Two Linguistics Response Papers

Dear Readers,

Here are two response papers I did for my linguistics class recently that you might find interesting. The textbook I'm responding to is Language: Its Structure and Use, 5th edition, by Edward Finegan.

Metaphors and Finegan and Me

For my first response paper I would like to respond to Finegan’s treatment of metaphors, as discussed on pages 188-190, in Chapter 6, the semantics chapter.

Finegan starts the section on metaphors this way: “Difficulties in drawing a distinction between polysemy and homonymy arise partly from the fact that language often uses words metaphorically.” (188) This is a confusing sentence. It will help me to understand it if I define polysemy and homonymy. “Polysemy,” according to Finegan’s glossary, is “the term used to refer to multiple related meanings for a given word or sentence; a word with more than one meaning is said to be polysemic.” “Homonymy” is, again, according to the glossary, “the state of having identical expression but different meanings. (book a flight and buy a book.): homophonous is sometimes used with the related sense of ‘sounding alike’ but not necessarily having the same written form (see and sea) or meaning.” Simply put, “polysemy” refers to one word with two or more meanings and “homonymy” refers to two different words altogether, but the two different words just happen to sound the same.

Now that we have a clear grip on the definitions of “polysemy” and “homonymy,” let’s go back to Finegan’s first statement. Why would metaphors have anything to do with making it hard to differentiate between polysemy and homonymy? Well, the tricky thing about metaphors is that when people come up with a new metaphor, they give a new meaning to an old word. That is, when people use a new metaphor, they are extending a word’s polysemy; they are increasing the number of meanings a single word has.

But what happens when the metaphor becomes popular and widely used? What happens when the metaphorical sense of a word is used so much that people stop realizing that it’s a metaphor at all? For example, to “book” a flight originally meant to have a secretary write down your ticket information in a book. The verb “book” was originally a metaphor, arising from the noun “book.” As the metaphorical meaning of the word “book” became more widely used, though, people began to forget the origin of the metaphorical sense of the word. So, the new word, the verb “book” wasn’t a metaphor at all anymore. It was just another word in the dictionary.

Thus, the metaphorical meaning of “book” went from being another meaning of one word to being a whole new word altogether. But when exactly did “book” make the transformation? When did “book” emerge from the cocoon of polysemy and spread its butterfly wings of homonymy? Well, no one knows- you can’t pinpoint the moment of transformation, that’s why metaphors muck up the polysemy/homonymy distinction.

I’ve never been in a position where I’ve needed to separate polysemy from homonymy, but I suppose that dictionary makers need to decide whether a word is two words or if a word is one word with multiple meanings. Because when I browse through a dictionary, I notice that for one word with multiple meanings, the dictionary has the word listed once, followed by a couple different enumerated definitions. I also notice that for two words that just happen to sound alike, each word gets its own entry. No doubt some of the distinctions between polysemy and homonymy dictionary-editors make are arbitrary.

One of the important things I’ve learned in this class and from the textbook is that metaphors aren’t just a device that creative writers use. I used to think of metaphors as things like, “O my love is like a red, red rose,” and “his fist was a sledgehammer.” But ENG 504 helped me to see that metaphors were a much bigger concept than those poetic devices. I didn’t realize before this semester that we use metaphors all the time.

I think humans use metaphors on a daily basis, in everyday conversation, for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that metaphors help us express ourselves in interesting and creative and descriptive ways. For example, which of the following sentences sound better?

1. “Tennis star Serena Williams breezed through the early matches.”

2. “Tennis star Serena Williams efficiently won the early matches.”

To me, sentence one sounds much better. It’s more aesthetically pleasing.
Sentence one paints a better picture, I think, because it contains a metaphor.

I just noticed another metaphor (sort of) in that sentence. The word “star” is like
the celestial thingamajig doing hydrogen fusion because they share these similarities: A movie star is far away and unobtainable, and a heavenly star is far away and unobtainable. A movie star is (typically) beautiful, and a heavenly star is beautiful. A movie star often sparkles (with makeup, and with the help of special lighting), and a heavenly star sparkles. So I just wonder if people came up with the word “star” as in “movie star” originally as a metaphor, and then eventually it became so widely used that it became its own word.

