Re: The Myth of Arbitrariness
- From: jlawler@xxxxxxxxx (John Lawler)
- Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 10:33:37 GMT
Vincent Ramos <siva_sans_spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim writes
>> Thanks Vincent. Have you got this chapter as a digital file or would
>> you recommend the book? When was it published?
>I only possess a paperback edition of the book. I really recommend it:
>R. Jakobson and L. Waugh, _The sound shape of language_, ISBN
>2-7073-0281-3. You may buy it on Amazon (or any other online
>bookseller):
><http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3110172852/104-0652232-3447132?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance>.
>The chapter I was talking about lately shows how deep are
>relationships between sounds and language, from phonetics and
>phonology point of view to litterature and especially poetry, where
>sounds may convey a certain cloud of meanings without needing to be
>related to words. For instance, words with an /i/ tend to be
>associated with thin things, though words with /u/ are felt as big
>(Jakobson names this a "phonic symbolism").
>Jespersen also worked on this subject, in _Symbolic value of the vowel
>i_ (1922 for the first edition); see also Sommerfelt and Sapir.
>The end of the book may also be a good introduction to stylistics.
Jakobson is always worth reading. Indeed, the relation between
sound and meaning is not nearly so arbitrary as Saussure
apparently thought. Aside from onomatopoeia, which is a special
case, there turns out to be a *whole* lot more sound symbolism
in English, for instance, than *I* was prepared to credit when I
first started looking at submorphemes in simplex words.
You can see some of the results at
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/monobib.pdf
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Rhodes-Lawler-1981-cls17.pdf
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/style.pdf
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/rimecoherence.pdf
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/assonances.pdf
and do your own research with the Simplex Word Database
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/monosyl.zip
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/disclaimers.html
.
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