Arbitrary Cause.

This article introduces the phrase arbitrary cause as a precise description of the contingent structural relationship of figurative language to the social sphere of linguistic agency and lexical choice. The purpose is to demonstrate the impact of causality on the process of figurative representation and to describe the overmotivated function of signification found in figurative representation. It states that the term causality as used in the term arbitrary cause is similar to what philosophers refer as regularity. It likewise states that the phrase arbitrary cause is concerned not with objects, but with the arbitrary nature of the syntagmatic intervention of a third term into dichotomy.