THE END

Language Change and Learning another Language

After browsing the table of contents, I’ve decided to do this response paper on chapter 13: Language Change over Time: Historical Linguistics.

One principle that has stuck with me from all my English classes at Northern Arizona University is “language changes and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Even if powerful men in power suits make and enforce uniform, universal ways of spelling and pronunciation, even if we create a whole bunch of prescriptive rules and write a bunch of books about how to speak and write English properly, it won’t work. English won’t be preserved indefinitely. English will die. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but wait a millennia or two or three or four, and English as we know it will be dead.

That’s kind of a sobering thought. It makes me feel a little existential. But I guess it’s not a huge deal. I’m only being sentimental when I mourn the eventual death of the English language. I personally believe that language is only a medium through which humans understand and talk about reality; language is not reality itself.

So, even though in a few thousand years, nobody will be able to read my blog posts or my love letters or my journals or my poems, (except for maybe scholars who take the time to learn modern English) people will still be able to experience reality just fine. Like, every language does its job of communicating, so it doesn’t really matter what language people speak, as long as people in a certain community understand the language. I’m just “rooting for the home team” when I root for English to stick around for a long long time. It’s like I’m at a high school pep assembly and I’m cheering for my high school football team. Why do I care if my team wins? Uh… just because it’s my school; and everybody else around me is cheering for it, and I’m familiar with the players on my team, and my high school football team is close to home. I cheer for my high school football team for purely sentimental, biased reasons.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter if my high school’s football team wins or not. The school they’re going to play is probably a good school, too. So if in a few thousand years, people in the U.S. (if the U.S. is still around- maybe I should say, “people dwelling on what we now call the North American continent”) are speaking Chinese or Tongan or some as-yet-undeveloped language, I won’t mind. That’s fine.

And I don’t really believe in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (well, I do a little bit) that says, roughly, that the language we speak influences our view of reality. (Let me clarify/digress. The metaphors we use and the word choices we make influence our view of reality, but the actual language-English, Spanish, French, etc., doesn’t fundamentally influence our view of reality. It’s not like English speakers have some kind of cognitive advantage over Tok Pisin speakers. It’s not like speakers of one particular language are trapped in one particular mindset for their whole lives. Although, I’m reading Metaphors We Live By and it makes a compelling argument for language influencing our view of reality more than we think it does. According to Lakoff and Johnson, the metaphors we use conversationally are used unconsciously and learned unconsciously- I’m talking about the underlying metaphors like ARGUMENT IS WAR) But ultimately, I think, humans, no matter what language they speak, still understand big concepts like war and time and love and age and wisdom and nature.

If you prick a French speaker, they bleed just as a German speaker would bleed. I don’t believe there’s something so special about English that everybody ought to speak it forever. I mean, for some social and political reasons, it’s advantageous for people in the U.S. to learn English now, but that’s a different issue.

Moving on, another part of the chapter I found interesting was on languages in contact. The book talked about how now more than ever, languages are coming in contact with each other, and as a result, many people grow up learning two or more different languages. Lots of people are learning another language in school, too.

The other day in one of my classes there was a guest speaker who did comparative literature, and she was fluent in three different languages. The guest speaker said that she thought that American students really should be required to learn a second language, the way many students in Europe and Asia are. And maybe I agree with her. I’d like to know another language, but, I was raised in a place where it was just fine to speak and read and write in English all the time, so that’s what I did, and that’s what my peers did. When I got to college I was required to take three semesters of a foreign language for my major. So I took three semesters of Spanish, and I learned a little bit, but really not very much, and what I did learn is slipping away, because I never use it. To me, learning a new language is like learning how to play an instrument. Sure, I’d love to be able to play the guitar like a rock star, and sure, I’d love to speak Italian, or Spanish, or Klingon, but it would be sooooooo hard! It takes forever to learn all those words and all that grammar! And to really get fluent in another language, I think I’d have to go live in an area of the world where they speak it for a few years, and not just listen to CDs at home and practice Tahitian with my stuffed animals. I guess I just don’t see the benefit of learning another language.

I’d rather learn how to paint. Or surf.

I’m surprised to read that, “In central Africa, India, and Papua New Guinea, it is commonplace for small children to grow up speaking four or five languages.” Wow. That’s cool.

THE END