[Lexicog] Pejorative suffixes

[Fritz Goerling]

David,

We should allow you to mount this your hobby horse more often.

Happy Easter,
Fritz


  Allow me to mount a hobby-horse, though it's one that is very germane to 
  lexicography and indeed to all the rest of linguistics.

  Peter Kirk wrote:

  > <snip>
  >
  > Well, it is the "under" rather than the "-ling" which makes "underling"
  > pejorative. And "earthling" was not originally pejorative, although I
  > have seen it used as such. I have never seen "courtling".
  > <snip>

  Peter is looking at this in a practical, somewhat simplistic way, as we 
  can all hardly avoid doing. I've said similar things plenty of times 
  myself, and was not wrong for doing so. Nonetheless...

  Meanings *are* associations. Particular thoughts, attitudes, emotions, 
  memories, etc., have become associated with particular linguistic forms: 
  in the case of lexical items, with patterns of sounds or of written 
  letters. How do such thoughts, attitudes, emotions, memories, etc., get 
  associated with the particular forms? Most basically, by repeated 
  cooccurrence. You hear the sound [rak] over and over again when you are 
  aware of physical rock in the vicinity, or when the context has already 
  primed the thought of it in your mind, or you hear the word [dor] over 
  and over when you can see a physical door, and when the previous or 
  subsequent context may have made that door salient in your thinking. 
  (E.g. your mother may have said "ʃət ðə dor" ('shut the door') and you 
  then saw your older sister shut the door. Eventually, the prompting of 
  the thought of the substance ROCK by the sound [rak] or the physical 
  object DOOR by the sound [dor] becomes automatic and largely independent 
  of context; you can hardly hear [rak] without at least beginning to 
  think of ROCK or [dor] without beginning to think of DOOR, and most of 
  the time you entertain those concepts strongly in you mind. You learn 
  other meanings, related or not, for the form; or associate the meaning 
  with other forms. E.g. through hearing [rakabay beybi] and other usages, 
  you learn that [rak] can also mean a lulling, swinging motion, or you 
  may learn that a friend is named qaya which means ROCK because his name 
  is Peter, which derives from a Greek word that also meant ROCK, and so 
  forth.

  Some meanings are strongly, to the point of being necessarily, activated 
  for a given form, whether context independently or in a particular set 
  of contexts; these are often called denotations. Others may not be as 
  strongly or inevitably activated, and may in fact be overridden or 
  denied in many contexts, yet may still be attached to the form. These 
  are often classed as connotations. But there is no clear dividing line 
  between them. In particular, there may be no practical or demonstrable 
  difference between cases where one might say "-ling has pejorative 
  connotations" or "-ling has a pejorative sense".

  The point (that got me started, not the only important point) is, 
  overlap of meaning with the context is *not* weird, *nor does finding a 
  meaning in the context mean it is not in the item you are considering*. 
  On the contrary, if the item you are considering constantly occurs in 
  contexts having that particular meaning, it will predictably acquire 
  (become associated with) the meaning.

  Peter said 'it is the "under" rather than the "-ling" which makes 
  "underling" pejorative.' But maybe it is 'the "under" *in addition to* 
  the "-ling"' rather than '*and not* the "-ling"', that has that effect. 
  I would thus want to restate Peter's sentence above as follows, for 
  greater accuracy: '"under" would tend to make "underling" pejorative 
  whether or not "-ling" had a pejorative sense/pejorative connotations.' 
  And I would tend to agree with Fritz that, even though I rarely if ever 
  use the suffix productively, a large enough proportion of the words that 
  end in it involve a negative evaluation, that for me it has a pretty 
  strong association with such evaluation, i.e. that this is an important 
  part of its meaning. I might say it has pejorative connotations, or that 
  it may have a bit of a pejorative sense, and I wouldn't mean anything 
  very different with these two ways of talking about it.

  (I have not talked about contrast, which also is important for the 
  establishing of meanings. Note that "under" does not give a particularly 
  pejorative tone to such words as "under-secretary" or "undergird" or 
  "undergraduate"; contrasting "underling" with such forms might enhance 
  the pejorativity of "-ling". )

  fwiw,

  --David Tuggy


    a.. 

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