Eggcorn Forum

David-

I think we agreed before that the substance of our discussion revolved around the meaning we attached to “morpheme.”

I see morphemic status lying along a spectrum. On the one end is the claim that every sound contributes to meaning. Some sounds contribute more, some less, of course. Even if we could locate that rare bird, the sound that had no meaning, it would quickly gain a meaning-as soon as a language community began to employ the sound, someone would use it to make differences in meaning. Call this position the left end of the spectrum.

The other end of the spectrum is the dictionary end. On this end we let the modern dictionary, as the lexigraphical art is currently practiced, determine the morphemes of our language. Only words in the dictionary have meanings. Call this the right end.

I find myself more or less in the middle of this spectrum. I agree with those on the left that there are adfixes and even a few infixes that have definable semantic components. There are multiword units that act as unitary morphemes. Even some onomatopoetic sounds function as morphemes. But I also agree with those on the right that there are sounds that are not morphemes. To be a morpheme a sound has to play some role, historical or contemporary, in syntax and/or grammatical inflections in a language. The sound has to carry its meaning consistently across the range of its use in ways that can be statistically analyzed. In short, there has to be some semi-scientific way of defining what is and is not a morpheme.

As for frequentative “-er,” I would let it stand as an English morpheme simply because it did strong morphemic stuff at one point in the history of the language. Whether or not it is still a morpheme for a significant group of speakers, however, is an open question. English has become a lake into which many “-er” morphemes flow. The OED, for example, has six separate entries for “-er, suffix,” each with a different etymological source. Every new ”-er” stream dilutes the English lake a little, making it harder for speakers using an “-er” suffix to get listeners to focus on the right one. I suspect that it is no longer possible to coin a new verb with a frequentative “-er” and have a listener divine your intention. Keeping it as an English morpheme helps me to understand the spelling and history of some English words that are still in use, however, so I’m not ready to let it slip into the fuzz on the left side of the spectrum.

Thanks, Pat, for giving us a handle. “Phonesthesia,” it turns out, is a convenient term for looking up some of the discussion and debate on the topic of sound symbolism. By using it as a search term, I located a helpful paper by Benjamin Shisler at http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/9 … npap1.html .

Critical studies in phonesthetics often lack a sense of what constitutes meaningful argument. In order to make useful claims, we need more than a grab bag of words that share a sound and meaning. If I argue (just to make up an example) that the initial /t/ sound indicates a combination of science and mechanical skill because it occurs in the words “technology,” “train,” “television,” “typewriter” and “tool,” and I write a paper about it and get ten people to agree with me, have I really said anything meaningful? The arguments advanced in some phonesthetics papers remind me of the sentence that W. H. Auden (Foreword to Owen Barfield’s History in English Words) puts in the mouth of a hypothetical Frenchman: “The great advantage of the French language is that in it the words occur in the order in which one thinks them.” If we presuppose that everyone thinks in French, the French language is obviously the best one to use. If we presuppose that correlations between English symbols and sounds are morphemes a-borning, we can find morphemes and protomorphemes everywhere we look. I am more comfortable with an arbitrary relationship between sound and symbol as the gold standard. Non-accidental connections are allowed only in special cases, ones for which we have some hard evidence that sounds and symbols are linked, such as such as onomatopoeic words and historical morphemes.

Plato stands as a negative example of where phonesthetic thoughts can lead. Several sections of his dialogue Cratylus anticipate some ideas of sound symbols. Here, from Benjamin Jowett’s translation (http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/6/1/161 … 1616-h.htm) is Socrates at his most absurd:

