Semantics

Meaning Below the Morpheme : Sound Symbolism

            The question of what level of grammatical sructure a meaning should be attributed to may often be problematic, and boundary cases, where meanings seem to straddle several different grammatical units, occur quite frequently. One such boundary case is sound symbolis, ( also known as ideophony or onomatopoeia ).
This is existence of semi-systematic corespondences between of the individual morpheme, such as English clas, clang, clatter, etc.  Such associations may sometimes have a clear imitative basis, as with English click, thwack,meow, etc. Sond symbolism is by no means limited to English, of course. In Ilocano (Cordilleran, Philippines), for instance,a high front vowel is often used in words denoing high pitched sounds, like :

           

            singgit ‘high pitched voice’ : sing-i ‘sobbing (of a child)’ ; sultip ‘whistle’; riri         ‘whimper’ (Rubino 2001:304).

            Here the choice of vowel imitates the characteristic timbre of the sound referred to. Similarly, the alveolar fricative is often found nword representing rustling sounds or the sound of water:

-        Karasaka ‘rustling sound of leaves’

-        Saraisi ‘sound of rippling water’

-        Barasabas ‘sound of heavy rain’

            A possible connection might be discerned here between theacoustic quality of the fricative and irregular, sound of the refeent. But theimitative basis of such associations is often lessobvious,at east to English speakers. For example,docments the fact that many words indicating ‘smallness’ contain kp in Emain 9 Niger-congo, Nigeria):

            Kpuku ‘pointed’ : small,compact and round, short

            Kpdo ‘round’ : small, circular and supple, proportional

            Kpeke ‘petit’: small,thin, short.

            In all cases we have a sound-meaning correspondence which exists belowthe level of the individual mopheme. Neither the high front vowel nor the alveolar fricative in Ilocano, nor kp in Emacan, formally, be considered as individual morphemes,since once cannot remove them from the ideophonic words in the (examples) and retain possible roots to which other morphemes could attach.

Meanings Above the Word Level : Idioms

            Idioms constitute another boundary case where it is not clear what the correct level is for the chracterization of meaning. we defined idioms asnon-compositional phrases-phrases like throw in the towel whose overall meaning is not the same as the combined meaning of the individual parts. However, it is often possible to advance an interpretation of the individual words of an idiom which removes its idiomatic or non-comositional characer.

            For example, the english idiom “to scoop the pool”, which means something like ‘to winor gain everything’ with the entire unit scoop the pool, without trying to break the phrase down further. Neverthless, if we imagine scoop as having a meaning like ‘quickly gather up a large quantity ofsomething in a single movement’, and pool as meaning ‘the entire set o available items’. Then the arbitrarines and non-compositionality of the expressionis reduced, and the interpretation ‘win or gain everything’can follow unproblemaically from the combined meanings of the expression’s elements. The fact that a variety of possible interpretations is availabe for each component of theidiom, with consequent defferences in the overall interpretation of the expresion,only adds to the ambiguity. Thus, other speakers of English might associate scoop with a scoop in jounalism (a news story abtained exclusively by a single journalist), while others might analyse pool as in some way referring to a body of water.

            As we have been using the term, an idiom is non-compositional combination of words. But if we define an idiom as a non-compositional combination of morpheme, then idiom can also exist on the sublexical level. In following xample from Lakota (Siouan, Mississippi Valley; Rankin et al.2002: 181-182), a noun stem ‘heart’ is compounded with the verb stem meaning ‘be good’; the meaning of the resulting compound, ‘I made him/her angry”, is in no way simply the combination of individual meanings of its component morphemes :  Heart-be, good = I made him/her angry.

BACKGROUND OF PAPER

            Meaning and Defenition, focuses on defenition and the part it playsin how we understand and describe meaning. Riemer first  discuses the differencess between different conceptions of defeintions, such as those found insemantics vs those found in lexicography. He also introduces the concept of themental lexicography. He also intoduces the concept of themental lexicon. He then goes no to introduce basic units of meaning : word,morphemes, and also onomatopoeia and idioms. After discussing the effect of context on meaning and the idea of compositionality, this paper into the meatof the discussion and looks at deifferent ways to define meanings: real andnominal defenitions, and defenition by ostension, context, exemplars, and genus. He also discussion substitutability as a measure of accuracy for defenitions, aswell as problems with defeitions and the influence of usage on definitions.