Introduction

General

About the time Plato was writing Cratylus, in which the protagonist argues that the relationship of sign to signified was one of object to imitation (Fowler 1977), that is, less than arbitrary, discussion of this question was also going on in China, especially among the Confucianists. The Chinese, in general, came to a different conclusion than Plato's Cratylus. The writer who spoke most directly to this question was Xun Zi (d. 221 BC) (Hong 1982). He felt that an object and its name had a totally arbitrary relationship, that no name was any more “suitable” than any other, that all names are “suitable” only as a result of convention and popular usage. Though there were some Chinese philosophers (from the Han Dynasty on) who attempted to find the true sound-meaning correspondences for words, going against Xun Zi's principle of non-suitability of names, the mainstream of Chinese linguistics to this day still does not really question the concept of total arbitrariness. Almost all of the general books on linguistics now in use in the People's Republic (e.g. Gao and Shi 1963; Ye and Xu 1981; Ma 1981) use the same quote from Xun Zi and another, from Capital, where Karl Marx says “The name of a thing is entirely external to its nature” (Fowkes 1977: 195).

In the West, although Saussure felt that “No one disputes the principle of the arbitrary nature of the [linguistic] sign” (1966: 68), there have been many since that time who have tried to show that the assignment of signifier to signified is not always completely arbitrary.