Saussure Revisited: Balancing Arbitrariness and Systematicity in Vocabulary Structure

Morten Christiansen, 11.00-12.00

Research on sound symbolism has revealed that a considerable amount of systematicity exists in the mapping between a word's phonological form and its meaning  -- but just how systematic is language? In this talk, I first discuss results from analyses of English, indicating that language incorporates a significant amount of systematicity in form-meaning correspondences across the vocabulary. This systematicity is more pronounced for words involved in the early stages of language acquisition and reduces in later vocabulary development. I then consider further corpus analyses suggesting that additional systematicity can be found at level of lexical categories, revealing the sound of syntax. Results from human experimentation corroborate the corpus analyses, pointing to a division of labor between arbitrariness and systematicity in the structure of the vocabulary. I conclude that the vocabulary is structured to enable systematicity for early acquired words to promote language learning, whilst also incorporating arbitrariness for later acquired words in order to facilitate communicative expressivity and efficiency.

Morten H. Christiansen, Cornell University, University of Southern Denmark, and the Haskins Labs

Studying Social Interactions

Rick Dale, University of California, 12.00-13.00