Meaning in linguistic forms

the assumption that we know what the participants value the most and what the local rules are in treating guests at a table. In this case, in order to really know how to interpret the meaning of when an offer is made and what we are offered, we need to know the relevant distinctions for the people who are making the offer, what matters for them. For instance, canned food, when imported and more expensive, might be considered more valuable than fresh food (this is usually the case, for example, in Western Samoa). To better illustrate the structuralist point that any act of interpretation must take into consideration what matters within a given system of choices, we need to look at how individual sounds are used to convey meaning. As we will see, the principles originally developed within the study of sound systems were later expanded to the study of human behavior (see section 6.3.2).

The concept of meaning as relations among signs (in presentia and in absentia) has been used for the study of all kinds of communicative systems, especially within the field of semiotics (Barthes 1968; Eco 1976). Jakobson (1956, 1968), for example, saw syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations as the basis for understanding a wide range of phenomena, including aphasia, verbal art, realistic novels, paintings, and films. He suggested that in Russian lyrical songs, for example, artists prefer to explore paradigmatic relations and therefore tend to favor metaphoric constructions, whereas realistic authors like Tolstoy used syntagmatic relations in employing metonymic figures like the synecdoche (part for the whole): “In the scene of Anna Karenina’s suicide Tolstoy’s artistic attention is focused on the heroine’s handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches ‘hair on the upper lip’ or ‘bare shoulders’ are used by the same writer to stand for the female characters to whom these features belong” (Jakobson 1956: 78). In painting, cubism favored metonyms and surrealism favored metaphors. In film, closeups are metonymic because they allow the use of a detail for the whole while parallel editing is metaphoric because it juxtaposes the actions of two characters and hence forces the audience to think of one character by means of the actions of the other.3

6.3Some basic properties of linguistic sounds

Humans’ ability to produce and perceive linguistic sounds is due to a combination of physiological, neural, cognitive, and contextual factors. Physiologically, humans’ speech is afforded by a larynx of a particular shape and size and a supralaryngeal vocal tract of a particular shape and length, which acts as a filter for the air coming from the lungs. Since the human larynx is not as efficient for respiration as that of non-human primates and other animals, researchers

3For an exploration of the role of metaphorical and metonymic relations in grammaticalization, see Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer (1991).

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speculate that it must have developed for extra functions such as the production of speech.

The air tract of an adult human is also quite different from that of a newborn child or a chimpanzee (Lieberman 1975: 108–9). A few months after birth, the anatomy of infants starts developing to allow for the production of the full range of sounds produced by adults. By the age of two, a child has an adult-like supralaryngeal vocal tract.

From a neurological and cognitive point of view, humans must be able to control and move their vocal organs at a fairly high speed to produce linguistic sounds.

Human speech is the result of a source, or sources, of acoustic energy being filtered by the supralaryngeal vocal tract. For voiced sounds, e.g., sounds like the English vowels, the source of energy is the periodic sequence of puffs of air that pass through the larynx as the vocal cords (folds) rapidly open and shut. The rate at which the vocal cords open and close determines the fundamental frequency of phonation. Acoustic energy is present at the fundamental frequency and at higher harmonics. (Lieberman 1975: 10)

Humans must also be able to tune into and analyze, at a fairly high speed, the particular types of sounds that another speaker is producing. Humans can decode linguistic sounds typically produced at a rate of 20 to 30 segments per second despite the fact that the human ear usually cannot identify sounds at a rate higher than 7 to 9 segments per second (Liberman 1970) and sounds that are transmitted at a rate of 20 segments per second or higher are heard as an undifferentiable “tone” (Lieberman 1975: 7). Linguistic sounds “glide” into one another, affecting and being affected by the surrounding sounds. This is what phoneticians call coarticulation. What is considered the same consonant can be quite different depending on the following vowel. The /k/ sound of the word car is articulated much further back in the mouth than the /k/ of key. All three consonants in the word spoon, /s/, /p/, and /n/ acquire lip rounding, one of the defining features of /u/, the only vowel in the word (Daniloff and Hammarberg 1973). Hearers use several different cues, acoustic and contextual, to analyze into discrete units sounds that are in fact not rigidly separable, either in terms of their acoustic signal or in terms of the way in which they are articulated.

