Fluxus Editions

Abstract. This article deals with the form-meaning hypothesis in Old English within the theory of arbitrariness/non-arbitrariness. It focuses on the relations between the initial grapheme (phoneme) in a word and its lexical semantics and aims to reveal any non-arbitrary form-meaning associations at the lexical level. The data include <w>-, <s>-, <h>-, and <p>-words from a Thesaurus of Old English. The methodology employs statistical methods (Chi-square test, the coefficient of contingency, the contributions to the Chi-square) within Python realization. Our primary hypothesis is that alliteration—regular repetition of onsets in Old English lexemes, could stand for the regularities in the semantics of these words. We extrapolate the initial research and underlying hypothesis to lexical data in general. The findings demonstrate non-arbitrary form-meaning regularities at the level of the entire Old English lexicon—the tendency of words sharing initial graphemes to be attracted to certain semantic categories.

References References in BIB How to cite How to cite in BIB

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   AUTHOR = {Abramova, Ekaterina and Fernández, Raquel},
   TITLE = {Questioning Arbitrariness in Language: a Data-Driven Study of Conventional Iconicity},
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   YEAR = {2016},
   PAGES = {343--352},
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@ARTICLE{altmann2004a,
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   TITLE = {Script Complexity},
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   YEAR = {2004},
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   PAGES = {68--74},
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@ARTICLE{aryani2013a,
   AUTHOR = {Aryani, Arash and Jacobs, Arthur M. and Conrad, Markus},
   TITLE = {Extracting Salient Sublexical Units from Written Texts: “Emophon,” a Corpus-Based Approach to Phonological Iconicity},
   JOURNAL = {Frontiers in Psychology},
   YEAR = {2013},
   VOLUME = {4},
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@ARTICLE{atkinson2019a,
   AUTHOR = {Atkinson, Mark and Mills, Gregory J. and Smith, Kenny},
   TITLE = {Social Group Effects on the Emergence of Communicative Conventions and Language Complexity},
   JOURNAL = {Journal of Language Evolution},
   YEAR = {2019},
   VOLUME = {4},
   NUMBER = {1},
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   TITLE = {Sound-Meaning Association Biases Evidenced across Thousands of Languages},
   BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},
   YEAR = {2016},
   VOLUME = {113},
   PAGES = {10818--10823},
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@ARTICLE{cornell1981a,
   AUTHOR = {Cornell, Muriel},
   TITLE = {Varieties of Repetition in Old English Poetry. Especially in The Wanderer and The Seafarer},
   JOURNAL = {Neophilologus},
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   VOLUME = {65},
   NUMBER = {2},
   PAGES = {292--307},
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@ARTICLE{dingemanse2015a,
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   TITLE = {An Introductory Grammar of Old English with an Anthology of Readings},
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   PUBLISHER = {ACMRS Press},
   ADDRESS = {Tempe, Arizona},
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   AUTHOR = {Givón, Talmy},
   EDITOR = {Haiman, John},
   TITLE = {Iconicity, Isomorphism, and Non-Arbitrary Coding in Syntax},
   BOOKTITLE = {Iconicity in Syntax. Proceedings of a Symposium on Iconicity in Syntax, Stanford, June 24--26, 1983},
   PUBLISHER = {Benjamins},
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   PUBLISHER = {Cambridge University Press},
   ADDRESS = {Cambridge},
   YEAR = {1992},
   PAGES = {490--535},
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   TITLE = {Finding Non-Arbitrary Form-Meaning Systematicity Using String-Metric Learning for Kernel Regression},
   BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
   YEAR = {2016},
   VOLUME = {1},
   URL = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P16--1225.pdf},
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@BOOK{haiman1985a,
   AUTHOR = {Haiman, John},
   TITLE = {Natural Syntax: Iconicity and Erosion},
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}

@BOOK{hinton1994a,
   EDITOR = {Hinton, Leanne and Nichols, Johanna and Ohala, John J.},
   TITLE = {Sound Symbolism},
   PUBLISHER = {Cambridge University Press},
   YEAR = {1994},
}

