This observation challenges one of the fundamental principles of linguistics : the arbitrariness of the sign. Generally, there’s no direct link between a word’s sound and its meaning.

It is a cornerstone of theoretical linguistics: the principle of arbitrariness, according to which the form of a word doesn’t tell you anything about its meaning. Yet evidence is accumulating that it ...

In this talk, I present two approaches for measuring the arbitrariness of gender on inanimate nouns: the first approach measures how well gender correlates with word vector representations of meaning, ...