sound symbolism

[Martha McGinnis]

To my knowledge, DM has nothing special to say about sound symbolism.
However, it does make a distinction that might be useful to people
interested in the topic.

DM distinguishes between two types of meaning.  "Syntactic" (or
"semantic") meaning is a property of the elements manipulated by the
syntax.  For example, the components of meaning that distinguish
finite from non-finite clauses are syntactic/semantic.  "Encyclopedic"
meaning is meaning that plays no role in the syntax. The components
of meaning that distinguish "dog" from "cat" (or "sneer" from "snarl")
are encyclopedic.

In DM, the "pieces" of morphophonology -- Vocabulary items -- are
phonological strings (e.g. /-ed/) associated with a morphosyntactic
category (e.g. Tense) and syntactic/semantic features (e.g., [+past]).
Items of a given category compete for insertion into a morphosyntactic
node of the same category, which is a terminal node of a syntactic
structure (tree).  The winner of the competition is the vocabulary item
that best matches the features of the morphosyntactic node.

My understanding is that sound symbolism makes reference to
phonological strings that aren't Vocabulary items, because they aren't
inserted into their own separate morphosyntactic nodes.  For example,
the sequence sn- (sneeze, snore, snort, sneer, snarl) doesn't
correspond to some morphosyntactic node such as Tense (T) or Voice
(v).  On the contrary, my native-speaker intuition is that sn- is
rather loosely associated with some component of meaning like "nose-
related."  This kind of meaning doesn't play a role in syntax -- it's
encyclopedic.  It would be interesting to me if it turned out that
sound symbolism _always_ iconifies encyclopedic meaning, rather
than syntactic meaning.

> I'm very curious to know if the theory has anything to say about the vast
> amounts of sound symbolism to be found in ideophone systems and lexical roots
> in languages from around the world. Personally I'd be quite happy if the
> theory was open to new views about this. Let me know. Thanks.
>
> Sincerely,
> Jess Tauber
> zylogy at aol.com
>