I think Saussure missed the point about onomatopoeia. Just because
there are grounds for motivating things that occur commonly across
even unrelated language, it does not mean that if you give a few
counter-examples, the motivation can be dismissed entirely. Instead we
should think of a spectrum that pits the purely arbitrary (impossible,
unless you could conceive of a vocal organ without a body) and purely
motivated (impossible if gesture or symbol is to have any meaning, any
power to represent, other than being itself).
Take for example words like 'crispy', 'crunchy', 'crackly' in English,
and we find counterparts in Japanese like 'kari-kari' and 'saku-saku'.
The common occurence of /k/ sounds (what in traditional phonetic terms
might be described as an unvoiced velar stop, although often this is a
palatalized velar) show a degree of motivation. How? One, this is a
common category of sound in almost all human languages. Two, here it
is being used to imitate the sound of something that is crispy,
crunchy, crackly, kari-kari, etc. So the relationships are more than
just arbitrary, although there is a degree of arbitrariness thrown in
as well--why crispy and not kari-kari in English, etc. But also
Japanese uses a /p/ in 'pari-pari' to mean something very similar.
Does English have anything with /p/s to describe this? Well, the
English word 'crispy' also contains a /p/ and it contains an /s/ , as
does the Japanese 'saku-saku'. So the shared psychology and
phenomenology, however it is set out differently in the
English-language cultural grid vs. the Japanese-language cultural
grid, seems to have something to do with the phonetic and kinesthetic
properties of 'crunchy', which seems to have something to do with our
abilities to imitate those properties using vocal friction, sibilance,
plosiveness and stridency (and all of these words contain a lot of
what the acoustic properties they were chosen to describe).
To give Saussure his due on aribitrariness, he at least deserves a
wiki cite here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_in_General_Linguistics#Arbitrariness
But the picture is actually more complicated, through the integral
notion of 'relative motivation'. Relative motivation refers to the
compositionality of the linguistic system, along the lines of an
immediate constituent analysis. This is to say that, at the level of
langue, hierarchially nested signifiers have relatively determined
signified. An obvious example is in the English number system: That
is, though twenty and two might be arbitrary representations of a
numerical concept, twenty-two, twenty-three etc. are constrained by
those more arbitrary meanings. The tense of verbs provides another
obvious example: The meaning of "kicked" is relatively motivated by
the meanings of "kick-" and "-ed". But, most simply, this captures the
insight that the value of a syntagm-- a system-level sentence-- is a
function of the value of the signs occurring in it. It is for this
reason that Leonard Bloomfield called the lexicon the set of
fundamental irregularities of the language. (Note how much of the
'meaningfulness' of 'The Jabberwocky' is due to these sorts of
compositional relationships!)
A further issue is onomatopoeia. Saussure recognised that his
opponents could argue that with onomatopoeia there is a direct link
between word and meaning, signifier and signified. However, Saussure
argues that, on closer etymological investigation, onomatopoeic words
can, in fact, be coincidental, evolving from non-onomatopoeic origins.
The example he uses is the French and English onomatopoeic words for a
dog's bark, that is Ouaf Ouaf and Bow Wow.
Finally, Saussure considers interjections and dismisses this obstacle
with much the same argument i.e. the sign / signifier link is less
natural than it initially appears. He invites readers to note the
contrast in pain interjection in French (aie) and English (ouch).
--
CJ
--
ELT in Japan
http://eltinjapan.blogspot.com/
Japan Higher Education Outlook
http://japanheo.blogspot.com/
We are Feral Cats
http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/
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