Phonological structure and ‘expressiveness’

Abstract

Words of certain semantic types which can be subsumed under the label ‘expressive’ (notably onomatopoeias, movement words, and words with pejorative, jocular, or intense connotations) have a tendency in a wide range of languages to be associated with peculiarities of phonological structure – these peculiarities include types of sounds, sound-sequences and syllable-structures which can be regarded as peripheral in the language concerned.

Long and short [æ] in one Southern British speaker's English

“…First, there are words which might be expected to carry affective stress just as frequently as the members of this list, but which in fact do not: propaganda, stranded, faddy, blabber, jabber, grand, gab, swag, damn, scram, slam, wham, and perhaps hag, scrag. Secondly, there are words whose long [ae:] is difficult to account for in these terms (or in terms of informality, as in the previous paragraph): bladder, banner, manor, lad, badge, flag (noun), jazz, dam, ram, yam. In at least three respects, this situation is reminiscent of what I have elsewhere (Fudge, 1970) referred to as ' expressiveness ' : (i) A set of superficially disparate categories appears on closer inspection to behave as if they were in fact closely related;…”

The psychopathology of everyday names

“…Phonetic symbolism (Sapir, 1929) must also be taken into account. To quote from a recent linguistic review (Fudge, 1970): '. .…”

Emphatic stress shift in German

“…The question is, then, how sensitive are speakers to such constraints? Do they ignore them because the stress shifts express the emphatic function and the emphatic function might best be marked by breaking the rules (see Fudge 1970)? If, however, they respect these constraints, their means of expressing the emphatic function through stress shift would be severely curtailed.…”