A critical feature of language is that the form of words need not bear any perceptual similarity to their meaning or function - these relationships can be 'arbitrary'. The capacity to process arbitrary form-meaning associations is key to the diversity and the enormous expressive power of human languages.

Yet, despite the significance of this topic and its long-standing importance to the language sciences, the evolutionary roots of our capacity for arbitrariness have gone largely unexamined. Filling this gap requires a novel interdisciplinary research effort, drawing together methods and insights from: theoretical and empirical linguistics, evolutionary linguistics, conceptual analysis, and comparative research on animal communication.

Our workshop The Evolution of Arbitrariness will provide an interdisciplinary platform for discussing the nature and evolutionary origins of arbitrariness. In particular, it will focus on the conceptual issues surrounding the definition of the notion of arbitrariness, on the extent to which arbitrariness is unique to language, and on what evolutionary pressures may have shaped its origin. By doing so, we aim to strengthen the synergies between arbitrariness research in human and animal communication, and identify promising directions for future cross-disciplinary research on the evolution of this crucial capacity.