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Motivation, Conventionalization, and Arbitrariness in the Origin of Language Robbins Burling University of Michigan Introduction The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of what I will call motivated signs in the origin of language. By motivated signs I mean signs that are not arbitrary and that are, therefore, very different from the typical arbitrary signs of language. At least since the time of Ferdinand de Saussure, early in this century (Saussure 1959: 69), linguists have generally insisted upon the arbitrary relationship between the form and the meaning of linguistic signs. The substance that we call bread is called pain by the French, and roti by speakers of Hindi, and any other name would do as well. All that is required is that everyone in the speech community agrees on a some consistent convention. To be sure, a few onomatopoetic words echo the bleats of animals or the twitterings of birds, but these words have generally been looked upon as exceptions to the more general pattern of language. Nevertheless, I will argue that motivated signs are likely to have been important in the earlier stages of language. I will start by proposing a typology of the various forms of human and primate communication, and by exploring the role of motivated signs within the context of other forms of communication. Next, I survey of the various kinds of motivated signs that are found in contemporary human languages. I then move on to diachronic change and consider several examples in which signs that began as motivated were gradually conventionalized until, having lost their motivation, they became totally arbitrary. The background having been given, I turn in the final sections of the paper to phylogeny. Here I consider the part that motivated signs could have played in the early stages of human language. I conclude with some suggestions, admittedly speculative, about the stages through which the early antecedents of language could have passed. Arbitrary and Motivated