Chapter 4  Motivations 

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Motivation accounts for the connection between the linguistic symbol and its meaning

Motivation deals with the connection between name and sense. Two rival schools of thought: the Naturalists who believed that there was an intrinsic connection between sound and sense, and the Conventionalists, who held that the connection was purely a matter of tradition and convention. In dealing with content morphemes and grammatical morphemes in the second chapter we have also touched on the problem of motivation - for example, chopper and doorman are respectively formed by adding -er to chop and combining door-and-man into one word. This is called morphological or grammatical motivation.

    Ⅰ. Onomatopoeic motivation

     Onomatopoeia is derived from Greek onomatopoiia "word-making": onoma, -matos "name" + poieo "make". Various other terms have been suggested, such as echoism (Jespersen) and "phonaesthetic function" (Firth). Onomatopoeic motivation means defining the principle of motivation by sound. The sounds of such words as cuckoo, ding-dong, swish, buzz, seem to be appropriate to their senses. But it has to be pointed out that onomatopoeic words constitute only a small part of the vocabulary. The forms of words normally have only a conventional relationship with what they refer to. According to Stephen Ullmann, onomatopoeic formation can be divided into primary onomatopoeia and secondary onomatopoeia.
     1. Primary onomatopoeia
     Primary onomatopoeia means the imitation of sound by sound. Here the sound is truly an "echo to the sense": the reference itself is an acoustic experience which is more or less closely imitated by the phonetic structure of the word. Terms like crack, growl, hum, roar, squeak, squeal, whizz and a great many others fall into this category.
     2. Secondary onomatopoeia
     Secondary onomatopoeia means that certain sounds and sound-sequences are associated with certain senses in an expressive relationship. In this form, the sounds evoke, not an acoustic experience, but a movement (dither, dodder, quiver, slink, slither, slouch, squirm, wriggle), or some physical or moral quality, usually unfavourable (gloom, grumpy, mawkish, slimy, sloppy, sloth, wry).
     Some of these onomatopoeic terms have certain elements in common; in Bloomfield's words, there is "a system of initial and final root-forming morphemes, of vague signification", with which the "intense, symbolic connotation" of such termsis associated. For Example, the sounds / sn / may express three types of experiences: "breath-noise (sniff, snuff, snore, snort), "quick separation or movement" (snip, snap, snatch), and "creeping" (snake, snail, sneak, snoop). Final groups have similar functions: -are suggests "big light or noise" as in blare, flare, glare, stare; -ump suggests "protuberance" as in bump, chump, clump, dump, hump, lump, mump(s), plump (adjective), yump, stump and "heavy fall" as in dump, crump, flump, plump (verb), slump, thump.
     Another interesting feature of onomatopoeic patterns is that they often work by vowel alternation. By substituting one vowel for another one can express different noises: snip - snap, sniff - snuff, flip - flap - flop. Akin to this tendency are reduplicated words and phrases like riff-raff, wishy-washy, tit for tat, tick-tock, click-clack. It should be noted that many onomatopoeic forms are based on alternations of not vowels but of initial consonants: higgledy-piggledy, helter-skelter, namby-pamby, roly-poly, etc.
     Fairly recent onomatopoeic formations are: hifi, walkic-talkie, heebie-jeebies, lilo, flower-power, hokey-cokey, itsy-bitsy, swing-wing, etc.

    Ⅱ. Semantic motivation

        Semantic motivation means that motivation is based on semantic factors. It is a kind of mental association. When we speak of the bonnet or the hood of a car, of a coat of paint, or of potatoes cooked in their jackets, these expressions are motivated by the similarity between the garments and the objects referred to. In the same way, when we say the cloth for the clergy, silk for a Q. C., or "town and gown" for "town and university", there is semantic motivation due to the fact that the garments in question are closely associated with the persons they designate. Both types of expression are figurative: the former are metaphorical, based on some similarity between the two elements, the latter are metonymic, founded on some external connection.

