The phonesthetics of blends: A lexicographic study of cognitive blends in the OED

Smith, Chris

doi:10.1515/exell-2016-0002

Cited by 23 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 27 publications

(30 reference statements)

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“…Meanwhile, the role of phonaesthemes in morphological and cognitive blends has been deepened by Smith (2014), who has studied multidirectional motivation ties in diachronic semantic shift in historical blends.…”

Section: More Recent Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Synchrony and Diachrony: The Multimodal Nature of Phonaesthemes

Pozza¹,

Civale²

2022

IJL

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Knowledge about phonaesthesia has particularly been deepened since 1930 until now. Starting from John Wallis’ first thoughts on the subject in 1653 via the contributions from John Rupert Firth’s post-1930s’ studies, the phenomenon has seen a growing interest as the result of the consolidated – but still to some extent arbitrary – interactions between meaning and sound over time. This paper focuses on some relevant issues in the field of diachronic linguistics, especially in connection with etymological reconstruction, to evaluate phenomena that, in a certain sense, appear to be correlated with the idea of a posteriori re-motivation by the speaker, investigating phonaesthemes’ conceptual organization around some meaningful morpho-phonological clusters derived from Proto Indo-European, always connected with analogical associations. It also reasons about the stability of the root itself, due to fundamental characteristics of human cognition and broader social contexts in which language is used. Besides diachrony, the psycholinguistic relevance of phonaesthemic clusters is synchronically highlighted both in productivity – especially within the Germanic branch, English above all – and in comprehension processes, because their faciliatory priming effect seems to guide the speaker towards a better experience of understanding and to ease the progressive and natural addition of patterned neologisms after an existing word, in order to make them compatible with the original sets. The purpose of this contribution is to offer a general overview of the issue, trying, at the same time, to show how the phenomenon of phonaesthesia can also be read in the interaction between synchrony and diachrony, even if synchrony, for obvious reasons, remains the privileged investigation filter.

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Section: More Recent Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Synchrony and Diachrony: The Multimodal Nature of Phonaesthemes

Pozza¹,

Civale²

2022

IJL

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“…For example, twiddle , first attested in 1547, originally meant ‘to be busy with trifles’. However, it acquired the sense of ‘rotate or turn’ around 1676, due to its formal similarities with words like twist and twirl (Smith 2014: 25). The OED is unclear on twiddle 's etymology, and suggests that it is actually a blend of twist or twirl with fiddle or piddle – however, the fact that it showed no apparent semantic connection to twisting until over a century after its first attestation might call this account into question.…”

Section: Phonesthesiamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Chris Smith (2014) explored the role of phonesthesia in blends, and found that 55 percent of blends coined between 1200 and 1900 fit within phonesthetic groups. For example, eight blends fit within the fl - ‘motion, repeated or fluid’ phonesthetic group: flaunt , flounder v., flurry , flush , flare , flustrate , fluff and flimmer .…”

Section: Germanic Vocabularymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another interesting finding is that only 1.5 percent of the 202 blends coined after 1900 seemed to be phonesthetic. This is attributed to the more recent blends tending to be more transparent, and thus less likely to be reanalyzed (Smith 2014: 29). It is also possible that blends belonging to phonesthetic groups tend to be longer lasting, perhaps owing to their phonesthesia.…”

Section: Germanic Vocabularymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Phonesthetics and the etymologies ofbloodandbone

Pentangelo¹

2020

English Language and Linguistics

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The etymologies of English blood and bone are obscure. Although their cognates are well represented in the Germanic family, both lack clear cognates in other Indo-European languages. Various explanations for their origins have been proposed, including that they may be non-Indo-European (e.g. Hawkins 1987). Blood and bone, and their cognates, share an initial /b/ with numerous body-related words (e.g. beard, breast, bosom) throughout Germanic. This initial /b/ constitutes a phonestheme. Phonesthemes – ‘recurring sound-meaning pairings that are not clearly contrastive morphemes’ (Bergen 2004: 290) – are present in many Germanic languages, but their role in lexicogenesis is little understood. I suggest that blood and bone were formed by blending the initial /b/ phonestheme with two pre-existing lexemes: Proto-Germanic *flōda- ‘something that flows’ and *staina- ‘stone’. Phonesthetic blending may be a fruitful avenue for future etymological research.

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“…Phonaesthemes are clusters of phonemes which systematically pattern to meaning, e.g., gl-as in glisten, glimmer, and glint in English. Because of this and their diachronically obscure origins (see Table 1), phonaesthemes are misconstrued as examples of iconicity at work in spoken language (Hinton et al 1994;Waugh 1994;Hutchins 1998;Bergen 2004;Smith 2014;Kwon & Round 2015). It is assumed that phonaesthemes are statistically consistent in their form-meaning mappings because they are inherently iconic one way or another.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining iconicity: An articulation-based methodology for explaining the phonological structure of ideophones

Thompson

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as 'sounding like what they mean,' so that phonological structure of an iconic word is what begets its meaning through perceived imitation, rather than an arbitrary semantic link. Fundamental examples are onomatopoeia, e.g., dog's barking: woof woof (English), wou wou (Cantonese), wan wan (Japanese), hau hau (Polish). Systematicity is often conflated with iconicity because it is also a phenomenon whereby a word begets its meaning from phonological structure, albeit through (arbitrary) statistical relationships, as opposed to perceived imitation. One example is gl-(Germanic languages), where speakers can intuit the meaning 'light' via knowledge of similar words, e.g., glisten, glint, glow, gleam, glimmer. This conflation of iconicity and systematicity arises from questions like 'How can we differentiate or qualify perceived imitation from (arbitrary) statistical relationships?' So far there is no proposal to answer this question. By drawing observations from the visual modality, this paper mediates ambiguity between iconicity and systematicity in spoken language by proposing a methodology which explains how iconicity is achieved through perceptuo-motor analogies derived from oral articulatory gesture. We propose that universal accessibility of articulatory gestures, and human ability to create (perceptuo-motor) analogy, is what in turn makes iconicity universal and thus easily learnable by speakers regardless of language background, as studies have shown. Conversely, our methodology allows one to argue which words are devoid of iconicity seeing as such words should not be explainable in terms of articulatory gesture. We use ideophones from Chaoyang (Southern Min) to illustrate our methodology.

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The phonesthetics of blends: A lexicographic study of cognitive blends in the OED

Cited by 23 publications

References 27 publications

Between Synchrony and Diachrony: The Multimodal Nature of Phonaesthemes

Between Synchrony and Diachrony: The Multimodal Nature of Phonaesthemes

Phonesthetics and the etymologies ofbloodandbone

Defining iconicity: An articulation-based methodology for explaining the phonological structure of ideophones

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