3

tl;dr

Linguists like to claim that the mapping from sounds to word meanings is mostly arbitrary. Can you point out research that supports this claim? Specificllay I am looking for hard evidience in form of experimental research and not arm chair linguistics.

Details

Over the years I have repeatedly heard the claim, that the meaning of words is not compositionally computed from its constituent phonemes. In other words, the mapping from sounds to meaning is arbitrary. Whenever somebdy made this claim it obviously was always restricted to atomic words such as house or tree rather than compounds like treehouse. Nobody would argue the meaning of compounds is not derived from its constituent words.

Let me state this more formally, so we understand each other correctly.

(no latex support? really? uff...)

For atomic words (not compounds, not words with productive affixes like un, etc.), there is assumed to be a mapping

f : W_p --> W_s

where W_p denotes the set of phonological representations of the concepts of all words and W_s denotes the set of semantics of all words. The consensus seems to be that this mapping is just a big lookup table that contains only entire atomic words.

We do not assume the alternative function

g : P* --> W_s

where P* denotes the Keleene closure over the set of all phonemes (of a given language).

Let's also require that

forall w in W_p where w = p_0 .. p_n with p_i in P* . f(w) =~ g(p_0 .. p_n)

where =~ means approximately equal under some metric. For example the L2 norm of the difference vector of the vectors of f(w) and g(p_0 .. p_n) if f and g map into an n-dimensional vector space. (We could define f(a) =~ g(b) to be true, iff g(b) is among the k closest vectors to f(a) for example)

g in contrast to f internally performs some computation on the sequence of n input phonemes p_0 .. p_n. It does not perform a simple lookup of p_0 .. p_n. It only looks up either single phonemes or a limited number of phoneme combinations and then computes their composite meaning according to some unknown procedure.

So while f and g are extensionally equivalent (up to the error allowed for =~) they differ intensionally.

However, to this date, nobody claiming that g is not how sequences of sounds are mapped to meaning, but rather that f is how it happens, ever provided any research papers to back this up.

Can you point out to me any papers that investigated this and tried to falsify the assumption that a function like g exists? i.e. that the meaning of atomic words is computed from some composition of its constituent phonemes.

lo tolmencre
  • 205
  • 1
  • 5
  • 3
    You would need to show that transitive closure. You are making a formal argument, but the claim that you attack is not a formal one, the way you present it. I'll just claim that your premises is potentially flawed, until proven otherwise. That's just not how it works. [cont] – vectory May 02 '19 at 20:37
  • Can you elaborate? Why do I need to show the closure? And what do you mean by "show"? How is the claim I am attacking not a formal one the way I present it? And what does not work like this? – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 20:40
  • 2
    You are essentially still trying to understand what they said, who said it and in what context (otherwise give a dog a bone). There's no need to reject the claim as you seem to out of fear that it contradicts your intuition, if you don't know what the claim is. – vectory May 02 '19 at 20:48
  • 1
    I don't understand what you are saying, sorry. – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 20:52
  • 4
    Transitivity and reflexivity are are properties of relations. A phoneme is not a relation. Uness you somehow redefine the linguistic concept of a phoneme or the mathematical concept of a relation, which you didn't, your "transitive and reflexive closure over the set of phonemes" is just pseudo-formal jabber that can't even possibly exist. – Natalie Clarius May 02 '19 at 21:03
  • 2
    You may cast your vote for LaTeX formatting here: https://linguistics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/509/use-of-latex-commands – Natalie Clarius May 02 '19 at 21:06
  • @lemontree Okay, think of phonemes as their string representations. Then the closure is the closure over the set of phoneme symbols. – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 21:06
  • The set of phonetic strings is not a binary relation either. – Natalie Clarius May 02 '19 at 21:07
  • @lemontree https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kleene_star – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 21:09
  • First of all I was trying to ask what the transitive, reflexive closure of a flat set is. Wikipedia tells me it is usually derived from relations (which are also sets if you will, but not flat ones). – vectory May 02 '19 at 21:14
  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Natalie Clarius May 02 '19 at 21:17
  • @vectory what do you mean by flat sets? I can't find that term when searching for it. And with transitive reflexive closure I was referring to the Keleene Closure. – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 21:18
  • 1
    Oh OK, your update explains it. Underwhelmingly, P* is the set of all texts. You cannot construct that, but you can easily describe an algorithm that does. That's not as problematic as the set of all meanings or of all semantics. In essence you are saying that one can describe everything with words, built from nothing but phonemes. Sorry from nothing and phonemes (the empty string, the initial element). Sure that sounds nice. Has someone shown that you can't? Would that be a prove of the weaker statement? A little ad-hoc I have to ask, can you construct the closure from just phonemes? – vectory May 02 '19 at 22:06
  • @vectory That's not as problematic as the set of all meanings or of all semantics. In essence you are saying that one can describe everything with words. Ah, no, you misunderstood me there. Sorry if I was not clear. W_s is just the set of meanings (however encoded) of existing words in a given language. One concrete instance would be a word embedding, which is a mapping from words (as strings) to vectors (as the words' meaning). – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 22:15
  • @vectory A little ad-hoc I have to ask, can you construct the closure from just phonemes? That is what I intended... or I am not understanding you correctly again. – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 22:17
  • I mean can you construct the Kleene star just from phonemes. Of course that's an unexpected question and easy to miss. But that's what it means,since the semantics of the Kleene star are (is?) part of the W_s, and the original claim concerned phonems, not words. – vectory May 03 '19 at 05:01
  • @vectory How is the Kleene closure part of W_s? I just needed to construct a domain for g that contained all elements form W_p ans sequences of phonemes rather than atomic elements like the elements of W_p. And *P** does so. – lo tolmencre May 03 '19 at 05:37
  • 1
    See also – Luke Sawczak May 03 '19 at 21:40
  • 1
    Using all before you've got data from some is a strategic mistake. Here's a a bibliography of phonosemantic research (i.e, the opposite of l'arbitraire du signe), with links. Of particular attention in the context of this question is the recent dissertation and Language article by Bergen. – jlawler Jan 09 '22 at 15:03

