Boom! Pop! $%#@!: Iconicity and Expressivity in Language

Catalog description

One of the most fundamental observations about human language is that the relationship between a linguistic form and its meaning is an arbitrary one. While this is overwhelmingly right, there are nonetheless many cases in which this relationship is not so arbitrary, where the properties of a linguistic form are motivated by the meaning it expresses. This course explores the various kinds of cases with these sort of “motivated meanings” seeking to understand their grammatical properties across different domains of the grammar. Specific topics include: onomatopoeia, ideophones (the analogues of onomatopoeia in visual or other modalities), curse words and other forms of expressive grammar, statistical patterns in the lexicon, preference in novel word formation (e.g. sound symbolic product names, nicknames).