Onomatopoeia and Arbitrariness

WARNING: Huge Nerd Alert

Recently, I've decided to start rereading some of my linguistics textbooks to brush up on and maintain my knowledge and skills.  Yes, I know, I'm a nerd.  But you're reading this blog, so really, who's to say?  I kid.

I'm starting with the textbook for my introductory linguistics class, which was Linguistics For Everyone.  I honestly loved this textbook and recommend it to everyone who's interested in linguistics.  After reading through the first chapter, I started to look over the review section.  The first review exercise asked one to think about the connection between onomatopoeia and arbitrariness, one of the design features of language.

Charles Hockett introduced six design features of language that characterize human language and separate it from other communication systems.  (There are like ten more that he later came up with, but the book focuses on these six, so we'll go with these.)  They are as follows:

• Semanticity - all signals must have meaning
• Arbitrariness - there is no logical connection between the signal and the idea it represents
• Discreteness - any message can be broken into parts (e.g., sentences into words, words into sounds)
• Displacement - the language user can discuss things that are not present (either physically or chronologically); this also includes abstraction, talking about things that are not tangible (such as ideas)
• Productivity (or generativity) - language users can understand and create completely new utterances
• Duality of patterning - a number of meaningful utterances can be recombined in a systematic way (such as prefixes can be combined to various root words).

Other communication systems (animal languages, traffic signs, etc.) can have some of these design features, but only human language has all of them.  It's the difference between communication and true language.

So, as said earlier and as this post is titled, the review exercise asked us to think about the connection between onomatopoeia and arbitrariness.  Apparently, this is quite the topic for debate among linguists.  Well, here are my thoughts.

Onomatopoeia is a word that represents a sound, such as bam or buzz.  Is the connection between woof and the sound a dog makes arbitrary or not?  Well, it's not black and white, but I argue that it is arbitrary.

Arbitrariness is proven by different words for the same concept across various languages.  There's no logical reason that a dog is called a dog in English or a perro in Spanish or a собака in Russian.  Similarly, there's no logical reason that a rooster should say cock-a-doodle-doo in English but cucurucu in Portuguese.  As my first linguistics professor said, the rooster doesn't actually sound different in Portugal or anywhere else; the onomatopoeia is arbitrary.

Of course, there are similarities in onomatopoeia across the languages (rooster calls all seem to have a repetitive [k] sound and four or more syllables; check out this cool webpage that lists a bunch of other languages' versions), while dog and perro and собака couldn't be more different from each other.

This is because there is a somewhat logical connection between the signal (cock-a-doodle-doo) and its concept (the sound a rooster makes).  Onomatopoeic words are trying to be representative or iconic of the sound it's signifying, so it's not completely random or arbitrary.  That would mean that my argument for onomatopoeia being arbitrary is false.  But!  I have a counterargument.

The textbook also brings up sign languages in relation to Hockett's six design features and discusses how sign languages are also full human languages that fit all six features.  I minored in American Sign Language and highly enjoyed this recognition of sign languages as valid.  (Did you know that ASL was only recognized as an official language in the 60's?  A discussion for another time.)

In terms of arbitrariness, many signs do not have a logical connection between the sign and the concept.  For instance, the sign for name:

Or the sign for trash.

However, there are also many signs that are iconic, or there is a logical connection between the sign and the concept.  For example, the sign for cat:

As you can see, the sign makes a motion like pinching a whisker, which cats have.  Another example is the ASL alphabet.  Practically all of the letters are iconic of the English alphabet, such as the sign for C, in which the user curves their thumb and fingers to make a c-shape.

Despite these rather non-arbitrary iconic signs, ASL still has the quality of arbitrariness.  In fact, even for these iconic signs, there is variation across sign languages.  Below is a comparison between the signs for cat in American Sign Language and British Sign Language.

The BSL sign also represents whiskers, funnily enough, but it uses two hands and all fingers to demonstrate the whiskers.  This represents a similar kind of arbitrariness that onomatopoeia displayed across languages.

In the first chapter of Linguistics For Everyone, the book states that there is a "language-dialect continuum" that all varieties of language fall on.  I assert that all words fall somewhere on an arbitrary-iconic continuum.

I argue that, even though there is a logical connection between the onomatopoeic word and the sound it represents, because the words vary over languages and there is no logical argument for one language's onomatopoeic word over another's, that onomatopoeia still has the quality of arbitrariness.

What does a rooster say where you live?

Him & I & Rhyme

My previous post (link) was about G-Eazy and Halsey's song "Him & I" and whether or not the line "in the end, it's him and I" is grammatically correct.

The conclusion I came to was that, prescriptively, "him and I" with I in the object position is incorrect.  There's more to it than that, but you can read the other post for the full explanation.

