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The Submorphemic Structure of Amharic: Toward a Phonosemantic Analysis

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The Submorphemic Structure of Amharic: Toward a Phonosemantic Analysis THE SUBMORPHEMIC STRUCTURE OF AMHARIC: TOWARD A PHONOSEMANTIC ANALYSIS BY BEZZA TESFAW AYALEW DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Eyamba G. Bokamba, Chair Professor Elabbas Benmamoun Professor José I. Hualde Assistant Professor Ryan Shosted Associate Professor Peter Unseth, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, Dallas, TX ABSTRACT Since the emergence of structural linguistics most of the linguistic studies have been conducted with the declared assumption that there is no systematic relationship between sound and meaning until a certain number of sounds are combined and arbitrarily associated with certain meanings to form the basic meaningful units known as morphemes. The pervasiveness and success of this paradigm over the decades has apparently discouraged the search for potential sound-meaning relation below the morpheme presumably because such an association is difficult to establish empirically. This study represents an attempt to explore and address this nexus based on one African language: Amharic. It addresses the systematic correspondence between sound and meaning that is observable in the Amharic language’s lexicon across varieties of roots, which are generally believed to be the basic meaningful units. Contrary to the fundamental assumption that restricts sound-meaning association to the morphemic level, the study shows that roots in the Amharic language exhibit phonetic and semantic relationship with one another. This fact suggests the existence of lower level phonetic and semantic structure that has not been recognized as meaningful, and thus substantiates similar sub-morphemic sound meaning correspondences that have been observed in various languages of the world, including the phonaesthemic analyses of English and other Indo-European languages. The initial phase of investigation on a comprehensive database of Amharic roots extracted from Kane’s (1991) Amharic-English dictionary confirmed that there is a systematic sound- meaning correspondence between roots that share subsets of their consonants to such extent that the shared semantic properties of the roots can be abstracted as the semantic descriptions of the ii common sub-morphemic pairs and single consonants. The study was followed by a sound- meaning matching experiment with native speakers based on a series of constructed non-sense words/ roots and the abstracted semantic descriptions of the individual consonants. The findings showed the same results as the initial phase thus confirming those findings: a. The cross-root semantic relations indicate correspondence in phonetic form and in semantic association between the shared components of the roots. b. The core meaning of a root can be described as the composition of the associated semantic properties of its consonants. Statistical analysis of the results of the experiment confirmed that the observed sound- meaning correspondences are not mere coincidences, but systematic relationships that occur at the sub-morphemic level. To the extent that the statical analyses are correct, this finding is argued to be an important contribution to linguistic theory in general with respect to the redefinition of what constitutes the basic unit of meaning in natural language. It is suggested that form-meaning association in language trickles down to the phoneme level. Further, with respect to Amharic and potentially other Semitic languages, the finding in this study has necessitated the dichotomization of the concept of root and etymon which is defined as the phonetic and semantic base of related stems. It is argued that this distinction is vital in understanding the morpho-semantic characteristics that occur in Amharic and related languages, and in accounting for certain diachronic phenomena in the language. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are examined in the study. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to acknowledge the assistance of all the people who generously devoted their time to fill out the experiment questionnaire without which this study wouldn’t have come to fruition. I would also like to thank the people who facilitated the dissemination of the questionnaire: Dr. Animaw Anteneh, Dr. Bedilu Wakjira, Dr. Mersha Alehegn, and Mr. Yohannes Bashaye. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my patient mentor and advisor Dr. Eyamba G. Bokamba, without whose unreserved support and encouragement I wouldn’t have continued my studies at the Univeristy of Illinois, nor would I have been able to complete this dissertation. His meticulous guidance has helped me shape my ideas in this study and beyond. My first positive impressions in joining the department came from the generosity and care of Dr. Elabbas Benmamoun. His generous provision of some household items and toys for my son in my first days in Urbana-Champaign, the first Thanksgiving dinner for my family at his house, his advice, encouragement, and follow up were more than gestures of welcoming a new graduate student to the unit he administered. So I wish to express hereby my indebtedness to Dr. Benmamoun who made me feel at home. My graduate education at UIUC would not have been possible without the continued financial support I enjoyed from the Center for African Studies and the Department of Linguistics. I would like to thank Dr. Mirle Bowen (Director, Center for African Studies) and Dr. James Hye SukYoon (Head, Department of Linguistics). I would like to thank my doctoral committee members Dr. Elabbas Benmamoun, Dr. José Hualde, Dr. Ryan Shosted, and Dr. Peter Unseth all for their constructive comments and suggestions since the defense of my dissertation proposal project. I wish particularly to thank Dr. José Hualde, for encouraging me in my venturing into the wilderness of sound-symbolism by providing some resources and allowing me to take an independent study with him; Dr. Peter Unseth of GIAL, for his willingness to be a member of the committee beyond his call of duty to complement with his specialty on Amharic and Semitic morphology; Dr. Ryan Shosted, for his advice on some technical matters. My family has endured the brunt of all the pressure a graduate study imposes. I would like to thank my wife Genet F. Bogale and my children Simeneh, Inniyew, and Dagim for their unyielding support and love. My sister Hageritu T. Ayalew and her husband Demere G. Sahlu deserve special thanks for all their support, particularly for baby-sitting my children when I was hard-pressed for time. My colleague Mr. Timothy Mahrt was more than a well-wisher in my course of study. I have benefited from his selfless volunteer tutoring of programming lessons. His assistance in reviewing the draft of my proposal deserve him special mention. The statistical analysis of the experimental data would not have been possible without the help of Ms. Dawn Owens-Nicholson of ATLAS in the College of LAS. Last but not least, I would like to thank all relatives and friends who were pouring their continual encouragement to me along the course of my study. While my doctoral studies and this dissertation were facilitated by the above-mentioned individuals, I alone am responsible for the analysis and interpretations offered herein. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: THE STRUCTURE OF AMHARIC: AN OVERVIEW ..................................................... 26 CHAPTER 3: REVIEW OF LITERATURE .............................................................................................. 50 CHAPTER 4: ANALYSIS OF THE SUB-MORPHEMIC PHENOMENA .............................................. 61 CHAPTER 5: RESULTS FROM THE EXPERIMENT ........................................................................... 100 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS AND THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS ............................................ 113 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................ 123 APPENDIX I: GLOSSARY OF ROOTS/ ETYMONS ............................................................................ 127 APPENDIX II: THE QUESTIONNAIRE (Amharic) ............................................................................... 152 APPENDIX III: THE QUESTIONNAIRE (English Translation) ............................................................ 156 v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background This study deals with the phenomenon of non-arbitrary relation between sound and meaning in a natural language, a highly controversial subject in linguistics, commonly known as sound symbolism. The controversy arises from its conflict with the so-called first principle of structural linguistics which asserts that the linguistic sign is arbitrary (De Saussure 1959). There are enough research findings today to affirm that the relationship between sound and meaning in linguistic signs is not so arbitrary. However, as Nuckolls’ (1999) remark suggests more work is needed to make a stronger case for the subject beyond challenging the opposite view; “ … linguists' claims for sound symbolism are often weak and highly qualified, as when a descriptive report of sound-symbolism patterning merely concludes that the principle of arbitrariness is not absolute” (p. 216). Not long
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