Abstract
More than a century ago, in a vivid metaphorical image, Bloomfield (1895: 409) likened the appearance of phonesthemes to an animal on the hunt: ‘Every word, in so far as it is semantically expressive, may establish, by haphazard favouritism, a union between its meaning and any of its sounds, and then send forth this sound (or sounds) upon predatory expeditions into domains where the sound is at first a stranger and parasite. A slight emphasis punctures the placid function of a certain sound-element, and the ripple extends, no one can say how far.’ This ‘ripple’ can indeed extend far; the meaning of the words within a particular sound symbolic network can adapt to other members of the set, which reinforces the sound symbolic connection and makes it possible for further words to join the set (see Burridge and Bergs 2016). The aim of the paper is to address the related notions of sound symbolic motivation and remotivation, with a special focus on the notion of semantic change in phonesthemic meaning.
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Notes
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Lakoff (1987) used the notion of ‘radial category’ to explain the category (and thus the meaning of) mother. In Lakoff’s view, a radial category is composed of a central category which is a cluster of converging models (this being the birth model, the nurturance model, etc. in the case of mother), and there are noncentral extensions of this central category (‘variants’) that ‘are not generated from the central model by general rules; instead, they are extended by convention and must be learned one by one’ (such as foster mother, adoptive mother, birth mother, etc.; p. 91). The variants are, however, not random, as it is the central model that influences what possibilities might arise, as well as determining the relationship between the central model and the individual variants. Thus, the extensions or variants are motivated by the central model on the one hand and by various ‘general principles of extension’ (ibid.) on the other.
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I wish to thank the reviewers for their very helpful remarks.
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Benczes, R. (2020). Sound Symbolism and Semantic Change. In: Allan, K. (eds) Dynamics of Language Changes. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6430-7_16
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