Another reason, I believe, for the lyric being "him and I" instead of "him and me," is the rhyming capabilities and sound of I.  I is comprised of the diphthong [ay], a sound that's heavily present throughout the song.

All of the lines in Halsey's choruses end with [aj], as well as most of the bridge and the first two parts of G-Eazy's verses.

Halsey's Chorus:

Cross my heart, hope to die [daj]
To my lover I'd never lie [laj]
He said, "Be true," I swear I'll try [čraj]
In the end, it's him and I [aj]
He's out his head, I'm out my mind [majnd]
We got that love; the crazy kind [kajnd]
I am his, and he is mine [majn]
In the end, it's him and I [aj]

First Part of G-Eazy's First Verse:

My '65 speeding up the PCH, a hell of a ride [rajd]
They don't wanna see us make it, they just wanna divide [dɪvajd]
2017 Bonnie and Clyde [klajd]
Wouldn't see the point of living on if one of us died [dajd]

First Part of G-Eazy's Second Verse:

It's her and I mobbin' 'til the end of time [tajm]
Only one who gets me, I'm a crazy fuckin' Gemini [ǰɛmɪnaj]
Remember this for when I die [daj]
Everybody dressed in all black, suits and a tie [taj]

My funeral will be lit if I [aj]
Ever go down or get caught, if they identify [ajdɛntɪfaj]
My bitch was the most solid, nothing to solidify [səlɪdɪfaj]
She would never cheat, you'd never see her with a different guy [gaj]
Ever tell you different, then it's a lie [laj]

Halsey's Bridge:

Cross my heart, hope to die [daj]
To you I've never lied [lajd]
For you I'd take a life [lajf]
It's him and I, and I swear [aj]

Cross my heart, hope to die [daj]
This is our ride or die [daj]
You can confide in me [kʌnfajd]
There is no hiding, I swear [hajdin]

As we can see, the [aj] sound is heard throughout the song.  It's not necessarily the last sound in the word (such as with die [daj]), but sometimes in the middle of the word (such as with mine [majn]).  Even in the bridge, when the last lines don't end in [aj], they're still found in the middle of the lines with I, confide, and hiding.

I believe this helps to create a universal sound throughout the song, and G-Eazy continuing the rhyme of the chorus in the first parts of his verses helps unite them and make the transition better because it still sounds like one cohesive unit.

Another aspect of [aj] is that it's an open, untensed vowel.  The song is very relaxed, and that's aided by [aj] being a relaxed vowel sound, something that wouldn't have been accomplished by the prescriptively correct "him and me."

Him & I

This post is a day late because the last few days have been very busy and I have not yet had time to build up a buffer of posts.  Alas, here we go!

I hardly ever listen to the radio, and when I do it's usually country radio--I know, I know.  Therefore, I'm usually in the dark about the new hit songs that are playing.  Yesterday I was introduced to Him & I by G-Eazy ft. Halsey while listening to the radio in my girlfriend's car.

If you're like me and haven't heard the song yet, here is their performance on Good Morning America because I can't link the music video:

Halsey's one of my favorite artists, so my girlfriend was surprised that I hadn't heard of this song yet.
 As we listened and heard the song multiple times throughout the day, she remarked, "Isn't that not correct?  'Him and I'?"

I thought she was saying the "him" part was incorrect.  I said it was fine, that because "him and I" is the object of the sentence "In the end, it's him and I."  Then she said, "Shouldn't it be 'him and me'?"

Let's explore that, shall we?

The "you and I" or "you and me" debate is one that's plagued me for almost my whole life.  I remember being corrected on it several times as a child, but as I grew older nobody cared anymore.  Much like who vs whom, the proper distinction is fading and both options tend to sound right to native English speakers.

We know when it's right to use "I" or "me" in other situations.  For example, we would never say, "Me am going to the store," or "Give that ball to I."  Yet it seems we switch me and I pretty frequently when an and gets involved.

Is it "Me and Joe are going to the store" or "Joe and I are going to the store"?  Is it "The estate is going to Mary and I" or "The estate is going to Mary and me"?  And even then, does the I or me come before or after the other name(s) or pronoun(s)?

If we look prescriptively at what should be right, then I should always be used in the subject ("Joe and I are going to the store"), and me should always be used in the object ("The estate is going to Mary and me").  In fact, if you get rid of Joe and Mary in the example sentences, you still get a grammatically correct sentence: "I [am] going to the store," and "The estate is going to me."

Therefore, the lyric "In the end, it's him and I" is prescriptively incorrect and should be "him and me."

BUT, what is right prescriptively is not always what we do.

