Re: Grimm shift as starting point of "Germanic"

At 12:34:47 PM on Monday, March 17, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> At 7:57:11 PM on Sunday, March 16, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:

>>>>> In other words, with some words, you'll have to resort
>>>>> to 'expressiveness' to explain the gemination, which is
>>>>> no explanation at all.

>>>> Why not? In many languages, "expressive" formnations do
>>>> have their own peculiar phonology and phonotactics, and
>>>> follow different historical developments.

>>> What is 'expressive'? What does it express?

>> Emotional coloring.

> That's hardly better. Coloring by which emotion?

Any, including 'This isn't something prosaic' and 'I want to
give this term special emphasis'.

>> Indeed, I now see that this is exactly
>> the characteristic that Larry Trask used to define the term:

>> *expressive formation* Either of two rather different cases.
>> 1. A modified form of a word possessing additional
>> emotional colouring, such as small size or affection. ...
>> 2. (also *descriptive form*) A lexical item which is
>> coined _de novo_, often in defiance of the ordinary
>> phonological structure of words, and often to denote
>> something with intrinsic emotional colouring. ...

> And here's apart of my posting you left out:
> "
> It sounds to me like someone is playing on the word's
> connotations of 'hypochoristic' and 'diminutive' but
> doesn't want to say it straight out, since that would
> provide an actual criterion for evaluating the use of that
> epithet, by which it would surely fail. Those supposed
> 'expressive' forms have nothing semantic in common.
> "

I omitted it because I thought that anyone reading the
definition without prejudice would have seen that it
answered the allegation satisfactorily. I still think so.

> re 1)
> 'small size' = diminutive
> 'affection' = hypochoristic
> That was pretty accurate of me. Now if that's what he
> means, why doesn't he say so? [...]

Because it isn't what he means. Expressive slang
formations, for instance, often carry pejorative emotional
coloring. Augmentatives as well as diminutives can be
expressive formations. And the boundary between expressive
formation and onomatopoeia is fuzzy; <zing> in 'The Hunan
chicken doesn't have its usual zing tonight' is expressive,
falling under his (2), but it seems to have an onomatopoetic
component when used to describe an arrow flying by.

The category of expressive formations is like pornography:
it's hard to define and a lot of disagreement over details,
but there's considerable agreement on the membership or
non-membership of specific candidates.

Brian