Affordances of Arbitrariness in Transmodal Semiosis

Arbitrariness is a linguistic principle proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure
through his synchronic structuralist analysis of language. He delineates the
structure of signs and establishes the absence of a necessary relationship
between the signifier and the signified. Any such putative relationship
is arbitrary. Whereas his theory discusses the arbitrariness in linguistic
perception, this paper argues that there is significant arbitrariness between
sensory modalities in object identification which affords experiments on
sensory substitution projects.