All four of the example sentences I gave above sound fine to me and are sentences I would not be surprised to hear coming from any English speaker's mouth.  In fact, "The estate is going to Mary and I" sounds more correct to me than the actually correct "The estate is going to Mary and me," or at least more formal than "Mary and me."

It turns out that this is a result of hypercorrection in English speakers.  Because speakers were always corrected against using me in the subject, speakers tried to avoid me even further by replacing it with I even when me is actually correct.  Prescriptive ideas tend to align with ideas of prestige in language use, and so the usage of I in the object has a more formal connotation to it.

Therefore, while the lyric "In the end, it's him and I" is prescriptively incorrect, it's actually a result of hypercorrection because of prescriptivism and sounds more formal or prestigious than "him and me" would.

Interestingly, the issue of me and I is also complicated further by the fact that the third person pronouns don't follow the same pattern as the first person pronouns should.  (I'm leaving out second person because it's all you, which is a whole other basket of fun that I'll post about in the future.)

The singular nominative first and third person pronouns are I, he, she.  We've established that the subject pronoun should be used when in the subject position ("Joe and I are going to the store").  But "Joe and he" or "Joe and she are going to the store" do not sound right, but "Joe and him" or "Joe and her are going to the store," the objective pronouns, do.

Let's look at the objective pronouns: me, him, her.  Prescriptively, they should be in the object ("The estate is going to Mary and me.")  And it turns out that "The estate is going to Mary and him" or "Mary and her" do sound right.

So even with third person pronouns, we see the objective form in the subject position, and that is grammatically correct.

I believe this occurrence with the third person pronouns is why me started cropping up in the subject position as well.  Grammarians fought against it, which led to hypercorrection, and now we have a subject pronoun commonly found in the object position--ironically, the opposite of what the grammarians were going for.

There you have it, a very long-winded explanation for why, in the end, it's him and I.

More reading/my sources:

• https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/74887458423/why-do-we-get-confused-about-you-and-me
• https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1047/which-is-correct-you-and-i-or-you-and-me
• https://www.thoughtco.com/hypercorrection-grammar-and-pronunciation-1690937
• https://www.thoughtco.com/i-and-me-1689417

Comma Safety

I'd been pondering what to write about for this blog post, tossing around random ideas, when today I got a mass email about firework safety from my apartment managers.  The email reminded us that fireworks are dangerous, and that they're not allowed on the property.  It also contained some facts about firework risks.

These are the facts that were listed:

• Most amateur firework injuries are to children.
• Sparklers can burn at temperatures as hot as 1200 degrees Fahrenheit and range up to 2000 degrees.
• Every Fourth of July fireworks are the leading cause of fires
• The National Fire Protection Association warns that there is no safe use of amateur fireworks and urges you to attend a public fireworks display instead of using them yourself.

Did you notice anything?

Well, first, I noticed that the sentence of the first bullet point is awkwardly written.  It could have been easily fixed with a simple verb change: Most amateur firework injuries happen to children.

While that was interesting, what really caught my eye was the third bullet point.  As a side, it was the only bullet point that didn't have a period at the end.  But my true focus was on the lack of a comma, which caused confusion when first reading it.

"Every Fourth of July fireworks are the leading cause of fires."

When I first read it, I thought that "Fourth of July" was a noun phrase that was modifying "fireworks," and was confused because "every" didn't match up with the plural "fireworks."  My brain supplied possible alternate sentences such as, "Every Fourth of July firework is the leading cause of fires," or "All Fourth of July fireworks are the leading cause of fires."

It was then I realized that there was a comma missing after "July."  The phrase "Every Fourth of July" is a dependent noun phrase that sets up the following noun clause: "fireworks are the leading cause of fires."

The phrase should be punctuated and read as such: "Every Fourth of July, fireworks are the leading cause of fires."

So remember, folks, on this fast-approaching Fourth of July to practice firework safety, and also to practice comma safety in your every day lives.

We Vs. We

Yet another post inspired by tumblr, but also by my real life conversations!  This blog post will focus on the linguistic concept of "clusivity."  Clusivity marks the difference between inclusive and exclusive pronouns (and therefore verb morphology), primarily in first-person plural.

It's the difference between saying, "We're going to the mall!" meaning "you and me and/or others" and "me and others but not you."

So the post I saw on tumblr a while ago (link) mentioned that the Cherokee language has inclusive/exclusive verb tenses.  Again, it's not that Cherokee has different verb tenses, but more that Cherokee has a different "person" (first person inclusive plural and first person exclusive plural), which therefore affects verb tenses.

Someone else commented on the post and joked that "some languages just side-eye harder than others."  While the idea of specifically denoting "we but not you" does seem rude in American culture, it probably avoids a lot of confusion and isn't rude in those languages.

Which brings me to my real life conversation.

