Here's Givon text: Dan Everett on Piraha and Universals

[jess tauber]

Aya Katz i:kama:nude:

<<Hunter gartherers, like their non-human primate brethren, tend
to be able to express an entire clause in a very compact phonological
form, but don't be too sure that this form is not syntactically complex.
There are meaningful recurrent subcomponents, and that's where recursivity
comes in.>>



My analysis of 'sound symbolism' in some of the analytical click languages reveals collapsed ancient morphological material within the supposed root. The meanings of Aya's 'recurrent subcomponents' here are quite different in flavor from the more expressive or lexical ones one often finds at the margins of words corresponding to old ideophone or lexical roots. Similar things seem to have been going on in a number of other families with isolating/analytical cast. Old productive morphology has left its now frozen and transformed mark on current lexicon.

This makes sense from the POV of the Bybeean relevance principle- where meaningful internal stem changes are found late in the game of the analysis/synthesis cycle. How MUCH gets incorporated into the new analytical root is a variable, and even here one may see an increase in the ability to play with the form (as in Matisoff's Lahu).

Recently I have speculated that such stem change may correlate with the size of the ideophone inventory (with some spectacular exceptions which seem motivated by areal influences)- the more synthetic a language is, and/or the more fusional it is, the smaller the ideophone inventory will tend to be. This may be because ideophones tend to code more 'relevant' information, and if such information is already redundantly marked either by productive or lexicalized morphology, economy will weed out ideophones as an unnecessary extravagance.

As remnants of the old stem changes die away one should see the rise either of new equivalent morphology from set A of the lexicon (the usual grammaticalization resource suspects), or new ideophones from set B of the lexicon (more expressive forms)- the latter has been claimed for many languages.

This may help to account for the fact that ideophones aren't a one-size-fits-all category- in some languages you get a short list with only completive aspectual senses, in others you get progressive, and so on. It remains to be seen whether one is dealing with an unprincipled mixture of formal means of expression, or something more akin to complementary distributions.

I would suggest that knowledge of the structure of the lexicon of a particular language, by providing another yet related perspective, might help to differentiate supposed syntax-based cultural/grammatical property clusterings- for instance it has been hypothesized by Janis Nuckolls that cultures utilizing more ideophones would tend to see the world as more animistically organized, a more 'bottom up' approach to interpreting a world that requires far more negotiation on the part of the animate agent- the sort of place one would find less automaticization of behavior and more reliance instead on social memory and landmark-based navigation- where context looms large and fixed sets of rules may not work well.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net