     1. Metaphor
     Metaphor is a figure of speech containing an implied comparison, in which a word or phrase ordinarily and primarily used of one thing is applied to another, as in "He has a heart of stone.", "The curtain of night has fallen."
     Mixed metaphor means a combination of inconsistent metaphors, as in "This tower of strength will forge ahead.", "The storm of protest was nipped in the bud."
     2. Metonymy
     Metonymy is the device in which we name something by one of its attributes, as in crown for king, the turf for horse-racing, the White House for the President.
     3. Synecdoche
     Synecdoche means using a part for a whole, an individual for a class, a material for a thing or the reverse of any of these - for example, bread for food, the army for a soldier, copper for penny.
     4. Analogy
     Analogy is a process whereby words are created in imitation of other words. It is illustrated by motorcade and aquacade, created on the model of cavalcade; cashomatic coined after automatic; flash-forward after flash-back; earthrise after sunrise; without-it after with-it.

    Ⅲ. Logical motivation

     Logical motivation deals with the problem of defining a concept by means of logic. A definition has two forms. A common form of definition is "This means such and such." "Fat" means "having much or superfluous flesh". Another form, also common, is "This means the same as that" or "This is equivalent to that"; and a word or set of words is given that can be substituted for the original word. "Fat" means "the same as obese". These two forms of the definition show that a definition has two parts: the definiendum (the word being defined), and the definiens (the definition that is being made). In the above example, "fat" is the definiendum, and "having much or superfluous flesh" and "obese" are the definiens.
     Giving a definition involves two steps to be taken. One step is to identify the concept of a genus (a class of things made up of two or more subordinate classes or species) that is closest to the concept of the definiendum. The other step is to identify the attributes distinguishing one species from other similar species in the same genus. A combination of these two approaches helps define a concept. In the 1950s, for example, there appeared a new crisis gripping the minds of part of the American youth who felt disturbance and anxiety about their personality development and adjustment. This crisis is called an identity crisis. The word "crisis" is a genus, which consists of two or more species, such as spiritual crisis, economic crisis, political crisis. The expression "identity crisis" is used to distinguish itself from other crises.

    Ⅳ. Loss of motivation

     There may be two factors which lead to loss of motivation. One is a change in the morphological structure of a word. The parts of which a compound is made up may coalesce to such a degree that it becomes an opaque, unanalysable unit. The English word "lord", for example, comes from the old English hlaford, earlier a perfectly transparent compound of hlaf "loaf" and weard "ward". The word "lord" originally meant "loaf-keeper". The other factor that accounts for loss of motivation is change of meaning. When the gap between original and transferred meaning becomes too wide, motivation is lost and two senses will be felt to belong to two separate words. There are many examples of this tendency: pupil "ward" and "scholar" and "apple of the eye"; collation "comparison" and "light repast", etc. To re-estabish the link between the two senses of the last word, one requires some special information about its history; it is then found that passages from Cassian's Collationes Patrum used to be read before compline (the last [church] service of the day) in Benedictine monasteries, and these readings were followed by a light meal which was called collation because of its chance connection with the book.

    Ⅴ. Motivation and cultural background

     Words that epitomizes cultural history are called culturally-bound words or allusive words. A culturally-bound word condenses a fund of meanings into a shorter term. "Quixotic", for example, is an epitome of a great book by Cervantes. The word derived from Don Quixote, the hero of the satirical romance, has come to mean "extravagantly chivalrous or romantically idealistic; visionary; impractical or impracticable". Another example is the Faustian spirit: that heaven-storming, adventurous thirst for the infinite which led Faust to sell his soul to the devil in return for universal knowledge and experience.
     The spiritual history not merely of a decade, but of a whole epoch may be summed up in an allusive word. Sometimes a great poet, a dramatist or a novelist gives a name to the spirit of an age - as Goethe did with Faust, Shakespeare with Hamlet. Even a poet's own name may come to express a quality and temper for which we have no other single word. Virgilian Pity, for example, carries a wealth of meaning: poignant, sensitive sadness over the tragedy implicit in most human life; the feeling of regret over vanished beauty and the doom visited on great-hearted courage in the face of malign destiny.
     Culturally-bound words present a challenge to anyone who likes to bring history up into the vivid present.

Exercises

Ⅰ. What does onomatopoeic motivation mean? Does it contradict the statement that is no natural connection between sound and meaning?

Ⅱ. Give the words denoting sounds produced by the animals enumerated below:

the ape..., the ass..., the snake..., the horse..., the duck..., the pig..., the raven... the lark..., the hound..., the lamb..., the mouse..., the dove..., the cricket..., the wolf..., the puppy..., the thrush..., the tiger..., the bull..., the eagle..., the elephant..., the fly..., the monkey..., the kitten..., the frog..., the owl..., the ox...

Ⅲ. What does semantic motivation mean?