@UNPUBLISHED{jee2018a,
   AUTHOR = {Jee, Hana and Tamariz, Monica and Shillcock, Richard},
   TITLE = {The Substructure of Phonics: The Visual Form of Letters and their Paradigmatic English Pronunciation are Systematically Related},
   YEAR = {2018},
   NOTE = {PsyArXiv \url{https://psyarxiv.com/n85mb/}},
}

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   AUTHOR = {Jespersen, Otto},
   TITLE = {Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin},
   PUBLISHER = {George Allen \& Unwin},
   ADDRESS = {London},
   YEAR = {1922},
}

@INPROCEEDINGS{kastovsky1992a,
   AUTHOR = {Kastovsky, Dieter},
   EDITOR = {Hogg, Richard M.},
   TITLE = {Semantics and Vocabulary},
   BOOKTITLE = {The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. I: The Beginnings to 1066},
   PUBLISHER = {Cambridge University Press},
   ADDRESS = {Cambridge},
   YEAR = {1992},
   PAGES = {290--408},
}

@ARTICLE{lotman2011a,
   AUTHOR = {Lotman, Yuri},
   TITLE = {The Place of Art among Other Modelling Systems},
   JOURNAL = {Sign Systems Studies},
   YEAR = {2011},
   VOLUME = {39},
   NUMBER = {2/4},
   PAGES = {249--270},
}

@ARTICLE{lvova2005a,
   AUTHOR = {Lvova, Nadija L.},
   TITLE = {Semantic Functions of English Initial Consonant Clusters},
   JOURNAL = {Glottometrics},
   YEAR = {2005},
   VOLUME = {9},
   PAGES = {21--28},
}

@BOOK{minkova2003a,
   AUTHOR = {Minkova, Donka},
   TITLE = {Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English},
   PUBLISHER = {Cambridge University Press},
   ADDRESS = {Cambridge},
   YEAR = {2003},
}

@ARTICLE{monaghan2014a,
   AUTHOR = {Monaghan, Padraic and Shillcock, Richard and Christiansen, Morten H. and Kirby, Simon},
   TITLE = {How Arbitrary is Language?},
   JOURNAL = {Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B---Biological Sciences},
   YEAR = {2014},
   VOLUME = {369},
}

@ARTICLE{perniss2014a,
   AUTHOR = {Perniss, Pamela and Vigliocco, Gabriella},
   TITLE = {The Bridge of Iconicity: from a World of Experience to the Experience of Language},
   JOURNAL = {Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B},
   YEAR = {2014},
   VOLUME = {369},
}

@ARTICLE{philps2008a,
   AUTHOR = {Philps, Dennis},
   TITLE = {Submorphemic Iconicity in the Lexicon: a Diachronic Approach to English `gn-words'},
   JOURNAL = {Lexis},
   YEAR = {2008},
   VOLUME = {2},
   URL = {http://journals.openedition.org/lexis/728},
}

@INPROCEEDINGS{pimentel2019a,
   AUTHOR = {Pimentel, Tiago and McCarthy, Arya D. and Blasi, Damián E. and Roark, Brian and Cotterell, Ryan},
   TITLE = {Meaning to Form: Measuring Systematicity as Information},
   BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
   YEAR = {2019},
   PAGES = {1751--1764},
}

@BOOK{pollington1993a,
   AUTHOR = {Pollington, Stephen},
   TITLE = {Wordcraft: New English to Old English Dictionary and Thesaurus},
   EDITION = {2},
   PUBLISHER = {Anglo-Saxon Books},
   ADDRESS = {Hereward, UK},
   YEAR = {1993},
}

@INPROCEEDINGS{shillcock2001a,
   AUTHOR = {Shillcock, Richard and Kirby, Simon and McDonald, Scott and Brew, Chris},
   TITLE = {Filled Pauses and their Status in the Mental Lexicon},
   BOOKTITLE = {ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech},
   YEAR = {2001},
   PAGES = {53--56},
}

