Homonymous Word Translation
I do not propose to say anything new here so much as to reexamine briefly some of the fundamental properties that have been recurrently predicated of 'natural languages' and to follow up some of the implications of what this reexamination reveals. The three properties we are going to take up, namely, arbitrariness, necessity, and the duality of patterning (respectively in §§ 1, 2, 3), are logically distinct from each other. It is true that they have frequently been confused with each other in the past, but that is all the more reason for making a special effort to keep them apart in mind.
While considering arbitrariness and necessity, we can very well assume that Saussure's analysis of the linguistic sign into the signifiant and the signifié is adequate and not worry too much about the various refinements, elaborations, reservations, and revisions proposed by later thinkers. With pattern duality, as we shall see, it is another matter.
Having considered the three properties and their interrelations (§ 5).
- Arbitrariness. Cross-linguistically, the relation between the signifiant and the signifié is arbitrary. There is no extra-linguistic reason why the given signifiant should not be correlated with other than its usual signifié in a given language, and vice versa. We are quite justified in laughing at the English soldier who criticized the French for calling a cabbage a shoe (Fr. Chou /šu/). A symbolism is non-arbitrary when there is some sort of appropriateness about it - for example, the geometrical similarity between a map and the original landscape, the similarity of responses that make darkness a symbol of ignorance, the stimulus-response relationship that makes bright red more suitable as a symbol of danger than, say, pale blue.
