Labio-Velarity and Derogation in English: A Study in Phonosemic Correlation
1971; Duke University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1/2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3087993
ISSN1527-2133
Autores Tópico(s)Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
ResumoN 4 NOVEMBER 1971, Allen Walker Read of Columbia University, President of the American Society of Geolinguistics, spoke at Drew University on Ethnic Insult in American English. Among his auditors on that occasion was Charles Sleeth, Professor of English at Brooklyn College, who noted, during the discussion period following Read's presentation, that the phonic element common to such slur words as Nigger, Kike, and Dago is velar occlusion. Building on the insights voiced by both these scholars, I would like to extend the Read-Sleeth thesis to semantic realms beyond ethnicity and to phonological features other than velarity and occlusion. The hypothesis developed in this paper is that labiality as well as velarity connotes derogation and that this derogation is almost as evident in terms for tabooed objects and actions as in names for racial, national, and ideological groups that are targets of xenophobia. Moreover, derogatory velarity and labiality appear not to be confined to stops but rather to extend to fricatives, nasals, and glides and even to low and back vowels. In justice to Sleeth's observation, however, it should be added that, in producing derogatory connotations, velarity is apparently more efficacious than labiality, and consonantality more efficacious than vocalicity. While the sound units considered in this paper will be, among others, distinctive features, those features will be articulatory in nature rather than acoustic. My phonology will further depart from that proposed by Roman Jakobson (1951) in being, for most purposes, nonbinary. The only sense in which it will be binary is that I descry an overall phonosemic opposition between apical and nonapical sounds in English, nonapical sounds tending to be derogatory in force and apical sounds nonderogatory. (The term nonderogatory is advisedly employed, since there is, so far as I can see, no strictly laudatory feature or phoneme in the English sound system. This phonosemic asymmetry is paralleled by the grammatical asymmetry in accordance with which English has diminutive suffixes, such as the -le in thimble, but lacks augmentative suffixes of the type found in Spanish or Italian.) Further evidence for a tendency toward functional equivalence among nonapicals in English is provided by the frequent synonymies of
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