Iconicity, Arbitrariness, & Duality of Patterning in Signed & Spoken Language: Perspectives on Language Evolution

Introduction. One of the hallmarks of human languages is their ability to incorporate signs that have no obvious physical relationship to the objects, actions, ideas, emotions, or other entities to which they refer. Languages also have the capacity to incorporate signs with varying degrees of relatedness to their referent. I use sign here and not word, because I intend for this discussion to include signed languages as well as spoken languages. I will use the general term sign to refer both to the words and morphemes of spoken languages and to the gestural signs of signed languages. The present discussion will be oriented toward elucidating the nature of arbitrariness of relationship between sign and referent in signed and spoken languages and will include observations about the biological bases of this phenomenon.

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