Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each observation by the design feature it illustrates.
Groups: Arbitrariness · Displacement · Productivity · Cultural transmission
- Sound isn't dog
- Woof versus guau
- Century-ago talk
- Unvisited cities
- Tokyo upbringing
- Unheard sentence
Hints
- Two items are about the link between form and meaning.
- Anything about the remote in time or space is displacement.
Show the answer
Arbitrariness: Sound isn't dog, Woof versus guau
Displacement: Century-ago talk, Unvisited cities
Productivity: Unheard sentence
Cultural transmission: Tokyo upbringing
Why
The onomatopoeia item is the interesting one: it looks like a counter-example to arbitrariness and is in fact evidence for it, since the same sound is rendered by different conventional forms in different languages. Motivation and convention are not exclusive.
Practise Design Features: What Makes Language Language
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