[Lexicog] Re: sub-morphemic particles??

[David Frank]

My son who got his B.A. degree in linguistics last spring did his honors 
thesis on phonesthemes. I'm afraid I don't have a copy of his thesis 
immediately available to me, but I did hear him make a presentation on it. I 
remember that he did research into people's reactions, and he mentioned this 
book by Margaret Magnus entitled Gods of the Word. His research demonstrated 
that his English test subjects had positive or negative reactions to made-up 
words based on the phonological patterns of the words. As I recall, his 
research focused on consontant clusters at the beginning of words.

-- David Frank


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Helge Gundersen" <helge.gundersen at iln.uio.no>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 4:06 AM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] sub-morphemic particles??


Bloomfield called them root-forming morphemes (Language, 244f). A more
conventional name nowadays is phonaesthemes (or phonesthemes). OED
defines that as a "phoneme or group of phonemes having recognizable
semantic associations, as a result of appearing in a number of words of
similar meaning".

There's a lot written about it, although it's not a mainstream topic, so
not well known by those not particularly interested in it. I don't have
the time to dig out a lot of bibliographical references now (and I've
been away from the topic for a while), but you can search the net for a
start.

Also, Ben Bergen wrote an article in Language (vol. 80) called "The
psychological reality of phonaesthemes", which contains several
interesting references as well. Some people have done psycholinguistic
research, which statistically confirms the reality of the phenomenon
(which doesn't mean that every connection a particular person posits
should be considered real, but that really applies to linguistic
phenomena in general).

The semantic aspect of the phenomenon falls under the broader (it seems)
topic of sound-symbolism (another search term).

Since the unit, presumably, has meaning, it could be considered a
morpheme, but it could also be considered a *submorphemic unit*, a
meaningful unit that doesn't share some of the other properties commonly
associated with morphemes. It would perhaps be a matter of definition
whether to include it under the heading of morphology, but it's a part
of lexicology anyway. (It would be mistaken and very unfortunate to
include it in phonology, which otherwise concerns itself with
meaning-differentiating units, not meaning-bearing units.)

In this morphological respect, it falls under a broader range of
phenomena which are hard to single out as hard-core morphemes, see
already Bloomfield. Think of how many pronouns that share some common
phonology, for example. And what about the relationship between "pope"
and "papal"? It doesn't confirm to the descriptions of derivational
morphology commonly found (it't not regular), and "pape" is not a
variety of "pope" on its own.

For a textbook discussion of various kinds of "problematic" (for many
linguistic theories, that is) phenomena of this kind, also touching on
phonesthemes, I strongly recommend Part 3 Morphology in John Taylor:
Cognitive Grammar, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Regards,

Helge Gundersen 



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