语言学题目

Comments on Arbitrariness

(1)Arbitrariness at different levels

Language is arbitrary. There is no intrinsic connection between meanings and sounds.

1.Arbitrariness at the morpheme level:

Arbitrary relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning, with the exception of onomatopoeic words, whose sound resembles its natural sound in reality. In different languages, the same idea is expressed by different forms. As Shakespeare says: A rose by any other name still smells as sweet as ever. Even for onomatopoeia, its sound varies from language to language.

2. Arbitrariness at the syntactic level

The order of elements in a sentence follows certain rules and there is a certain degree of correspondence between the sequence of clauses and the real happenings, though conjunctions can be used to changes the structure of a sentence while making it basically the same in meaning. So sentences enjoy less freedom or arbitrariness.

(2)Arbitrariness and conventionality

In principle, we can use any sound to stand for any idea we intend. But in reality, language is conventional at the same time. Words are associated with certain objects, actions, events or ideas. If language were entirely arbitrary in reality, communication would be impossible.Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative and conventionality makes learning a language laborious.

(3)Arbitrariness and motivation

There is an arbitrary relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning. In different languages, the same idea is usually expressed by different linguistic forms, e.g. the concept “书” is realized in English as book and书(shu) in Chinese.

As for derivatives and compounds, their creation is based on words already existing, so there is a certain motivation behind their creation. For example, the meaning of simplify is derived from the word simple, and the meaning of classroom is based on the meanings of class and room.

Chapter1 ：Body language doesn’t possess all of the design features of human language.The design features of human language includes Arbitrariness,Duality,Productivity and Displacement.

Firstly,Arbitrariness means the sound doesn’t have logical relationship with the meaning.For example,a book wasn’t called “book” at first.The reason why we say it is a book is that we set the sound “book” as this thing’s name.This sound has no direct or meaningful connection with the thing.When we are using body language, the actions in different situations may mean totally opposite meanings.Different countries,different cultural backgrounds will influence the actions’ expression to a great extent.So arbitrariness also can be found in body language.

Secondly,Duality means language is a system which consists of two sets of structures,one of sound and the other of meaning.It means that meaningless sounds can be combined into meaningful words.Sounds and meanings are two units.But body language only have primary units,which means it can only deliver meanings,but can’t be d ivided into elements.A action has its own meaning,however,it wasn’t composed of smaller elements.Thus,duality is the unique feature of human language.

Thirdly,Productivity means the language is creative.Human language is resourceful because of its duality.The fundamental elements,such as different sounds or words can be used in new ways to create new meanings.As for body language,people can also create new actions to voice