| Lemma | referential symbolism |
|---|---|
| Categoria grammaticale | N |
| Lingua | inglese |
| Sigla | Sapir (1929) |
| Titolo | A Study in Phonetic Symbolism |
| Sinonimi | |
| Rinvii | arbitrary association (inglese) expressive symbolism (inglese) functional significance (inglese) phonetic variant (inglese) symbolism (inglese) |
| Traduzioni | |
| Citazioni | The symbolism of language is [...] twofold. [...] the greater part of its recognized content and structure is symbolic in a purely referential sense; in other words, the meaningful combination of vowels and consonants [...] derive their functional significance from the arbitrary associations between them and their meanings [...]. This completely dissociated type of symbolism is [...] of the very essence of linguistic form. So far as the referential symbolism of language is concerned, the words 'boy' and 'man' are discrete, incomparable phonetic entities, the sound-group b-o-y having no more to do with the sound-group m-a-n, in a possible scale of evaluated phonetic variants, than any randomly selected pair of sound-groups, say 'run' and 'bad', have to do with each other. [...] in actual speech referential and expressive symbolisms are pooled in a single expressive stream, the socialization of the tendency to expressive symbolism being far less extreme, in the great majority of languages, than of the tendency to fix references as such. |