Linguistics An Essential Introduction (Version 1.5)

Let us start with a spoken language. Recall the words for the concept CUCKOO in different languages: Kukuck (German), coucou (French), kukułka (Polish), guguk (Turkish), cu cu (Vietnamese), and so on. Even based on their orthography, we can see that they must sound similar (and their actual pronunciation is even more similar than the orthography suggests).

Recall that such similarities can be due to development from a common ancestor language or to borrowing, but for the words for CUCKOO, neither of these are the case. This similarity across very different languages suggests that there must be some non-arbitrary connection, and, indeed, we came up with such connection: the words all sound a bit like the call of the bird referred to, which provides an obvious source for their similarities.

In our new terminology, we can say that these words are iconic (they are similar to the call of the bird referred to). Other examples of iconic words in English are choo-choo (a childish word for train) or Chickadee (another word for a bird based on its call), slurp (a way of drinking noisily), and many words for sounds, such as boom for the sound of an explosion, tick-tock for the sound of a clock, etc. However, the iconicity of these words does not actually challenge their fundamental arbitrariness. There are three reasons for this.

First, even though such words in the different languages are often similar, they are not identical. Take the words for CUCKOO: some languages have a final k sound (German, Turkish), some do not (French, Vietnamese). The Polish word contains the ending ‑ka, which is a diminutive that occurs in many other Polish words (it means something like ‘little’). All words use speech sounds that also occur in other words in the respective language — saying the word cuckoo in English is different from actually imitating the sound a cuckoo makes. All these differences are arbitrary, limiting the iconic aspects of the word.

Second, while some languages may base their word for a particular entity on indexical and iconic principles, others will not: for example, the form associated with the concept CUCKOO in Danish is gøg, and in Ukrainian, it is зозуля (zozulya). Also, even the languages where the word cuckoo is iconical/indexical do not generally refer to animals by words based on the noises they make. The English word for cow is not moo, the word for a rooster is not cock-a-doodle-doo, the word for a dog is not wuff, even though the three words exist as ways of referring to the noises the animals make. Other animals do not even have an agreed-upon word for the noise they make: if you want to refer to the sound of an eagle, you either have to use the sequence the sound of an eagle, which is completely arbitrary, or you have to imitate the screech, which is not a word. Whether or not a language uses a form with iconic or indexical aspects for a particular meaning is itself arbitrary.

Third, there are very few concepts that even allow us to create iconic signs. Animals make typical noises that we can imitate within the confines of a given language if we want to, and so do a few other entities (vehicles and other machines, musical instruments, some natural phenomena like storm, rain and thunder). But the vast majority of things we talk about do not make typical noises, or, indeed, any noises at all — stones, apples, books, hate, democracy or time. So there is simply no way (in spoken languages) to have iconic/indexical forms for these meanings. Consequently, the number of words in any given language for which you could argue that they are at least partially iconic and/or indexical is vanishingly small.

So, what about indexical signs? As far as the creation of words is concerned, indexicality is even more limited in its possibilities than iconicity: it would have to be a sign causally connected to its meaning.

We saw one possible set of candidates in our discussion of the expressive function of language in Section 3.2 — interjections like ouch (expressing pain), oh (expressing surprise), wow (expressing astonishment or admiration) or eww (expressing disgust). Comparing such words across languages also shows that they are more similar than words for TREE or HEALTH INSURANCE. This could be due to an origin as spontaneous vocalizations — like laughter or crying. But note, again, that they are similar, not identical across languages, so even though they might have an indexical component, they are fundamentally arbitrary.

However, while linguistic signs are rarely (if ever) indexical, there are aspects of language that clearly function indexically. Think of the information you can gather about a speaker of English just by listening to the way they speak. They might be using a particular tone of voice that tells you they are happy, sad or angry — this tone of voice is directly caused by their emotional state, and thus indexical. They will be using a particular dialect or sociolect — some speakers can do this on purpose, but most of us speak the language the way we acquired it, making the dialect an index of where we grew up and the sociolect an index of the social class or stratum we are associated with. They might have trouble finding words and they might slur them when they find them — symptoms of a neurological problem such as a stroke, being drunk or extremely tired, and thus an index of the speaker’s internal state.

You might think that this last point does not apply to the same extent to signed languages, which use gestures instead of sound sequences to express meanings. While relatively few entities in human environments are associated with typical noises, comparatively many entities have typical shapes that we could imitate. And it is true that signed languages, like spoken languages, have signs that involve associations based on similarity, and it is even true that this is true for a larger part of the vocabulary of signed languages compared to spoken languages.

However, the same caveats that apply to spoken language also apply to sign language. Let us briefly illustrate this, beginning with the word tree. Go to the website Spread the Sign

¹

www.spreadthesign.com/search/

, and search for this word. Then look at the videos for the word in British Sign Language, listed under “English (United Kingdom)”, German Sign Language (DGS, Deutsche Gebärdensprache), listed under “German (Germany)” and Indian Sign Language, listed under “Hindi” (note that listing these signs under the names of the spoken languages of the speech communities surrounding the respective signed-languge communities is very bad practice, it is an example of oralism). You can look at other videos too, of course, but we will discuss these three.

In all three cases, the iconic (imitative) part of the sign very likely played a role in its formation. But note that the specific way in which the shape of a tree is incorporated into the gesture is completely different in each case, and those differences are arbitrary. Users of the respective signed languages have to learn these signs in the same way that users of English, German and Hindi have to learn the words tree, Baum and ped (पेड़) respectively.

Also, while many of the things that we talk about have shapes that can be imitated more or less loosely, most things do not. Thus, for signed languages to be able to express the full range of meanings relevant to humans, they must be based on the same fundamental principle of arbitrariness as spoken languages.

CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. Written by Anatol Stefanowitsch