Week 8 - Sound Symbolism & Semantic Change

Sound symbolism

• Similarity between form and meaning

• Signified: Meaning of the form (i.e. concept)

• Signifier: linguistic form (i.e. sound pattern)

Onomatopeia

• When word mimics a sound closely associated with the meaning of the word

• Common source of new words

  • e.g. moo, meow, bang, beep

• Conforms to the phonological system of a language

  • meow vs Greek νιάου niáou vs Malay ngeong vs Japanese にゃあ nyā vs Korean

    야옹 yaong

• Can be obscured by sound change over time

  • meow vs ME mew

• Can also be reisistant to sound change (reinforced after sound changes occur)

Tactille sound symbolism

• Connection between sounds and some physical quality

  • e.g. Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness

Phonaesthemes

• Connection between a set of sounds and some meaning

  • e.g. gl- is connected to words that pertain to light or vision (but its v controversial)

    • glare, glimmer, gleam, gloss, glimpse, etc

Nursery forms

• Words learned very early on during child acquisition often share similarities between non-related languages

  • Labial consonants /b/, /m/, or /p/ or alveolar /n/, /t/, or /d/

  • mama and papa/baba

Sound symbolism and etymology

• Phonaesthemes and symbolic sounds are difficult to pin down and are often unconvincing

• Nursery forms are much more cleand and inform our comparative methodology

  • BUT we shouldn’t compare nursery forms as languages have similar sounds

How to know if a sound is onomatopeic?

• Form

  • Signifies something that pertains to some sound/noise?

  • Conforms with phonological system of languages in a way that makes sense?

• Typology

  • Are there other languages that have similar words that are onomatopeic?

• Comparison

  • If highly frequent word is not related or borrowed and has right form:meaning correspondence, may be onomatopeic

  • Some onomatopeiic words can be reconstructed

Semantic change

• Changes in meaning rather than form

• Necessary for proper comparison

• Sometimes the only identifiable change is change in meaning

• Often tied to culture and tells us more about the past

Lexical change

• Changes in meaning of specific lexical items

• Quite different than most other work on synchronic semantics

1. Changes in form are not related to culture or history of speakers

2. Changes in form are governed by rpinciples of regularity (word-specific)

Widening

• Meaning goes from narrow to broader focus

  • boss when addressing a customer or friend

Narrowing

• Meaning goes from a broader focus to a narrow focus

  • wife < Old English wīf ‘woman’

    German Weib ‘woman’

Metaphor

• A is like B

• Often very vague

• Highly dependent on culture

  • e.g. English chill ‘relax, calm down’ < ‘cool

  • English grasp ‘seize, understand’ < ‘seize’

Metonymy

• A is associated with B

• Highly dependent on culture

• Even though metonymy and metaphor are traditionally separated, many challenges involve aspects of both

  • e.g. English tea ‘tea-time’ < tea

    • Like tea being used as a verb

Synechoce

• Type of metonymy

• Part-to-whole relationship

  • e.g. English hired hand, Malay bulan, Mandarin ⽉ yuè

    • month vs moon

Pejoration

• Meaning goes from positive/neutral to negative

  • e.g. disease < dis+ease ‘discomfort’

  • sinister < Middle English sinistre ‘unlucky’ < Old French sinistre ‘left

Amelioration

• Meaning goes from negative/neutral to positive

  • e.g. pretty < Old English prættiġ ‘sly, crafty’

Taboo deformation

• Replacing a word/phrase with another to reduce obsecurity

  • rooster has replaced cock for the word for an ‘adult male chicken’

• Minced oaths

  • oh my gosh, jeez, shoot

Algospeak

• Coded language to avoid content moderation

  • unalive, acoustic etc

Elipsis

• When one word adopts the meaning of another word within the same phrasal constituent

  • e.g. contacts from contact lenses, capital from capital city

Hyperbole

• Shift in meaning due to exaggeration

  • terribly, horribly, awfully > ‘very’

  • dumb ‘stupid’ < ‘unable to speak’

Litotes

• Shift in meaning due to exaggeration through understatement

  • Something framed as ‘of no importance’ when in reality it is worth noting

    • e.g. hit as in hitman