The linguistic sign isn’t arbitrary – IAS Excellence Lecture

Iconicity is the perceived resemblance between aspects of a sign’s meaning and aspect of a sign’s form. It occurs across spoken and signed languages, including iconic prosody, co-speech gestures, onomatopoeia, ideophones, and basic vocabulary. A recent wave of experimental, corpus, and typological research has revealed that iconicity is far more widespread than previously thought. In this talk, I will review recent empirical work from our lab and highlight how it fits a construal-based perspective of iconicity (Bellugi & Klima, 1976; Wilcox, 2004; Occhino et al., 2017; Winter et al., 2026). Much of the opposition that the concept of iconicity has received in linguistics stems from an over-emphasis of the universal nature of iconicity, and an under-appreciation of the extent to which it is based on construal, and hence variable between individuals and different communities.

I then turn to a central conceptual problem: the confusing, and often conflicting definitions of ‘arbitrariness’. Recent philosophical work (Planer & Kalkman, 2021; Gasparri et al., 2022) highlights that the label ‘arbitrary’ means different things in different contexts, such as arbitrariness as non-iconicity, arbitrariness as non-systematicity, or arbitrariness as conventionality. A closer look at this web of interrelated senses reveals that the banner notion of arbitrariness is not needed and, in fact, actively damaging as it leads to false dichotomies, such as the idea that conventions are somehow inimical to iconicity. Drawing on Keller’s (1998) sign theory and Flaksman’s (2017, 2020) notion of de-iconization, I will show that everything that is generally attributed to the principle of arbitrariness results from the interplay of conventions and regular processes of language change. I will conclude that in order to get a clear picture of the linguistic sign and the different evolutionary forces that act upon it, we need to abandon the notion of arbitrariness altogether.