Today at work, a coworker was talking about her upcoming trip to Las Vegas that she was taking with her fiance and their roommates.  She said that her best friend ended up inviting herself along because she told her friend, "We're going to Vegas!" and her friend exclaimed, "Oh, we are?!"

We all laughed at the situation, and my coworker said she didn't know how to politely say "I meant we, not including you," and shrugged it off and figured the trip would still be fun.  If English had clusivity, it wouldn't have been a problem!"

Thinking about that story and the tumblr post made me think of how there's a lot of jokes about inclusive and exclusive we in tv shows.

For example:
Children: Do we really have to clean the living room?
Parent: We are not cleaning the living room, you two are.

Or...
Older sibling: We're going to the mall later.
Younger sibling: We are?!
Older sibling: No, me and Jessica are.  You're going home.

You get the picture.

Clusivity is uncommon in languages, featuring mostly in Austronesian languages, various languages in India, eastern Siberia, Mandarin, and about half Native American languages (Source).

This article (link) talks more about clusivity and the "we" issue in English, and shows how Tok-Pisin takes clusivity even further than "we and you" and "we and not you," by also have a "we two" and "we more than two" distinction as well, resulting in four different words/phrases for English's one "we"!  Could you imagine?

Clusivity is not the only way English is lacking in pronouns.  I did a project in college on English's lack of a true second person plural pronoun, and I'll probably make another post about that in the future.

Until then, I hope we all (we and you) have a good day!

Mental File Cabinets

In my first linguistics class, my professor described our mental lexicon, or the dictionary of words in our brains, as file cabinets.  As we store words, we group them together based on similar meanings.  For instants, red, blue, and yellow could all be filed under "Colors" and "Adjectives," while blue could also be filed under "Nature" for the ocean and the sky.

Sometimes, however, when we try to access our file cabinets we have trouble finding the page or word we're looking for, but can come up with others in that same file folder.  When a word is on the tip of our tongue or we say, "It's like quirky, but not quite," we're having a problem with our file cabinet.

This all came to mind because of a conversation with my girlfriend on the drive home on Sunday.  We were discussing plot ideas for a Harry Potter-based show she's choreographing for when she said, "Exactly!  Then Draco could be like a...a second spy?  What's the word?"

I laughed and said, "Double agent?"

"Yes!"

Her brain couldn't quite find the pages for "double" and "agent" in her file folders, but next to "double" it found "second" and next to "agent" it found "spy."  I found that to be completely fascinating, and I just wanted to share it.

On a side note, there was no post on Saturday, and I apologize.  I ran out of my vacation buffer and didn't have time for a Saturday post.  Perhaps I'll make an extra post sometime to make up for it.

Until then!

My Honors Thesis | Young People Are Always On Their Phones: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Text Messaging

As I said in my first post, I graduated last year from Western Oregon University with a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and American Sign Language.  I was also part of the Honors Program, and in order to graduate I had to complete a thesis project.

For my thesis, I decided to investigate texting attitudes and patterns across demographics.  I did a survey, read a ridiculous amount of articles, and wrote my thesis.  That all sounds easier than it really was, but in the end it was fun--after the countless hours in the library, eyes glazing over from reading too much, and crying over how to organize all this data, of course.

The linguistics of text messaging is something I'm really passionate about now, so I might make posts about it and refer back to my thesis, so I decided to post it here so people could read it and have it as a reference if I post about it later.

Young People Are Always On Their Phones: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Text Messaging (link)

Abstract: Since the invention of texting in the 1990s, it has become a vital tool of interaction used by people all over the world. Texting is a unique form of communication because it uses written language to emulate aspects of spoken language through the usage of textisms – emoticons, abbreviations, acronyms, and more. It is these textisms that have been the cause of much hysteria and concern over the future of the English language, and most of the focus has been put on the biggest proponents of texting: young people. This senior thesis reviews the history of standardization in writing and research on texting to investigate the linguistic purpose and function of textisms. I surveyed members of my community to learn patterns in usage of and attitudes toward texting with a focus on demographics and claims against texting, with the goal to assert that texting is an incredibly innovative form of language that enhances, rather than degrades, English.

To entice you to read, here are some of my favorite lines:

• It’s the same reason that people use metaphors in poetry, and why elementary school children spell “boobies” with the numbers on their calculators: humans like to have fun with their language. (Culpepper 10-11)
• Indeed, what is the difference between shortening Monday to Mon. and totally to totes? It’s about the same difference as wearing a swimsuit in public versus underwear: social acceptability. (Culpepper 67)
• The idea of proper English is inherently ableist, racist, and classist. (Culpepper 75)

If you read it, please comment and let me know what you think.  I'd love to discuss it with people.