@INPROCEEDINGS{slam2019a,
   AUTHOR = {Slaměníková, Tereza},
   EDITOR = {Haralambous, Yannis},
   TITLE = {On the Nature of Unmotivated Components in Modern Chinese Characters},
   BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Graphemics in the 21st Century, Brest 2018. Ed. by Yannis Haralambous},
   PUBLISHER = {Fluxus Editions},
   ADDRESS = {Brest},
   YEAR = {2019},
   PAGES = {209--226},
}

@ARTICLE{smith2016a,
   AUTHOR = {Smith, Chris A.},
   TITLE = {Tracking Semantic Change in fl-\hskip0ptmonomorphemes in the Oxford English Dictionary},
   JOURNAL = {Journal of Historical Linguistics},
   YEAR = {2016},
   VOLUME = {6},
}

@BOOK{smith2009a,
   AUTHOR = {Smith, Jeremy J.},
   TITLE = {Old English: A Linguistic Introduction},
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   ADDRESS = {Cambridge},
   YEAR = {2009},
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@INPROCEEDINGS{tsur2002a,
   AUTHOR = {Tsur, Reuven},
   EDITOR = {Semino, Elena and Culpeper, Jonathan},
   TITLE = {Aspects of Cognitive Poetics},
   BOOKTITLE = {Cognitive Stylistics---Language and Cognition in Text Analysis},
   PUBLISHER = {John Benjamins},
   ADDRESS = {Amsterdam, Philadelphia},
   YEAR = {2002},
   PAGES = {279--318},
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@ARTICLE{wilcox2004a,
   AUTHOR = {Wilcox, Sherman},
   TITLE = {Cognitive Iconicity: Conceptual Spaces, Meaning, and Gesture in Signed Language},
   JOURNAL = {Cognitive Linguistics},
   YEAR = {2004},
   VOLUME = {15},
   NUMBER = {2},
   PAGES = {119--147},
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@ARTICLE{winter2017a,
   AUTHOR = {Winter, Bodo and Perlman, Marcus and Perry, Lynn K. and Lupyan, Gary},
   TITLE = {Which Words are Most Iconic? Iconicity in English Sensory Words},
   JOURNAL = {Interaction Studies},
   YEAR = {2017},
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   NUMBER = {3},
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}

@ARTICLE{youn2016a,
   AUTHOR = {Youn, Hyejin and Sutton, Logan and Smith, Eric and Moore, Cristopher and Wilkins, Jon and Maddieson, Ian and Croft, William and Bhattacharya, Tanmoy},
   TITLE = {On the Universal Structure of Human Lexical Semantics},
   JOURNAL = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America},
   YEAR = {2016},
   VOLUME = {113},
   NUMBER = {7},
   PAGES = {1766--1771},
}

@ARTICLE{zlatev2020a,
   AUTHOR = {Zlatev, Jordan and Żywiczyński, Przemysław and Wacewicz, Sławomir},
   TITLE = {Pantomime as the Original Human-Specific Communicative System},
   JOURNAL = {Journal of Language Evolution},
   YEAR = {2020},
   VOLUME = {5},
   NUMBER = {2},
   PAGES = {156--174},
}

Nataliia Drozhashchikh, Elena Efimova & Evgenia Meshcheryakova (2020), “Form-Meaning Regularities in Old English Lexicon,” in Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, 2020 (Yannis Haralambous, Ed.), Grapholinguistics and Its Applications, Vol. 5, Brest: Fluxus Editions, 739–754.


@INPROCEEDINGS{gla5-droz,
   AUTHOR = {Nataliia Drozhashchikh and Elena Efimova and Evgenia Meshcheryakova},
   EDITOR = {Haralambous, Yannis},
   TITLE = {{Form-Meaning Regularities in Old English Lexicon}},
   BOOKTITLE = {{Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, 2020}},
   SERIES = {{Grapholinguistics and Its Applications}},
   VOLUME = {5},
   PUBLISHER = {Fluxus Editions},
   ADDRESS = {Brest},
   YEAR = {2020},
   PAGES = {739--754},
   DOI = {https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-graf-droz},
}