SOCRATES: My first notions of original names are truly wild and ridiculous, though I have no objection to impart them to you if you desire, and I hope that you will communicate to me in return anything better which you may have.
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HERMOGENES: Fear not; I will do my best.
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SOCRATES: In the first place, the letter rho appears to me to be the general instrument expressing all motion (kinesis)..... Now the letter rho, as I was saying, appeared to the imposer of names an excellent instrument for the expression of motion; and he frequently uses the letter for this purpose: for example, in the actual words rein and roe he represents motion by rho; also in the words tromos (trembling), trachus (rugged); and again, in words such as krouein (strike), thrauein (crush), ereikein (bruise), thruptein (break), kermatixein (crumble), rumbein (whirl): of all these sorts of movements he generally finds an expression in the letter R, because, as I imagine, he had observed that the tongue was most agitated and least at rest in the pronunciation of this letter, which he therefore used in order to express motion, just as by the letter iota he expresses the subtle elements which pass through all things. This is why he uses the letter iota as imitative of motion, ienai, iesthai. And there is another class of letters, phi, psi, sigma, and xi, of which the pronunciation is accompanied by great expenditure of breath; these are used in the imitation of such notions as psuchron (shivering), xeon (seething), seiesthai, (to be shaken), seismos (shock), and are always introduced by the giver of names when he wants to imitate what is phusodes (windy). He seems to have thought that the closing and pressure of the tongue in the utterance of delta and tau was expressive of binding and rest in a place: he further observed the liquid movement of lambda, in the pronunciation of which the tongue slips, and in this he found the expression of smoothness, as in leios (level), and in the word oliothanein (to slip) itself, liparon (sleek), in the word kollodes (gluey), and the like: the heavier sound of gamma detained the slipping tongue, and the union of the two gave the notion of a glutinous clammy nature, as in glischros, glukus, gloiodes. The nu he observed to be sounded from within, and therefore to have a notion of inwardness; hence he introduced the sound in endos and entos: alpha he assigned to the expression of size, and nu of length, because they are great letters: omicron was the sign of roundness, and therefore there is plenty of omicron mixed up in the word goggulon (round). Thus did the legislator, reducing all things into letters and syllables, and impressing on them names and signs, and out of them by imitation compounding other signs. That is my view, Hermogenes, of the truth of names….

The claims of the phonethesiasts don’t take this train as far as Socrates did. But the train is heading in the direction that Socrates is going, and it is not clear to me where the stations are that let us get off this “wild and ridiculous” line of thought.

I wasn’t reading the studies so much as I was reading about them.

But if you want a sample author, take a look at the work of Margaret Magnus, who did a Ph.D. in sound symbolism. Her pages are at http://www.trismegistos.com/MagicalLetterPage/ The perspectives on English sound and meaning on these pages reproduce Socrates’ take on Attic Greek.

The methodological problems with the studies on the Magnus pages boil down to two problems: sampling bias (semantic categories are selected with the data set in mind) and correlation/causality. Conceptual problems add to the confusion-chiefly, the use of “meaning” and “morpheme” in senses so broad that they lose almost all their historical moorings.

Thanks for the reference. Our local university library has the Hinton volume. I’ll take a look at it.

I suspect that I’ll agree with much of what’s in the Sound Symbolism book. I don’t have any large, programmatic disagreement with sound symbolism-as I said earlier, I’d put myself in the middle of the spectrum. Here, for example, is an academic study of sound symbolism in nicknames that seems to me to do a lot of its investigation in the right way (Nicknames, when you think about it, are a good place to look for sound symbolism-the peculiar semantics of names opens the door for phonetic influences on meaning.). But when I look at approaches to sound symbolism like that in the Magnus books, the little troll inside me, the one that I nursed all those years that I did philosophy and logic, starts yammering away, and I can’t seem to make it shut up.

Disagreements over the extent and significance of sound symbolistic phenomena, as I’m sure you’re aware, go back a long way in linguistics. We’re probably recapitulating discussions that have happened many times over the last century. See, for examples, the disagreements between Firth and Jespersen in Robin Allott’s 1995 article on “Sound Symbolism.”

Last edited by kem (2009-12-31 21:15:57)

all the thousands of cases with the multi-polysemous nominalizer – er as in rocker, drawer, trailer, ruler, computer, Britisher, nor’easter, grounder, beaker don’t seem to include a salient repetitive or frequentative meaning.

I’m not so sure. I have been known to rock, but I’m a long way from being a rocker. I am a teacher though.