Lieberman and other phoneticians use these properties of linguistic sounds to suggest that hearers do a terrific (and largely unconscious or automatic) job at unscrambling the linguistic signal (Lieberman 1975). Such a job would require hearers to idealize or regularize a rather variable input. Variation in fact seems to be the norm in sound production, not only because the same speaker never

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pronounces a word exactly the same way, but also because there is variation in the ways in which individual speakers configure their own repertoire of linguistic sounds. Phoneticians have shown experimentally that sounds that have different acoustic properties can be used to convey the “same” linguistic sound by two different speakers. What for one speaker is used to produce the sound [ε] for another speaker might represent the sound [ ] (Lieberman and Blumstein 1988: 177). This means not only that different speakers might use different parts of the vocal tract to produce what is perceived as the same sound, but that hearers routinely adjust to such variations, as long as certain parameters and differentiations are roughly maintained constant.4 Linguists have hypothesized that speakershearers must rely on theoretical, that is, abstract units that can be easily adapted to the specific qualities of the sounds produced by a particular speaker. Linguists call these units phonemes, classes of sounds such as /t/, /i/, /p/, /θ/, that can be combined in a sequence to form larger, meaningful units such as /t p/, /p t/, and /tiθ/ (spelled tip, pit, and teeth).5

6.3.1The phoneme

The notion of phoneme was introduced in linguistics to capture the fact that not all variations in how a given sound is pronounced produce differences of meaning. In English, for instance, whether we say /p/ or /b/ can make a difference as shown by the following list of words (from Hyman 1975: 61).

Phonologists say that despite the fact that /p/ and /b/ share the same place of articulation – they are both bilabial (both lips are at work to stop the the air and produce the sound) – and some aspects of their manner of articulation – they are

4“Human speakers do not attempt to produce the same absolute formant frequency values for the ‘same’ vowels. They instead produce a set of formant frequencies that is fre- quency-scaled to their approximate supralaryngeal vocal tract length” (Lieberman and Blumstein 1988: 178–9).

5It is not clear yet whether thinking of words as sequences of distinct units like phonemes captures the ways in which speakers actually perceive linguistic sounds. Fowler (1985) has pointed out that if we think in terms of distinct segments, each of which has its own (ideal) position, most of talking involves getting to them. Armstrong, Stokoe and Wilcox (1994) used this argument to propose that articulating sounds might not be too different from articulating gestures in signed languages. Perhaps the ability to think in terms of such units is not so much a universal feature of language processing but a fairly sophisticated way of analyzing speech based on an exposure to theoretical constructs such as alphabetic writing systems (see section 5.1).

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both produced by first stopping the air flow (they are thus called stops) –, /p/ and /b/ do not share the way in which the vocal cords are used. In /b/ the vocal cords vibrate (for this reason it is called a voiced sound) whereas in /p/ they rest (in which case a voiceless sound is produced).6 Whereas the use of the vocal cords is considered by phonologists to be the crucial feature – the distinctive feature – that makes /p/ and /b/ separate phonemes, there are other features that /p/ and /b/ exhibit (or acquire) in certain contexts that are not considered relevant to making them separate phonemes. Thus, for instance, /p/ in English is aspirated7 at the beginning of a word (but not at the end of it) so that the word pin is actually pronounced [phin] whereas the word rip is pronounced [rip] (and not [riph]). But since the aspiration of p does not produce a word with a different meaning ([riph] is just an unusual pronunciation that might even pass unnoticed), phonologists treat [p] and [ph] as belonging to the same class, the phoneme /p/. This is a classification that makes sense, however, only within a particular system, namely, the sound system of the English language. There are other languages in which the aspiration of a bilabial stop does make a difference in meaning. For instance, in Korean, pul and phul are not variations of the same word, but two different words with two different meanings, “fire’ and “grass” respectively. In such cases, phonologists would consider p with aspiration and p without aspiration as two different phonemes: /ph/ and /p/ respectively (see Finegan and Besnier 1990: 66–8).

The phoneme as a unit of analysis is meant to capture the distinction between linguistic variations that matter and variations that do not matter – or between features that are distinctive and features that are non-distinctive. When we perform an analysis of the ways in which the various oral organs move when sounds are produced or the ways in which the sound waves produced by a particular articulation are formed (as can be done by studying a spectogram, see Ladefoged 1975), we find that there are innumerable variations from one instance to the other of what speakers might perceive as the same sound. From the point of view of the denotational meaning of those sounds, however, many variations can be ignored, including variations in volume, pitch (in non-tonal languages like English),

6For those who are not familiar with the distinction betweed voiced and voiceless sounds, the best way to experience it is to articulate two other sounds, /z/ and /s/, which are distinguished by the same opposition – voiced/voiceless – but are produced by a continuous flow of air, which makes it easier to hear the difference: cover your ears with your hands and pronounce the two words eyes and ice stretching out the last sound of each word; you will be able to feel the vibration in the s of eyes because it is phonemically a voiced sibilant, /z/, but not in the -ce of ice because it is a voiceless (or unvoiced) sibilant, /s/).

7This means that there is a stronger puff of air coming out of the mouth after the /p/ of pin than there is after the /b/ of bin. Phoneticians analyze aspiration as an extended period of voicelessness after the articulation of the stop and before the following vowel (Ladefoged 1975: 43 and 124).

