Conceptions of Language and Grammaredu.au/personal/dabbott/animal.html
Another type of motivation is sound symbolism, the relatively consistent
association of certain sounds with certain meanings. For example, the [ee]
vowel sounds of teeny suggests something small. We find similar uses of similar
vowels in other languages. Spanish, for example, uses the suffix -ito/a to desig-
nate small things and children. However, it can hardly be said that this vowel
always carries this diminutive meaning. For example, no hint of smallness
appears in words like beefy, treaty, keep, or heal. And similarities with other
languages may be purely accidental: -chen is a diminutive suffix of German, a
language more closely related to English than Spanish is.
While it is true that the vast majority of words that consist of just a single
meaningful part, e.g., lamp and post are arbitrarily related to their meanings,
combinations of such words frequently are not. That lamppost means “lamp-
post” is motivated by the fact that it consists of lamp and post.
Exercise
What apparent motivation occurs in the following English words? What
words can you think of that don’t fit the patterns?
a. slop, slime, slush
b. itsy-bitsy, tinkle, twinkle
c. slip, slink, slide, slither
d. moo, meow, cuckoo
Duality of patterning
This strange phrase means that meaningful linguistic units such as words are
composed of discrete units that have no meaning. For example, the word
book clearly has a meaning; but just as clearly, each of its individual sounds,
[b], [oo], and [k], has no meaning. Individual sounds like these can be used
to create other words. So languages take one or a combination of meaning-
less sounds and then assign meanings to them. The expressions of non-
human animals, even those with relatively large numbers of expressions,
seem not to be designed like this, with the result that their call repertoires
cannot be readily expanded.
Displacement
Human language allows human beings to talk about anything, regardless of
whether what they talk about is in the immediate context, occurred in the
past, will occur in the future, or, indeed, did not, may not, or will not ever oc-
cur. This freedom from the here and now is called displacement. Non-human