Sound Symbolism in Alaskan Athabascan Languages

Hartman, Sarah

Sound Symbolism in Alaskan Athabascan Languages

Files

Hartman_thesis_2006.pdf(28.22 MB)

Date

2006

Authors

Hartman, Sarah

Advisor

Napoli, Donna Jo, 1948-

Department

Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics

Type

Thesis (B.A.)

Language

en_US

Terms of Use

Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.

Abstract

Traditional Sausseurian linguistic theory views the relationship between sound and meaning in language to be essentially arbitrary (Sausseur 1989). Philosophers and linguists since the time of Plato, however, have wondered if a the sound of a word and its meaning may in fact bear some non-arbitrary relation to each other. This has lead to the theory of SOUND SYMBOLISM, which encompasses a broad range of potential non-arbitrary connections between sound and meaning, from the familiar forms of onomatopoeia within a single language to possible correlations between phonemes and physical qualities that span across unrelated language families. In the summer of2005, I worked at the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) in Fairbanks, Alaska, and was able to collect data on sound symbolism in Ahtna, Koyukon, and Lower Tanana, three ATHABASCAN languages in southern and central Alaska. My data was assembled both from dictionaries in the ANLC's archives and by consultation with a native speaker of Lower Tanana. This thesis examines sound-symbolic patterns in these three languages, looking at several semantic categories as well as the morpheme common to all Alaskan Athabascan languages which marks onomatopoetic words. These patterns are then compared to similar sound-symbolic categories in other unrelated languages.

Permanent URL

http://hdl.handle.net/10066/10880

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Linguistics

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