Phonestheme
Encyclopedia
The term phonestheme was coined in 1930 by British linguist J. R. Firth
(from the Greek φωνή phone, "sound", and αἴσθημα aisthema, "perception" from αίσθάνομαι aisthanomai, "I perceive") to label the systematic pairing of form and meaning
in a language
.
A phonestheme is different from a morpheme
because it does not meet the normal criterion of compositionality.
Within Peirce's "theory of signs" the phonestheme is considered to be an "icon" rather than a "symbol" or an "index".
For example, the English phonaestheme "gl-" occurs in a large number of words relating to light or vision, like "glitter", "glisten", "glow", "gleam", "glare", "glint", and so on; yet, despite this, the remainder of each word is not itself a morpheme (i.e., a pairing of form and meaning); i.e., "-isten", "-ow", and "eam" do not make meaningful contributions to "glisten", "glow", and "gleam".
There are three main ways in which phonesthemes are empirically identified.
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.
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
.
, Austronesian languages
, and Japanese.
While phonesthemes have mostly been identified in the onsets of words and syllables, they can have other forms.There has been some argument that sequences 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.
In addition to the distribution of phonesthemes, linguists consider 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.
. 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.
J. R. Firth
John Rupert Firth , commonly known as J. R. Firth, was an English linguist. He was Professor of English at the University of the Punjab from 1919-1928...
(from the Greek φωνή phone, "sound", and αἴσθημα aisthema, "perception" from αίσθάνομαι aisthanomai, "I perceive") to label the systematic pairing of form and meaning
Meaning (linguistics)
In linguistics, meaning is what is expressed by the writer or speaker, and what is conveyed to the reader or listener, provided that they talk about the same thing . In other words if the object and the name of the object and the concepts in their head are the same...
in a language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
.
A phonestheme is different from a morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
because it does not meet the normal criterion of compositionality.
Within Peirce's "theory of signs" the phonestheme is considered to be an "icon" rather than a "symbol" or an "index".
Identification
Phonesthemes are of critical interest to students of the internal structure of words because they appear to be a case where the internal structure of the word is non-compositional; i.e., a word with a phonestheme in it has other material in it that is not itself a morpheme.For example, the English phonaestheme "gl-" occurs in a large number of words relating to light or vision, like "glitter", "glisten", "glow", "gleam", "glare", "glint", and so on; yet, despite this, the remainder of each word is not itself a morpheme (i.e., a pairing of form and meaning); i.e., "-isten", "-ow", and "eam" do not make meaningful contributions to "glisten", "glow", and "gleam".
There are three main ways in which phonesthemes are empirically identified.
Corpus studies
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.
Study of patterns in neologisms
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.Study of linguistic processing patterns
The final type of evidence uses the methods of psycholinguisticsPsycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
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
Sound symbolism
Sound symbolism or phonosemantics is a branch of linguistics and refers to the idea that vocal sounds have meaning. In particular, sound symbolism is the idea that phonemes carry meaning in and of themselves.-Origin:...
.
Distribution
Phonesthemes have been documented in numerous languages from diverse language families, among them English, Swedish, and other Indo-European languagesIndo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
, Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
, and Japanese.
While phonesthemes have mostly been identified in the onsets of words and syllables, they can have other forms.There has been some argument that sequences 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.
In addition to the distribution of phonesthemes, linguists consider 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.
Examples
Examples of phonesthemes in English (i.e., 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.Phonesthesia
A further phonesthetic phenomenon, ablaut phonesthesia, mimics the paradigm of a strong verb like swim : swam : swum with internal vowel change or apophonyApophony
In linguistics, apophony is the alternation of sounds within a word that indicates grammatical information .-Description:Apophony is...
. 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.
See also
- Phonesthesia
- Phonosemantics
- Blend (linguistics)
- ReduplicationReduplicationReduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....
- Sphota
- true nameTrue nameA true name is a name of a thing or being that expresses, or is somehow identical with, its true nature. The notion that language, or some specific sacred language, refers to things by their true names has been central to philosophical and grammatical study as well as various traditions of magic,...
- sound symbolismSound symbolismSound symbolism or phonosemantics is a branch of linguistics and refers to the idea that vocal sounds have meaning. In particular, sound symbolism is the idea that phonemes carry meaning in and of themselves.-Origin:...