we said at the beginning that signs have no natural connection with the outside world and are therefore arbitrary. it is precisely this arbitrariness that makes them so amenable to appropriation by members of culturally embedded discourse communities. speakers and writers use those signs that are most readily available in their environment, without generally putting them into question, or being aware, as Saphir noted, that other signifying relation might be available. as we noted in chapter 1, socialization into a given discourse community includes making its signifying practices seem totally natural. native users of a language, for example, do not view the linguistic sign as arbitrary; on the contrary, they view it as a necessity of nature. Jakobson reports the anecdote of one Swiss-German peasant woman who asked why the French used fromage for cheese. only detached researchers and no-native speakers see the relations between signs as mere contingency.native speakers do not feel in their body that words are arbitrary signs. for them, words are part of the natural, physical fabric of their lives. seen from the perspective of the user, words and thoughts are one. for example, anyone brought up in a French household will swear that there is a certain natural masculinity about the sun and femininity about the moon. for english speakers, it is perfectly natural to speak of 'shooting down someone's argument'; they don't even think one could talk of arguments in a different way. having one recognized the semantic cohesion of the Emily Dickinson poem, readers may even come to view the interpretation offered in Chapter I as the only one possible - the natural one. even though, as we have seen, signs are created, not given, and combine with other signs to form cultural patterns of meaning, for native speakers linguistic signs are the non-arbitrary, natural reality they stand for.the major reason for this naturalization of culturally created signs is their motivated nature. linguistic signs do not signify in a social vacuum. sign-making and sign-interpreting practices are motivated by the need and desire of language users to influence people, act upon them or even only to make sense of the world around them. with the desire to communicate a certain meaning to others comes also the desire to be listened to, to be taken seriously, to be believed, and to influence in turn other peoples' beliefs and actions. the linguistic sign is therefore a motivated sign.
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