Chance and language
Valentina Bisconti, Francesco La Mantia, Raffaele Simone · 2024
Western linguistic thought has traditionally been concerned with the issue of the nature of language. Are languages shaped by randomness or necessity? Do they proceed freely, or do they follow obligatory paths? Are words natural or arbitrary? These questions have given rise to different theories. Languages have been considered in turn as shaped by arbitrariness and so developing out of the control of the speaker, or as designed by necessity due to the biological properties of the speaker. The debate about chance in languages then involves the role of the speaker, who turns out to be neither an inert subject nor a computing machine, but an incomplete, often confusing actor of language, always looking for symmetries, analogies, regularities and correspondences. This chapter illustrates the dialectic of the two domains, first in terms of the history of linguistic ideas, then through the description of language facts and finally by discussing a non-abstract model of the speaker.