  This work presents an information-theoretic operationalisation of
cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. It is not a new idea that there are small,
cross-linguistic associations between the forms and meanings of words. For
instance, it has been claimed (Blasi et al., 2016) that the word for "tongue"
is more likely than chance to contain the phone [l]. By controlling for the
influence of language family and geographic proximity within a very large
concept-aligned, cross-lingual lexicon, we extend methods previously used to
detect within language non-arbitrariness (Pimentel et al., 2019) to measure
cross-linguistic associations. We find that there is a significant effect of
non-arbitrariness, but it is unsurprisingly small (less than 0.5% on average
according to our information-theoretic estimate). We also provide a
concept-level analysis which shows that a quarter of the concepts considered in
our work exhibit a significant level of cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. In
sum, the paper provides new methods to detect cross-linguistic associations at
scale, and confirms their effects are minor.
