Phonestheme

The term phonestheme (or phonaestheme in British English) was coined in 1930 by British linguist J. R. Firth (from the Greek "phone", "sound", and "aisthanomai", "perceive") to label the systematic pairing of form and meaning in a language.

A phonestheme is different from a morpheme because it does not meet the normal criterion of compositionality.

Within Peirce's "theory of signs" the phonestheme is considered to be an "icon" rather than a "symbol" or an "index".

Identification of a phonestheme

Phonesthemes are of critical interest to students of the internal structure of words because they appear to be a case where the internal structure of the word is non-compositional; i.e., a word with a phonestheme in it has other material in it that is not itself a morpheme.

For example, the English phonaestheme "gl-" occurs in a large number of words relating to light or vision, like "glitter", "glisten", "glow", "gleam", "glare", "glint", and so on; yet, despite this, the remainder of each word is not itself a morpheme (i.e., a pairing of form and meaning); i.e., "-isten", "-ow", and "eam" do not make meaningful contributions to "glisten", "glow", and "gleam".

Distribution of phonesthemes

Phonesthemes have been documented in numerous languages from diverse language families, among them English, Swedish, and other Indo-European languages, Austronesian languages, and Japanese.

Examples of phonesthemes

Examples of phonesthemes in English (i.e., aside from "gl-"), include "sn-", related to the mouth or nose, as in "snarl", "snout", "snicker", "snack", and so on, and "sl-", which appears in words denoting frictionless motion, like "slide", "slick", "sled", and so on.

Not restricted to initial sounds

While phonesthemes have mostly been identified in the onsets of words and syllables, they can have other forms.

There has been some argument that endings like "ash" and "ack" in English also serve as phonesthemes, due to their patterning in words that denote forceful, destructive contact ("smash", "crash", "bash", etc.) and abrupt contact ("smack", "whack", "crack", etc.), respectively.

Phonesthesia

A further phonesthetic phenomenon, ablaut phonesthesia, mimics the paradigm of a strong verb like "swim" : "swam" : "swum" with internal vowel change or "apophony". Take the word "flip." It has an alliterative group, "fl-", that evokes the volatility of fly, flow, flee, fleet, flash, flake, and flick. Its rhymes, dip, sip, quip, drip, pip, tip, slip, and so forth, add to a connotation of minor labile action. But it is also part of an ablaut series where vowel alternation has semantic value (as in "flip-flop").

This kind of vowel alternation can be found in reduplicated word pairs like "pitter-patter," "chit-chat," "tip-top," or "tip-tap." The series "flip" : "flap" : "flop" : "flub" has the same vowels as "sing" : "sang" : "song" : "sung".

Another such series is "drip" : "drop" : "droop" : "drape". A regularity of phonesthetic relationship is shown by proportional analogies such as "clip" : "clasp" :: "grip" : "grasp" or "crash" : "crush" :: "mash" : "mush" or "crash" : "crunch" :: "mash" : "munch".

Two aspects of a phonestheme

It is critical to be able to identify two aspects of phonesthemes.

Distribution

The first is their distribution: the set of words where they occur in a language, and the extent to which their appearance in these words is statistically different from what would be expected at chance.

Motivation

The second is their motivation. In some cases, there may appear to be good sound-symbolic reasons why phonesthemes would have the form they have. In the case of "-ack", for example, we might imagine that the words sharing this phonestheme do so because they denote events that would produce a similar sound. But critically, there are many phonesthemes for which there can be no sound-symbolic basis, such as "gl-", for the simple reason that their meanings (such as 'pertaining to light or vision') entail no sound.

Three methods of identification

There are three main ways in which phonesthemes are empirically identified.

Corpus studies

The first is through corpus studies, where the words of a language are subjected to statistical analysis, and the particular form-meaning pairing, or phonestheme, is shown to constitute a statistically unexpected distribution in the lexicon or not.

Corpus studies can inform a researcher about the current state of the lexicon, a critical first step, but importantly are completely uninformative when it comes to questions of whether and how phonesthemes are represented in the minds of language users.

tudy of patterns in neologisms

The second type of approach makes use of the tendency for phonesthemes to participate in the coinage and interpretation of neologisms, new words in a language. Various studies have demonstrated that when asked to invent or interpret new words, subjects tend to follow patterns predicted by looking at the phonesthemes in their language. This approach demonstrates the vitality of phonesthemic patterns, but still does not provide any evidence about whether or how phonesthemes are represented in the minds of speaker-hearers.

tudy of linguistic processing patterns

The final type of evidence uses the methods of psycholinguistics to study exactly how phonesthemes participate in language processing. One such method is phonesthemic priming, akin to morphological priming, which demonstrates that people represent phonesthemes much as they do typical morphemes, despite the fact that phonesthemes are non-compositional.

Discussions of phonesthesia are often grouped with other phenomena under the rubric of sound symbolism.

Important considerations

:(1) If the words aggregated in these groups — e.g., muTTER, stuTTER, fluTTER, paTTER, tiTTER, gliTTER, jiTTER, chaTTER, twiTTER (all rapid, uneven motion); FLy, FLow, FLood, FLutter, FLicker, FLex, FLourish, FLee, FLeet, FLoat, FLush (flowing motion) — were nothing more than arbitrary symbols, rather than being icons, their totally arbitrary nature would preclude any such systematic connexions with meaning.

:(2) Although groups of phonesthemes "can" be identified, this type of iconic sign, in any language, is rather rare.

:(3) [Despite (2)] There may well be far many more iconic words in, say, the English language, than we are aware of.

:(4) It is also important that not each identified phoneme operates as a phonestheme every time it is used (e.g., words “SQUare” and “SQUadron” have no connexion with discordant eruptive sounds common to the "SQU group" of SQUeal, SQUeak, SQUash, SQUirt, SQUawk, SQUabble, SQUall).

:(5) [Despite (4)] It is very clear that, in many cases, some level of iconic communication certainly does take place in a number of words within any language.

:(6) Although people do seem to spend inordinate amounts of time creating a new word (such as deciding upon a “good name” for a new business), no-one has ever been able to produce any evidence that speakers are consciously aware of such (iconic) signalling processes when they create new words.

See also

* Phonesthesia
* Phonosemantics
* Blend (linguistics)
* Reduplication
* Sphota
* true name
* sound symbolism

References

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* Marchand, H., "The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word Formation: A Synchronic-Diachronic Approach (Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged)", C.H.Beck'she Verlagsbuchhandlung, (München), 1969.

External links

* [http://www.trismegistos.com/_soundandsense/00000012.htm Overview of the term]
* [http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/9783/phond1.html English phonesthemes]
* [http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-1106.html Linguist List discussion of phonesthesia]