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cogs.susx.ac.uk>Jess Tauber writes: > Ideophones. Harummph. Kinda reminds me of the apocryphal aside by > Huxley on hearing Soapy Sam's remark about his lineage at the Darwin > debate. Ideophones may be peripheral in some languages, but in others > they are pretty darned important. One scholar recently told me that > expressive roots comprise more than 30% of the total in Uralic > languages. Various Mon-Khmer languages are swimming in thousands of > them, as are Japanese and Korean. On the basis of percentage of > attested roots in the language, these items will rate very high, > either as free forms with their own word class, or percolated > historically into the regular lexical root stock. Indo-European > languages have very many cases of such expressive roots hidden within > regular lexemes. Ah, yes, but we're talking about two very different things here: ideophones on the one hand and lexical items of expressive origin on the other. By an ideophone, I understand an item of highly distinctive syntax, not assignable to any such familiar class as noun, verb, or adjective, and often also of highly distinctive phonology. Semantically, an ideophone typically represents a particular kind of noise, movement or action. Examples from the Carib language Apalai include <kui kui> 'screaming', <seky seky> 'creep up', <ty ty ty> 'person walking', and <tutututu> 'fast approach'. A lexical stem or lexical item of expressive origin is quite different. The point is that such an item is coined *de novo*, because of its appealing sound, and does not descend from an earlier form in the familiar way. At the same time, though, such a stem or item is at once assigned to a word-class of the language. Basque provides many examples of expressive items. For example, it has a large group of adjectives denoting physical or moral defects, all coined according to a particular phonological pattern. A few examples: <makar> 'scrawny', <makur> 'twisted, bent, curved', <malkor> 'sterile', <maltzur> 'sly, deceitful', <moxkor> 'drunk'. (There are loads of these.) But these items are all, in spite of their expressive origin, perfectly ordinary adjectives. They exhibit precisely the same syntax and morphology as "ordinary" adjectives like <handi> 'big' and <hotz> 'cold', and they exhibit precisely the same ability to participate in word-formation, giving rise to adverbs, verbs and nouns in the ordinary way. I think it's essential to distinguish the syntactically distinctive ideophones, in those languages that have them, from mere lexical items of expressive origin. They are not the same thing. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larrytMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
aol.com>Herb Stahlke discusses the low numbers of verb roots in Yoruba. Yoruba, of course, is also one of those ideophonically augmented languages I mentioned. As far as I've seen, only languages with unusually low numbers of verb "roots" have large numbers of ideophones. Some sort of conservation principle at work here? Of course if there is an historical lexicalization chain which attaches ideophone and noun/adjective roots to auxiliaries to create new verbs, then the historical stability of the notion "root" is open to question. This is also true in cases where grammatical marking becomes lexicalized into the structure of a form, as has happened in many cases in the formation of the monosyllabic morpheme stock of Tibeto-Burman (mentioned earlier). In Northwest Caucasian languages, where many roots have been reduced to single "phonemes", it may be difficult to say what part of the feature string belongs to what proto-morpheme. Even so, one wonders whether there is method to the madness here- whether the final forms totally randomly exhibit bits and pieces of the original morphemes or whether some sort of structure guides them into their final position in the featural gestalt. Doesn't have to be the same in different languages, so long as its consistent. Extrapolating from this back to the primate inverted signal (again assuming such a thing exists) one also wonders what kind of variability might be possible in such as system. In a "vertical" predicate, would there be typology? Low versus high frequency range headedness, for instance? And if temporal versus frequency axes have been inverted, could the time axis now carry the equivalent of formant information? Just as an aside- even if the scenario I'm positing is pure fantasy, it might still form the basis of a new kind of cryptographic scheme. Throw in intensity as a third axis for meaningful signalling and inversion, and you get some wild possibilities. But back to matrices- it is true that languages seldom utilize the full potential of allowed canonical shape for roots (though I hear Sinitic comes close). No language that I know of has a huge number of etymological roots. Less than 3000 would probably cover it anywhere. Combination syntactically or morphologically gives all the nuancing. A small number of workers have inquired about covariation here- polysynthetic languages which allow long chains of elements (such as Eskimo languages) tend to have a smallish set of lexical roots, and those with minimal morphology the largest number. Remember that even Sinitic probably has historically lexicalized covert morphology, so that the actual number of "roots" will be substantially smaller than the number of monosyllable morphemes. So how may binary feature pairs would you need to generate 3000 roots? Eleven gives you 2048, and twelve gives you 4096. Assuming of course you are going to utilize every cell in the matrix. If not, then you need a larger number of feature pairs. If you use only half the cells, then thirteen pairs will give you 4096 roots, if only a quarter, then fourteen pairs. Etc. Given the lack of elaboration of material technology and social hierarchy in nonhuman primates, we might assume that they wouldn't need as many LEXICAL root-equivalents as humans do. Given the importance of interpersonal social relations, though, elaboration in this area might be greater here than in others. And we might also expect elaboration in the area of sensory figure/ground separation. Humans are synthesizers- we create new configurations out of disparate parts, altering them to fit. In a way, syntax is the communicative equivalent of material synthesis. Animals, for the most part, simply take what is given, cutting out what they need or want from the background. That takes analytical ability, at some level. Is it fair, then, to say that such analytical ability precedes, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, synthetic capability? It seems to work for both the material and communicative realms, both in animals and in humans. Anyone want to challenge this? Jess Tauber zylogyMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue