Arbitrariness

Arbitrariness in human language refers to the fact that the meaning of linguistic signs is not predictable from its word form, nor is the word form dictated by its meaning/function.

It is not possible to deduce the underlying meaning from its word form.

Furthermore, there may be semantic change.The meaning of words changes over time, hence the same word form may be associated with a different meaning. This makes it impossible to link both word form with its meaning.

The human language is completely arbitrary with very few exceptions of onomatopoeia

and sound symbolism. Iconicity refers to non arbitrary form-meaning connections, where

the word form is representational of the meaning.

Arbitrariness is crucial in the human language because it frees up the communication system. Because it is not a must for word form to have a correlation to the meanings that they imply, this makes it much convenient for words to refer to abstract concepts. It would be difficult to restrict the form of signals to just the correlation between a symbol and an abstract meaning (Kuthy, 2001).

Discreteness

“The system consists of isolatable and repeatable units (e.g. phonemes, syllables etc.)” – From Alice’s notes. Cite and rephrase?