phonosemantics

From: Zylogy@aol.com
Date: Mon Jan 15 2001 - 16:39:23 GMT

  • Next message: William Benzon: "culture and memetics"

    Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id QAA17460 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 15 Jan 2001 16:42:37 GMT
    From: <Zylogy@aol.com>
    Message-ID: <50.100fd116.279481bb@aol.com>
    Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 11:39:23 EST
    Subject: phonosemantics
    To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    CC: Zylogy@aol.com
    Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
    X-Mailer: AOL 5.0 for Windows sub 129
    Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk
    Precedence: bulk
    Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    

    Hi. Answer for Vincent Campbell- essentially since the early part of the 20th
    century its been dogma in linguistics that the outer form of a word- its
    surface sound structure as well as its underlying systematic representation
    in more abstract form (phonology)- was only arbitrarily linked to whatever
    meaning it was intended to convey- thus "dog" as a concept could have
    whatever sounds attached to it anyone cared to name. Meaning of any sound
    string was thus conventional. The only exceptions generally allowed in this
    view are onomatopes.

    Problem with the above view is that it is way too simple and downright wrong
    in many ways. Sure there are huge variations in the ways concepts are carried
    as words- but there is also striking uniformity, at many levels, elsewhere.
    Depends on where in the vocabulary you are looking. Linguists interested in
    the reconstruction of parent languages or looking for deeper genetic
    connections have noticed that certain vocabulary (called "core") tends to be
    relatively resistant to replacement over long stretches of time, and this
    diagnostic set (which can be arbitrarily as large as one chooses it to be) is
    never very large by comparison with the size of the total vocabulary.

    Historical change is a given- no form once in a lexicon can escape it, so
    obviously words that hang around in the vocabulary because often used will
    end up mutated much more often than nonce creations. Since this set of
    long-used words is also the diagnostic tool, its what linguists see when they
    compare languages. And since historical changes go off in all sorts of
    different directions relatively independently in any language, after a while
    the basic vocabulary will be radically different from language to language.

    That said, let me tell you about the other side of the vocabulary- There are
    many languages which have very high proportions of phonosemantically
    transparent vocabulary. Phonosemantic transparency means that the form of the
    word and its meaning are not totally arbitrarily linked, but that the meaning
    is in some way predictable from the form. Onomatopes are like this, but they
    only convey sound for sound. Transparent vocabulary can convey all sorts of
    sensory impressions, movement patterns, etc. above and beyond mere
    onomatopoeia. The breakdown of form to meaning goes down through the root,
    past phoneme, and down into the individual abstract features of each phoneme
    (such as voicing, consonantality, articulatory position, etc.).

    Most SubSaharan African languages have huge numbers of what are termed
    ideophones- these are transparent forms in the thousands in any language,
    expandable by reduplication (repetition of various portions of the word) and
    infixation. Since most of these languages don't have much in the way of
    adjectives/adverbs as we normally think of them, they are stand-ins. But they
    are also much more. There is very strong evidence that these forms actually
    feed the normal lexicon- ideophone roots BECOME regular verb roots (its
    happening, for instance, right now in Zulu).

    Altaic languages (Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, Korean, maybe Japanese) have
    thousands of "expressives" as they are termed in English, again very similar
    to the ideophones in African languages, and similarly used. One of the
    reasons they are needed is that the numbers of true verb roots in these
    languages tend to be very small- and broad in meaning. Expressives and
    ideophones help to specify meaning, particularly in the area of manner of
    action. Languages such as English, which have more complex roots which
    incorporate manner specification, don't need such a supplementary vocabulary,
    and so don't have a separate word class of ideophones.
    Other languages with large numbers of such forms include Indonesian and many
    of its relatives, Tamil and its relatives in India, Khmer, Vietnamese- I
    could go on and on.

    But this is a typological thing- there are other kinds of languages where
    affixal morphology handles the manner specification- so you have neither
    complex roots (as in Indoeuropean languages) nor a special word class. Many,
    if not most of the languages of the Americas are/were like this- though there
    are also examples in the Old World too.

