--- title: "The No-Meaning Falsity — Abdelwahab 2026" description: "The paper asks whether Saussure's principle that the linguistic sign is arbitrary, and the deconstructionist views built on it, hold for Classical Arabic." authors: ["Elnaserledinellah Mahmoud Abdelwahab"] year: 2026 venue: "arXiv:2608.07737" source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07737" doi: "10.48550/arxiv.2608.07737" arxiv: "2608.07737" licence: "arXiv — non-exclusive license to distribute" licence_url: "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/abdelwahab-2026-no-meaning-falsity-structural-impossibility/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/abdelwahab-2026-no-meaning-falsity-structural-impossibility/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/10/) / The No-Meaning Falsity: The Structural Impossibility of the Arbitrary Sign in Classical Arabic # The No-Meaning Falsity: The Structural Impossibility of the Arbitrary Sign in Classical Arabic **Authors:** Elnaserledinellah Mahmoud Abdelwahab · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** arXiv:2608.07737 · **Licence:** [arXiv — non-exclusive license to distribute](http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07737) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.07737) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2608.07737](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2608.07737) · [arXiv 2608.07737](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07737) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7202173671) **Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) ## Summary The paper asks whether Saussure's principle that the linguistic sign is arbitrary, and the deconstructionist views built on it, hold for Classical Arabic. The author argues the principle was never given a testable definition and supplies one. Arabic word formation is modelled as a system M = ⟨R, P, ι, ρ⟩. Roots and patterns each carry meaning, an interdigitation operator combines them, and a phonological rewriting step produces the surface form. Word meaning is a composition of root meaning and pattern meaning. On this basis the paper proves several theorems: - Every word comes from one root–pattern pair. - Meaning is fixed before the surface form exists. - Under a strict definition of absolute arbitrariness, and given the phonosemantic patterns described by Ibn Jinni, no Arabic signifier is absolutely arbitrary. Relative arbitrariness is then defined through conditional Kolmogorov complexity. It is undecidable in general but decidable for Arabic. The work is purely formal and philosophical. It uses no corpus, treebank or empirical evaluation. Its claimed contribution is methodological: it insists that claims about arbitrariness be stated in decidable, falsifiable form. ## Key points - **Formal model.** Morphology operator M = ρ ∘ ι. Semantic assignment is µ(M(R,P)) = F(σ_R(R), σ_P(P)). It is contrasted with a Strong Surface Semantic Assignment (SSSA) hypothesis, under which meaning attaches only to finished surface words. - **Three theorems:** - Morphological Correspondence (each word comes from one root–pattern pair). - Semantic Localization (meaning is set at the derivational stage). - Structural Impossibility (no absolutely arbitrary Arabic sign). - **Relative arbitrariness** is defined as a "no-rule" property via conditional Kolmogorov complexity. The general case is undecidable. For motivated Arabic signifiers the value is provably below 1, while English stems are treated as incompressible stored facts. - **Three-level scheme:** - Level W: word. - Level M: morpheme. - Level P: sub-root/phoneme. Indo-European languages are claimed to be arbitrary at W, whereas Arabic is motivated at W and M, leaving only the assignment of consonant clusters to semantic fields (Level P) conventional. - **Examples.** Root k-l-b yields "dog" and also craving and clutching senses. Root m-l-k ("possess") is tied to a phonosemantic cluster meaning strength. The paper is explicitly an idealization that sets exceptions aside. ## Interesting ideas - **Meaning composed below the word.** Word meaning is built as a function of a stem meaning and a pattern/affix meaning instead of being attached to the finished word, so derived forms inherit meaning by rule. — For Mova (tokens): The English morphology crate could emit, for derivations like reader/driver, a lemma plus an affix role (agent, instrument), giving downstream stages an explainable meaning source for unseen derived words. - **Two-stage generator.** Word formation is split into a combine step (ι) and a separate phonological rewrite step (ρ), which keeps the abstract structure clean and isolates the surface quirks. — For Mova (back): Text generation could first assemble lemma plus morphological features and then apply a separate, auditable spelling/inflection rewrite layer, making generation errors easy to localize. - **Arbitrariness as compressibility.** How arbitrary an item is gets measured by how much of it remains unexplained given the known rule system, so "arbitrary" means "not compressible by current rules." — For Mova (learn): Lexical or parsing behaviour could be scored by how much is covered by induced repair rules versus stored as exceptions, tracking whether new rules really shrink the residue. - **Locating where conventionality lives.** Separating word, morpheme and sub-morpheme levels lets one say precisely at which depth a mapping stops being rule-governed. — For Mova (world): Compiled knowledge (verb classes, WordNet senses) could be tagged by the level at which a meaning is motivated (affix rule, class membership, or brute lexical fact), keeping provenance explicit in the world model. - **Insistence on decidable criteria.** The paper refuses to treat a principle as scientific until it has an operational, falsifiable definition. — For Mova (learn): Every evaluation claim could be tied to an explicit decision procedure with a negative control, so a claimed improvement cannot rest on an undefined notion such as "understands better." *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @misc{abdelwahab2026no, title = {{The No-Meaning Falsity: The Structural Impossibility of the Arbitrary Sign in Classical Arabic}}, author = {Abdelwahab, Elnaserledinellah Mahmoud}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.07737}, eprint = {2608.07737}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2608.07737} } ``` - [← previous The Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/trager-2026-moral-foundations-reddit-corpus/) - [next → The past and future of Fairslator](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mechura-2026-past-future-fairslator/) - [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/10/) ## References 15 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Baalbaki, R. (2014). The Legacy of the Kitāb: Sībawayhi’s Analytical Methods. Brill. 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