homonomy word translation
I do not propose to say anything new here so much as to reexamine briefly some of the fundamental properties that have been recurrently predicated of 'natural languages' and to follow up some of the implications of what this reexamination reveals. The three properties we are going to take up, namely, arbitrariness, necessity, and the duality of patterning (respectively in §§ 1, 2, 3), are logically distinct from each other. It is true that they have frequently been confused with each other in the past, but that is all the more reason for making a special effort to keep them apart in mind.1
While considering arbitrariness and necessity, we can very well assume that Saussure's analysis of the linguistic sing into the significant and the signifié is an adequate one and not worry too much about the various refinements, elaborations, reservations, and revisions proposed by later thinkers. With pattern duality, as we shall see, it is another matter.
Having considered the three properties and their interrelations (§ 5).
1. Arbitrariness. Cross-linguistically, the relation between the significant and the signifié is arbitrary. There is no extra-linguistic reason2 why the given significant should not be correlated with other than its usual signifié in a given language, and vice versa. We are quite justified in laughing at the English soldier who criticized the French for calling a cabbage a shoe (Fr. Chou /šu/).
A symbolism is non-arbitrary when there is some sort of an appropriateness about it-for example, the geometrical similarity between a map and the original landscape, the similarity of responses that make darkness a symbol of ignorance, the stimulus-response relationship that makes bright red more suitable as a symbol of danger than, say, pale blue.
