title: Arbitrariness, Iconicity, and Systematicity in Language.
abstract: The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only partly for the attested relations between form and meaning in the languages of the world. Recent research suggests a more textured view of vocabulary structure, in which arbitrariness is complemented by iconicity (aspects of form resemble aspects of meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularities in forms predict function). Experimental evidence suggests these form-to-meaning correspondences serve different functions in language processing, development, and communication: systematicity facilitates category learning by means of phonological cues, iconicity facilitates word learning and communication by means of perceptuomotor analogies, and arbitrariness facilitates meaning individuation through distinctive forms. Processes of cultural evolution help to explain how these competing motivations shape vocabulary structure.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: mark.dingemanse@mpi.nl.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dingemanse
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Damián E
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Blasi
authors.affiliation: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
authors.forename: Gary
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lupyan
authors.affiliation: Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA; University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.
authors.forename: Morten H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Christiansen
authors.affiliation: Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.
authors.forename: Padraic
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Monaghan
mesh_terms: D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Iconicity; arbitrariness; lexicon; sound-symbolism; systematicity; vocabulary