    Language type is a cyclic thing- and even the complex roots found in
    Indoeuropean languages appear to have originated from a combination of
    expressive root plus auxiliary verb. That process happened thousands of years
    ago, and in many of the living languages of the family the evidence is being
    worn away by historical change. But reconstructed parent forms show it in its
    full flower. Interestingly, this process is happening right now in the Altaic
    languages (and as I mentioned, also in Zulu and other African languages).
    Once a significant portion has been transferred, the independent word class
    will die off. In other languages they are on the rise. Big cycle of renewal.

    Scholars working on Uralic languages (such as Finnish, Hungarian) estimate
    that perhaps 40% of the total root inventory consists of these
    phonosemantically transparent forms- if one considers only verbs the
    proportion is much higher.

    In phonosemantically transparent vocabulary the root acts like an algebraic
    formula, but for meaning. Even in English there are still traces- think of
    the sequence of verbs ending in -ag: bag, drag, lag, sag, tag, nag etc.
    where though the particular application may be different from form to form,
    all give a sense of being held back or down by some force, generally from
    behind, at least metaphorically. Or consider the set in -am: ram, cram,
    slam, dam, etc., giving the very different sense of pressure upon something
    causing densification, confinement, etc. There are actually thousands of
    such remnant sets in English and other Indoeuropean languages, but the
    connections between items are spotty, the network of related forms diffuse.
    All because of a combination of historical change and random attrition of
    intermediate forms (if you have a Darwinian slant this'll sound familiar).

    In languages with rich sets of expressive or ideophonic forms, you get whole
    families of related terms which might vary by one or more features. Japanese
    and Korean, for instance, utilize voicing contrast on consonants in these
    terms to convey bigness or smallness of the same action/actor. Vowel height
    conveys vertical height in the semantics. And so on. It is, in effect, really
    "one" word with lots of regular variation, a multidimensional matrix covering
    all sensorimotor possibilities.

    Experiments have been done on many groups of subjects over the last 75 years,
    and depending on the type of experiment almost always show very strong
    results, even with speakers of unrelated languages. For instance, if I told
    you that the consonantal skeleton m-l referred to a body of water, and then
    gave you the series mil, mel, mal, mol, mul you could tell me which was a
    wide one, which one a deep one, and so on. Results between individuals seem
    to vary, but always are systematic, as if the brain was automatically forcing
    order on the situation.

    The particular values of the phonemes and features in semantic terms vary
    from language to language as well, but not wildly, and the relationships of
    the phonemes to each other is also quite systematic. The average language
    with large numbers of ideophones or expressives has between four and eight
    articulatory positions for consonants, and the phonological relationships can
    be mapped as a tetrahedron for the former and a cube for the latter (I didn't
    make this up). Each vertex of the former is capable of splitting in two, and
    studies have shown that neighboring vowels are the most powerful promotor of
    this. There is a method to the madness.

    What you end up with is a diagrammatical iconic relationship between phonemes
    which can be expressed as axial feature specifications and then feature
    strings for each of the vertices. Interestingly, this diagram is completely
    unconscious, though it has consequences throughout the lexicon and on the way
    we categorize our sensory and motor impressions.

    Fair enough? The organization I cofounded to bring together people interested
    in iconicity in language structure and usage has a web page at
    http://www.conknet.com/~mmagnus/LIA/index.html and there are numerous links
    to various related web pages. I recommend Margaret Magnus' (our web guru)
    bibliography, which is growing all the time. And on her pages and others' you
    will find detailed explication of the topic. We also have a discussion list
    with archives going back more than a year and a half, linked to the
    organization page. Hope you take a look (and anyone else that might be
    interested in this vastly underdiscussed area).

    Jess Tauber
    zylogy@aol.com

    ===============================================================
    This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
    Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
    For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
    see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jan 15 2001 - 16:44:12 GMT