5 Answers5

7

This is probably not the kind of answer you are looking for, but I guess the following two points would have to be considered as strong indications that meaning is not computed from phonology.

  • Polysemy (wood: the stuff a tree is made of as well as a collection of trees growing together) and homophony (pear, pair). This implies g is not a function. Also I don't know how the inverse of g works – how do speakers get from meanings to sounds?

  • What would the existence of a function such as g predict about language change, and how does it correspond to the kinds of changes we actually observe? Note especially the following two cases.

    Changes in the phonological structure that are not accompanied by a change in meaning (e.g. metathesis third < OE þridda; cf. three) and vice versa (wicked went from morally bad to excellent). The former is very weird – why would g change in such a fashion that three retains its meaning while the very closely related phonological form that maps to the meaning of the corresponding ordinal changes (with all other words containing r retaining their meaning)? The weirdness of the latter lies in the fact that words that are substrings of a word that changes its meaning (e.g. wick to wicked) do not change along, nor do any other words that stand in a relationship of X : Xed.

Two more armchairy arguments:

  • Chomsky's question: How would a learner infer g? Looking at, for instance, but, butt, butter, buttress – is there any better strategy than memorization? Any other strategy at all?

  • Why do competent native speakers with a vocabulary exceeding ten thousand words still need to look up unfamiliar words? And what happens when they look up a word – is g adapted in some manner? Do the meanings of all other words consequently change?

David Vogt
  • 447
  • 4
  • 8
  • I wanted to comment on the same problem regarding unambiguity of the functions f and g, but I can't argue against a mathematical formula. The target set doesn't have to be flat, the elements of the set don't have to be primitives. The claim in question, and the attacked claim, are both so weakly defined, that they are arbitrary. – vectory May 02 '19 at 19:59
  • Even if g can do complex stuff (e.g. but is a substring of butt but the meanings are as different as they could be) there's still the question: Well, what kind of linguistic changes would we likely observe given g? I have no idea. But the changes we do observe fit the assumption of arbitrariness quite well ("What, we say aks instead of ask know? Okay, cool."). – David Vogt May 02 '19 at 20:03
  • You are right, homophones would make f and g not functions. We can correct that by letting them map to sets of word meanings rather than to individual word meanings.

    You also assume g to be very precise in its mapping to word meanings. g could be vague, as suggested by my definition of =~. If it is vague enough and the mapping very complicated, cases such as wicked do not necessarily disprove g's existence.

     – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 20:16
  • Why should inferring g be a problem? phonemes could be correlated with co-occuring phonemes relative to word meanings somehow. – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 20:19
  • I think it is very rare that an adult speaker does not know atomic words from his language, but yes, g could be adapted in the same way it was learned din the first place. – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 20:20
  • 1
  • I look up words frequently, and there are a lot of simplexes among them (as complex words, as you indicated, often have compositional meanings). 2) Wouldn't the detection of the kind of correlations you mention require knowing a vast set of arbitrary sound-meaning-correspondences? 3) wick : wicked in itself would not be a problem, but what if the meaning of one element changes while the meaning of other elements of the form X : Xed stays constant? Does the assumption of sound-meaning-correspondence predict that these kinds of changes happen?
    • – David Vogt May 02 '19 at 20:33
  • There need to be at least some basic sound -> meaning mapping that is not compositional in nature, of course. The question is if these basic mapping can be combined by g to arrive at some compound meaning... which could be very vague and not necessarily needs to be proper word concept.
    • – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 20:50
  • Depends on how complex g is. Think of neural network models. These can compute functions that most often cannot be intensionally understood, because their computation is so intransparent. Just because a pattern defines a clean formalization by us does not mean there cannot be a formal procedure behind it. So this is not really an argument, I would say.
    • – lo tolmencre May 02 '19 at 20:51