Teacher Discussion Forums

I have always thought that the idea that linguistic signs, the sounds of words, are generally arbitrary things with no connection to the reference is a bit overdone in linguistuics. This thesis mentioned in answer to a question on the linguist list about many "bl" words such as "blather" and "blah" etc having a connection with sound seems interesting.

(this thesis is not concerned with normal onomatopoeia, "moo" and such like)

Any thoughts?

http://www.trismegistos.com/Dissertation/

linguist list link:

http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/messag ... =200428861

Is this kind of stuff familiar to the rest of you? (I rather wonder if the author in question, Margaret Magnus, didn't write this entry herself!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism

And do you agree with me, by the way, that across languages female names have a tendency to end in a vowel? Researching it a bit, it seems most people do, and I found this blog about a funnier issue that I perhaps should have begun a wild rambling thread about instead!

http://blog.stuffblackpeoplelove.com/20 ... h-a-vowel/

Well, I noticed that the exact same copy of Hamano's book (The Sound-Symbolic System of Japanese) was always in Kinokuniya, unsold, on my many visits.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Axoi ... g=PA140&dq

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1S2IP1GXYusC (Of immediate practical use, in comparison)

But seriously, people can express far more abstract things than referents of mimesis.* Which really does leave us with quite a stock (i.e. a massive majority) of truly (=will always seem to (have) be(en)) arbitrary sound-symbols still.

*Which I would assume is just a type of play that developmentally followed, draws upon and now nicely complements their language - specifically, its full range of phonemes - generally; that is, I am assuming that mimesis is not held in the literature to be a precursor of full/true language (mimesis just an interesting subarea of synchronic structural linguistics, right?). I mean, animals don't go around imitating sounds in their environment or whatever, do they? (I suppose I should actually read up on this stuff before posting...maybe the following book would "also" be a good start? (I have to admit that apart from the interesting-looking Wiki page, I haven't followed your links yet, Woody!) http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hCr0lAF9MtgC ).

Korean (which is "unrelated to Japanese" ) has lots of those kinds of obviously mimetic words too - he sludgy-wudgily put the manure in the bucket and clompy-stompily walked over to the field sort of stuff.

The dissertation I linked takes it all much beyond that though (however I'm not quite sure what is really supposed to be new about it, it is just new to me. The idea that "hard" nouns like tools will tend to have "hard" sounds seems to be treated as old hat here). Here is part of the abstract:

* I find that much confusion regarding linguistic iconism can be attributed to the assumption that 'word semantics' is best understood as 'word reference'. I believe these tests show this presumption to be unhelpful. If a word's meaning is analyzed into components -- only one of which is its referent -- it can be shown that some aspects of a word's meaning are arbitrary and others are not. It's therefore not the case that in some words or languages iconism holds more sway than in others. Rather since all words must have these requisite semantic components in order to function at all, the semantics of any word must be in part predictable from its form and in part not.

* Reference is essentially arbitrary. One cannot predict the referent of a word just by hearing it. In words with more concrete reference, the component of reference is more salient, and the iconic sound-meaning is consequently less salient. Therefore, the apparent effect of the sound-meaning is inversely proportional on the concreteness of the referent.

* Individual phonemes and phonetic features are meaning-bearing. They each have a unique semantics which can be identified by first measuring the semantic disproportions within phonologically defined classes of words and then the converse -- measuring the phonological disproportions within semantic classes. One finds in this way that every word which contains a given phoneme bears an element of meaning which is absent in words not containing this phoneme. One finds further than the effect of the phoneme-meaning varies with the position that the phoneme bears within the syllable. In addition, one finds that all phonemes which have a common phonetic feature also have a common element of meaning.

* It is important to distinguish types of sound-meaning correlations:

- The least fundamental kind of sound-meaning correlation is onomatopoeia. It does not concern me in this dissertation.

- The type of correlation which accounts for the 'phonesthemes' or disproportions between semantic classes and phonological form is most commonly called 'Clustering'. I refer to it also as Phonosemantic Association in order to emphasize that it is a side-effect of a natural and productive tendency in human psychology to associate any form with a coherent referent.

- The most fundamental and least salient type of linguistic iconism I will refer to as 'True Iconism', or the level on which form and content are one. This type of correlation is universal, productive in every word, non-arbitrary, and blind to all higher level linguistic distinctions such as referent, part of speech, semantic class and argument structure.