Language Is Arbitrary as You Are Reading

Language Is Arbitrary

As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world," begins Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. (Pinker, 3) In other words, it is a wonder that the human mind is able to create, from need and cognitive structure and instinct, a morphological structure of communication that can change over time from context to context, yet still be understood.

It is a wonder that is both natural yet arbitrary in its construction. For the syntax, or appearance and sound of a particular kind of piece of language is arbitrary, even though the semantics, or relational meaning of the language is not. Should you, the reader, doubt this proposition, consider that one solitary letter can mean the difference between an object being understood, in an English context, as a bat, a cat, or a hat respectively. One letter can be a distinction between a pest, a pet, or an article of clothing. Yet for a French person, these same items in the morphological context of the French language are designated by entirely different nouns, different syntactical sounds. Other cultures might not even have an understanding what such objects are -- for instance, hats might not exist within particular tropical climates. There was no need to generate such words, given the absence of a need to communicate about such objects.

Only the construction of English, the common understanding of a community of individuals of a particular language, and the understanding that a furry creature that goes 'meow' neither flies at night around caves nor is worn upon one's head allows one to immediately associate the word 'cat' with the associated animal, a friendly tabby. The desire and need to share may be universal and biological, but designated a house pet does not refer to the intrinsic 'catlike' quality of a tabby.

Thus, to stress the arbitrary nature of different linguistic structures is not to deny that biology plays a role in human language organization and development. The ability to learn language is hard-wired into the cognitive structure of the human brain, as notes Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist whose book The Language Instinct suggests that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation as well as something learned. Communal verbal exchanges may have evolutionary roots, but the structures exchanges these take, so they can be understood and generated socially, are specific rather general to the human animal. Even the deaf uneducated in sign language strive to communicate, within their linguistic parameters and ability to understand through the sensory data they do possess, of the body and hand.

Language is an instinct to acquire, but an art to perfect, says Pinker. Its morphological structure and the syntactic meaning of different words are arbitrary. There is no inherent reason, other than common cultural exposure, for instance, that Japanese takes some of its sound and sensory data used to communicate from China rather than from the Indo-European structures of writing and semantic meanings attached to words. But this does not mean that the data, although arbitrary, arose from the human mind in an arbitrary fashion. There was an evolutionary selection process that favored certain acquisition processes in certain areas, and individuals whom were better able to communicate with one another were better able to survive.