structural linguistics in the twentieth century.  One of Saussure’s most quoted positions points out that the meaning of words is arbitrary, in that, for instance, the word arbre in French and its equivalent tree in English have nothing to do “naturally” with the object they signify.  Any other sequence of sounds could in theory designate the same object.  These are just the words French and English happen to have inherited from their history.

I prefer to think of the word “arbitrary” as reminding us how every aspect of a sign’s functioning is relative to an arbiter, a judge, an interpreter.  That brings semiology more into harmony with Peirce’s semiotics — if only Saussure had realized how it embeds all dyadic sign relations within the fold of triadic sign relations!

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