Wierzbicka, Anna (1985). Oats and wheat: The fallacy of arbitrariness. In John Haiman (Ed.), Iconicity in syntax (pp. 311-342). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/tsl.6.16wie
It is the purpose of the present paper to challenge a Bloomfieldian dogma and to explore the opposite view: that form classes are semantically motivated, and that differences in grammatical behavior reflect iconically differences in meaning. As my test case I will take the very area which apparently gives the tenet of arbitrariness the strongest possible support: mass nouns. I investigate the very restricted grammatical category singular/plural, the arbitrariness of which is a standard topos in all the linguistic textbooks. I undertake to show that seemingly arbitrary distinctions like the one between wheat and oats are in fact motivated by a set of principles with predictive power.
It emerges from the present study that the syntax of mass nouns in English is iconic to a degree previously undreamt of either by linguists or by philosophers who have written on the subject. Grammatical behavior which has previously been regarded as idiosyncratic has been shown to be semantically motivated. The grammar of mass nouns reflects iconically the way in which different classes of things and ‘stuffs’ are conceptualized. The apparent idiosyncrasies, far from being arbitrary, are revealing of subtle distinctions in the underlying conceptualizations. The relationship is iconic in the sense that the system of formal distinctions and the system of conceptual distinctions are mutually isomorphic.