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breathy voice, or emphatic lengthening of sounds. Some variations, such as the one between unaspirated and aspirated voiceless stops in English (for instance, [p] vs. [ph]) can be ignored because they are predictable, that is, they depend on the surrounding sounds and do not alter the denotational meaning of the word in which they occur.

The concept of phoneme is extremely attractive to anyone interested in how human minds process the flow of events and phenomena in which they participate. Particularly in the first half of this century, anthropological linguists and cultural anthropologists traded arguments in finding justifications for the general principle that there are abstract patterns or forms that may be psychologically real but difficult to see or hear. Sapir felt that the need for abstract classes to accommodate concrete cases of sounds produced by native speakers was strongly supported by his fieldwork experience with unwritten languages. He believed that native speakers of such languages had a hard time transcribing nuances of sound differences that they did not perceive as meaningful. When asked to divide up words, they would often produce forms that would be closer to abstract representations or etymological reconstructions than to what they had just said a few seconds earlier in the context of an entire word or phrase. It is on such grounds that Sapir argued in favor of the psychological reality of the phoneme. An example will illustrate his reasoning. While trying to teach his Southern Paiute informant, Tony Tillohash, to write his language phonetically, at one point Sapir selected the expression pa:βah “at the water,” formed by a sequence of: voiceless bilabial stop ([p]), stressed long a [a:], voiced bilabial spirant ([β]), unstressed short a ([a]), and final aspiration ([h]).

I asked Tony to divide the word into its syllables and to discover by careful hearing what sounds entered into the composition of each of the syllables, and in what order, then to attempt to write down the proper symbol for each of the discovered phonetic elements. To my astonishment Tony then syllabified: pa, pause, pah. I say “astonishment” because I at once recognized the paradox that Tony was not “hearing” in terms of the actual sounds (the voiced bilabial β was objectively very different from the initial stop) but in terms of an etymological reconstruction: pa “water” plus postposition *-pah “at.” The slight pause which intervened after the stem was enough to divert Tony from the phonetically proper form of the postposition to a theoretically real but actually nonexistent form. (Sapir 1949d: 48–9)

The “theoretically real” form for Sapir is the one with the phoneme /p/, which is realized in Southern Paiute in four different ways depending on where it occurs

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in a word or phrase, with [β] being the form that it assumed after a long voiced vowel, hence the form pa:βah . The alternation between [p] and [β ] in Southern Paiute is similar to phonological processes found in other languages. For instance, in Spanish the sound [b] becomes [β] when it occurs between two vowels. In the following example the first sound of the word banca “bench” changes when the word is preceded by the article la “the (feminine)” that ends with a vowel (from Hyman 1975: 62):

(6) banca [baŋka] “bench”

(7)la banca [la βaŋka] “the bench”

What happens in (7) is a typical case of assimilation: the first sound of banca acquires some of the properties of its surrounding sounds, that is, assimilates to the sounds that are next to it. Rather than closing the vocal organs (in this case the lips) completely to articulate a voiced stop [b], native Spanish speakers extend the feature of continuous air flow that characterizes vowels (the preceding [a] of la and the following [a] of banca) to the intervening consonant. The result is that instead of a stop (where the air stream is momentarily blocked), the sound produced is a fricative ([β]), that is, a sound that is produced by letting the air out of the mouth through a narrow passage (in this case between the lips). This creates a “friction” effect. The two sounds, [b] and [β] in Spanish are said to be in complementary distribution. This means that they never appear in the same environment, that is, [b] never appears between vowels and [β] never appears when it is not preceded by a vowel. In a phonemic analysis of these two sounds in Spanish, [b] and [β] are thus considered two allophones (that is, two variants) of the same phoneme (there are theoretical reasons for choosing /b/ over /β/ as the symbol for the more general, abstract unit). What is different between the Spanish and the Southern Paiute example is that whereas in Spanish what we posit as the abstract unit, the phoneme /b/, does appear in certain phonological contexts (e.g. when the sound is not preceded by a vowel), in Southern Paiute, the sound /p/ of the morpheme -pah never appears because, being part of a suffix, the /p/ of -pah always follows some other sound that affects its articulation. It is in this sense that -pah is a “theoretical form.” It is an abstraction rather than something that speakers actually ever say. To convey this idea, Sapir wrote *-pah, using the asterisk, a convention commonly used in historical linguistics for reconstructed but unattested forms (the form *pəte:r is given as the Proto-Indo-European reconstructed form for what is now the English word father because we have no way of really knowing what Proto- Indo-European people used to say). The fact that a native speaker of Southern Paiute could articulate the form -pah when dividing the word pa:βah gave Sapir an argument in favor of his belief in the psychological reality of the forms that

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