The Grammatical Monophonemes of Standard Italian. A Structural Isomorphism between Phonological and Semantic Oppositions?

Abstract

This paper proposes a structural theory of phonetic iconicity, conceived as a constitutive, unconscious dimension of the entire language complex, not as a phenomenon concerning particular sections of the lexicon. This theory involves a semantic treatment of the grammatical meaning and a special method of description of the lexicon. We can easily illustrate it by the analysis of the 7+1 Italian words formed from a single phoneme: i /i/ [plural determinative article], e /e/ [simple copulative conjunction], è /’E/ [3rd person of essere (to be)], a /a/ [simple locative preposition], ha /’a/ [3rd person of avere (to have)], ho /’O/ [1st person of avere (to have)], o /o/ [simple disjunctive conjunction] and uh! /u/ [meta-onomatopoeia of the human voice] (with /E/ = open e; /O/ = open o). Placing these words within the figure of the vowel system, and studying their relative topology in relation to semantic oppositions, we come to describe a physiognomy of linguistic value. For example, the relative advancement of the tongue, articulating in a single point, towards the exterior of the mouth, a relatively more acute sound (F2 between 1500 and 2500 Hz), perceived in the most exterior part of the cochlea and resonating in the highest or most exterior part of the organism (that is, the anterior vowels /i/, /e/ and /E/), always indicates semantic values which are positive, conjunctive (copulative: e “and”; copula: è “is”) and exterior (indicative: i “the” [plural]; 3rd person: è “is”), as opposed to semantic values which are negative, disjunctive (disjunctive: o “or”; transitive: ho “[I] have”) and interior (self-referential: uh; first person: ho “[I] have”), the latter of which, to the contrary, are always distinguished by the retraction of the tongue to the interior of the mouth, which articulates, in two distinct points (the palate and the lips) a more grave sound (F2 between 750 and 1250 Hz), perceived in a more interior zone of the cochlea and resonating in a lower and more interior part of the organism. In that way, describing the phonological oppositions as physiological metaphors of the semantic oppositions, this paper proposes a coherent explanation for all the distinctive features of this basic lexical system.