Darshita Shah - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The relation between words and its referents in the real world has intrigued scholars for centuri... more The relation between words and its referents in the real world has intrigued scholars for centuries. Debates about whether the origin of words or name for things relate to the referents or entities they stand for, has been written about by the likes of Plato and Socrates. The idea that form and meaning are linked by convention and tradition alone, have come to dominate our modern understanding of language. Language is conceived of as being arbitrarily related to the world, even in Linguistic thinking. At lexical level, the phonological form of a linguistic sign is considered to have no relationship to its meaning. Saussure and Locke have been very often linked by the idea of language being arbitrary.