Editing Course in General Linguistics (section)

==Arbitrariness==
For Saussure, there is no essential or natural reason why a particular signifier should be attached to a particular signified. Saussure calls this the "[[arbitrariness of the sign]]" (''l'arbitraire du signe'').

[[Image:Tree.gif|thumb|300px|left|''Fig. 2 – Arbitrariness'']]

No two people have precisely the same concept of "tree," since no two people have precisely the same experiences or psychology. We can communicate "tree," however, for the same reason we can communicate at all: because we have agreed to use it in a consistent way. If we agreed to use the word and sound for "horse" instead, it would be called "horse" to the same effect. Since all that is important is agreement and consistency, the connection is arbitrary.

In further support of the arbitrary nature of the sign, Saussure goes on to argue that if words stood for pre-existing universal concepts they would have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next and this is not so. Languages reflect shared experience in complicated ways and can paint very different pictures of the world from one another. To explain this, Saussure uses the word ''bœuf'' as an example. In English, he says, we have different words for the animal and the meat product: ''Ox'' and ''beef''. In French, ''bœuf'' is used to refer to both concepts. In Saussure's view, particular words are born out of a particular society's needs, rather than out of a need to label a pre-existing set of concepts.
But the picture is actually even more complicated, through the integral notion of 'relative motivation'. Relative motivation refers to the [[compositionality]] of the linguistic system, along the lines of an [[immediate constituent]] analysis. This is to say that, at the level of ''langue'', hierarchically nested signifiers have relatively determined signified. An obvious example is in the English number system: That is, though ''twenty'' and ''two'' might be arbitrary representations of a numerical concept, ''twenty-two'', ''twenty-three'' etc. are constrained by those more arbitrary meanings. The tense of verbs provides another obvious example: The meaning of "kicked" is relatively motivated by the meanings of "kick-" and "-ed". But, most simply, this captures the insight that the value of a syntagm—a system-level sentence—is a function of the value of the signs occurring in it. It is for this reason that [[Leonard Bloomfield]] called the [[lexicon]] the set of fundamental irregularities of the language. (Note how much of the "meaningfulness" of the ''Jabberwocky'' poem is due to these sorts of compositional relationships!)

A further issue is [[onomatopoeia]]. Saussure recognised that his opponents could argue that with onomatopoeia there is a direct link between word and meaning, signifier and signified. However, Saussure argues that, on closer [[Etymology|etymological]] investigation, onomatopoeic words can, in fact, be unmotivated (not sharing a likeness), in part evolving from non-onomatopoeic origins. The example he uses is the French and English onomatopoeic words for a dog's bark, that is ''ouaoua'' and ''Bow Wow''.

Finally, Saussure considers [[interjection]]s and dismisses this obstacle with much the same argument, i.e., the sign/signifier link is less natural than it initially appears. He invites readers to note the contrast in pain interjection in French (''aie'') and English (''ouch'').