Motivation in Language

This volume contributes to the now one-century old question, ‘Is the link between forms and meanings in language essentially arbitrary, as Saussure put it, or is it on the contrary also considerably motivated?’ The greater part of the papers (Sections 1–3) analyze linguistic phenomena in which not arbitrary, but cognitively motivated links between form and meaning play a role. As such, the contributions in Section 1 examine selected aspects of motivation in the continuum between lexicon and gram