Information AboutPhonestheme |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT PHONESTHEME | |
| phonetics | |
| pragmatics | |
| semantics | |
| semiotics | |
| phonaesthetics | |
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Phonesthemes have been documented in numerous languages from diverse language families, among them English, Swedish, and other Indo-European languages, Austronesian languages, and Japanese. Examples of proposed phonesthemes in English, aside from "gl-", include "sn-", related to the mouth or nose, as in "snarl", "snout", "snicker", "snack", and so on, and "sl-", which appears in words denoting frictionless motion, like "slide", "slick", "sled", and so on. While phonesthemes have mostly been studied in English, and mostly in onsets of words and syllables, they can have other forms. There has been some argument that codas like "ash" and "ack" in English also serve as phonesthemes, due to their patterning in words that denote forceful, destructive contact ("smash", "crash", "bash", etc.) and abrupt contact ("smack", "whack", "crack", etc.), respectively. A further phonesthetic phenomenon, ablaut ''. Take the word "flip." It has an alliterative group, "fl-", that evokes the volatility of fly, flow, flee, fleet, flash, flake, and flick. Its rhymes, dip, sip, quip, drip, pip, tip, slip, and so forth, add to a connotation of minor labile action. But it is also part of an ablaut series where vowel alternation has semantic value (as in "flip-flop"). This kind of vowel alternation can be found in reduplicated word pairs like "pitter-patter," "chit-chat," "tip-top," or "tip-tap." The series ''flip'' : ''flap'' : ''flop'' : ''flub'' has the same vowels as ''sing'' : ''sang'' : ''song'' : ''sung''. Another such series is ''drip'' : ''drop'' : ''droop'' : ''drape''. A regularity of phonesthetic relationship is shown by proportional analogies such as ''clip'' : ''clasp'' :: ''grip'' : ''grasp'' or ''crash'' : ''crush'' :: ''mash'' : ''mush'' or ''crash'' : ''crunch'' :: ''mash'' : ''munch''. It is critical to distinguish two aspects of phonesthemes. The first is their distribution - the set of words where they occur in a language, and the extent to which their appearance in these words is statistically different from what would be expected at chance. The second is their motivation. In some cases, there may appear to be good sound-symbolic reasons why phonesthemes would have the form they have. In the case of "-ack", for example, we might imagine that the words sharing this phonestheme do so because they denote events that would produce a similar sound. But critically, there are many phonesthemes for which there can be no sound-symbolic basis, such as "gl-", for the simple reason that their meanings (such as 'pertaining to light or vision') entail no sound. There are three main ways in which phonesthemes are documented empirically. The first is through corpus studies, where the words of a language are subjected to statistical analysis, and the particular form-meaning pairing, or phonestheme, is shown to constitute a statistically unexpected distribution in the lexicon or not. Corpus studies can inform a researcher about the current state of the lexicon, a critical first step, but importantly are completely uninformative when it comes to questions of whether and how phonesthemes are represented in the minds of language users. The second type of approach makes use of the tendency for phonesthemes to participate in the coinage and interpretation of Neologisms , new words in a language. Various studies have demonstrated that when asked to invent or interpret new words, subjects tend to follow patterns predicted by looking at the phonesthemes in their language. This approach demonstrates the vitality of phonesthemic patterns, but still does not provide any evidence about whether or how phonesthemes are represented in the minds of speaker-hearers. The final type of evidence uses the methods of Psycholinguistics to study exactly how phonesthemes participate in language processing. One such method is phonesthemic priming, akin to morphological priming, which demonstrates that people represent phonesthemes much as they do typical morphemes, despite the fact that phonesthemes are non-compositional. Discussions of phonesthesia are often grouped with other phenomena under the rubric of Sound Symbolism . See also REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS |
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