Phonetic motivation of words

Types of motivation

Definition of motivation

Word-meaning and motivation

Distributional meaning of morphemes

Differential meaning of morphemes

Differential meaning is the semantic component that serves to distinguish one word from all others containing identical morphemes. In words consisting of two or more morphemes one of the constituent morphemes always has differential meaning. For example, in such words as bookshelf, bookcase, bookshop the second morphemes have differential meanings that serve to these words from each other.

Denotational and differential meanings are not mutually exclusive. However, there are some cases when it is difficult or even impossible to assign any denotative meaning to the morpheme, as is the case with the morpheme cran- in the word cranberry, though its differential meaning is felt in comparison with words blackberry, gooseberry, strawberry.

Distributional meaning is the meaning of the order and arrangement of morphemes constructing the word. It is found in all words containing more than one morpheme. For example, the word reader is composed of two morphemes, namely, read- and –er, each possessing a denotational meaning. But there is one more element of meaning that enables us to understand this word. It is the pattern of arrangement of its constituent morphemes. A different arrangement of the same morphemes would make this word meaningless.

There are cases when we can observe a direct connection between the structural pattern of the word and its meaning. In such cases we say that the word is motivated. The term motivation is used to denote the relationship existing between the phonemic and morphemic composition and structural pattern of the word, on one hand, and its lexical meaning, on the other.

There are three main types of motivation: phonetical, morphological and semantic motivation.

Phonetic motivation of a word implies a direct connection between the phonetical structure of the word and its lexical meaning.

If the word is motivated by a certain similarity between the sounds which make it up and the sounds referred to by the sense of this word, we observe an onomatopoeic, imitative or echoic motivation, as in the case of cuckoo, cok-a-doodle-doo.

There is one more type of phonetic motivation closely akin to the imitative forms, namely sound symbolism. Some sounds or combination of sounds are supposed to have a symbolic value in explaining the meaning of words. As the same combinations of sounds are used in many semantically similar words, they become more closely associated with the meaning. For example, the sound-cluster fl used in the words flap, flip, flop, flitter, flimmer, flicker, flutter, flash, flush, flare is associated with quick movement.

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