fl- verbs

[Damien Hall]

In the words of the traditional disclaimer, "It's not my field, but ..."
Over on FUNKNET ('Discussion of ideas in Functional Linguistics'

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/funknet.html )

someone called Jess Tauber, who works on related things in South American
(I believe) languages, often contributes. It says so right in his/her*
e-mail address:

phonosemantics at earthlink.net

As I say, I know nothing about phonosemantics, but what I feel about it is
that it's difficult to prove any sound-symbolic relationship beyond the
level of amassing evidence the weight of which may begin to seem convincing
after a while. Also, in one or two FUNKNET posts Jess has alluded
indirectly to the apparent fact that many others on the list think him/her*
a crank for keeping on about phonosemantic relationships that can't be
objectively proven. But what I wrote this post to say was that Jess may be
able to point you in the direction of good scholarly discussions, since
he/she* does seem to do a lot of amassing of data on this kind of question.
Otherwise, a Google on <phonosemantics> just now threw up a few hits,
including one dissertation on the first page (Margaret Magnus'). Again, I
don't know Margaret or her work.

* 'Jess' is, I suppose, a girl's name first off, but I have also heard
people called Jesse being referred to as 'Jess' (not our own Jesse
Sheidlower though, whom I don't know personally!); so I am not actually
certain of Jess Tauber's gender. No FUNKNET posts have ever given any
evidence one way or the other!

Damien

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

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