A comprehensive case for supplementing the cherished principle of arbitrariness with other types of associations between form and meaning has been proposed by authors of a new report. "It's not that ...

Plato's dialogue Cratylus begins with a debate. Socrates is asked whether the sounds of words are simply arbitrary conventions, as Hermogenes suggests, or if sounds are reflective in some way of their ...

Humans worldwide might be speaking the same language – sort of. After analyzing word lists covering nearly two-thirds of the world’s languages, researchers found that unrelated languages very often ...

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try. The pandemic ...

This news release is available in German. "It's not that arbitrariness was a bad idea. It is an important principle, but it doesn't fully explain how words work," says Mark Dingemanse, language ...