Iconic word’s de-iconization: the nature of the process in the English Language
Abstract
The article is devoted to the diachronic study of iconic vocabulary of the English language. Language iconicity manifests itself either in acoustic copying of natural sounds (onomatopoeia) or in articulatory, mimetic copying of various objects (sound symbolism). Any iconic word gradually loses its iconicity in order to fit into a language, a sophisticated system of arbitrary signs. On its way to unavoidable arbitrariness, it goes through 4 stages of de-iconization. Two factors are in operation in this process: regular sound changes and the development of polysemy. Having analyzed the effect of regular sound changes on iconic vocabulary we conclude that deiconization tempo depends not only on the number of sound changes the word undergoes, but also on whether or not this particular change destroys the word’s meaning-bearing elements. These elements are the onomatopoeic word’s phonemes whose acoustic characteristics mirror the prominent acoustic characteristics of denoted sounds (e. g. /r/ is a core element of words denoting harsh, rumbling, discordant sounds). Taking into account various patterns of iconic word’s form evolution combined with the general semantic development tendencies we create a classification of iconic words according to the stages of their de-iconization.
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