Re: Sound symbolism and language

From: Mark Mills (mmills@htcomp.net)
Date: Sun Jan 14 2001 - 20:07:00 GMT

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    Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2001 14:07:00 -0600
    To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    From: Mark Mills <mmills@htcomp.net>
    Subject: Re: Sound symbolism and language
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    Jess,

    At 12:48 PM 1/14/01 -0500, you wrote:
    >Believers in macrogenetic relationship of languages often use such
    >resemblances as "evidence" for their claims (Mayan to Welsh, for ex.).

    I'm interested in having a few examples.

    >That leaves motivation.

    Motivation seems a bit odd choice of terms. Why not 'intrinsic semantics'
    or 'internal feedback'?

    >Even though you
    >can structurally scan an utterance from the most complex combinatorics
    >(texts, etc.) down through clause and phrase, word and root, phoneme and then
    >feature and come up with a systematic characterization, "meaning" (as she is
    >currently construed) parallels only down to roots, and no further.

    Is this 'top down' or 'bottom up'? Does this mean 'roots' have parallel
    meaning, but higher orders of organization don't or the other way around?

    A little while back I mentioned a paper
    (http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/Abstracts/00-12-068abs.html) on
    power-law distributions (Zipf-Pareto laws) for word use. Does your work
    suggest word usage produces power-law distributions ( linear relationship
    on log-log graphs with frequency of use on the x axis and '% used more
    often' on the Y axis).

    Mark

    http://www.htcomp.net/markmills

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