One form, many meanings: iconicity in phonological and semantic development

要旨

This thesis investigates the consequences of iconicity—a motivated mapping between form and meaning—for the phonological and semantic development of iconic words, through the lens of dialectal variation in the forms and meanings of ideophones in Japonic (Japanese, Ryukyuan). I use the term ideophone to refer to a lexical class of iconic words dedicated to the depiction of sensory phenomena. In Japanese, this class numbers well into the thousands, and includes ideophones mimicking sound (onomatopoeia), e.g. kokekkokoo 'cock-a-doodle-doo', as well as ideophones depicting movement (buruburu ‘wobbling’), shape (kunyakunya ‘twisting’), texture (nebaneba 'sticky'), and even internal states (mukamuka ‘nauseous’, wakuwaku 'excited') (Akita, 2017). The phonological and semantic development of ideophones is presumed to be shaped and constrained by their iconicity. For example, it has been noted that sound changes occurring regularly in the arbitrary lexicon are often absent in ideophones, presumably to conserve iconic mappings between form and meaning (e.g. Diffloth, 1979). Similarly, the semantic development of ideophones is assumed to follow an implicational hierarchy with sound—the easiest domain to represent iconically in speech—as the first domain in which ideophones appear, followed by domains that are more difficult to represent iconically. Thus, we find languages whose ideophone systems are limited to the depiction of sound, and those whose ideophones depict a broader range of sensory perceptions in addition to sound, but we do not find languages that depict broader sensory perceptions without also depicting sound (Dingemanse, 2012). This thesis investigates these two ideas by using dialectal variation to explore the phonological and semantic development of ideophones in Japanese. The first part of the thesis compares the degree to which sound change has occurred between Japanese and two varieties of Ryukyuan (Miyako and Ishigaki) in the iconic versus the arbitrary lexicon (e.g. the iconic gunyagunya 'mushy' vs. the arbitrary juunan 'pliable'). Taking Japanese as a baseline, I adopt a double-pronged approach to quantifying sound change. First, for Ryukyuan words with a Japanese cognate (N=330), string edit distances between cognates provide a measure of how much sound change has occurred in the cognate set. Second, for all words (N=404), I developed a phonotactic deviation score, which is a measure of how much a Ryukyuan word differs from Japanese words in general, based on the number of deviations it makes from Japanese phonotactics. Both measures confirmed that the iconic words studied had undergone significantly less sound change than arbitrary words from the same semantic domains. However, onomatopoeia were more likely to incorporate new sounds and sound configurations than ideophones depicting inaudible phenomena. The directness of the iconic mapping in onomatopoeia means that when new sounds or sound configurations enter the language, these can be used in onomatopoeia with a transparent interpretation. On the other hand, less directly iconic mappings between sound and other sensory domains must be established through large sets of similar systematic correspondences, and thus it takes longer for sound changes to make their way into this part of the lexicon. This confirms that, compared to other vocabulary, the forms of ideophones are diachronically very stable, but with the insight that this is less likely to be the case for onomatopoeia. The second part of the thesis addresses the idea of an implicational hierarchy for the semantic development of ideophone systems, with a broader cross-linguistic sample than has been used in previous studies. Using this broader cross-linguistic sample, I formulate an implicational hierarchy SOUND < MOVEMENT < SHAPE < TEXTURE < OTHER SENSORY PERCEPTIONS, which says that languages develop ideophones first in the domain of sound, next in the domain of movement, third in the domain

主題