Retracing the phonesthemic {gr-/prehension}, {sm-/oral phenomena} and {sn-/nasality} relations in English to Proto-Indo-European and beyond within a semiogenetic perspective

Abstract

The primary goal of this paper is to retrace the origins of the phonesthemic {gr-/prehension}, {sm-/oral phenomena} and {sn-/nasality} relations attested in English by words such as grab, grasp and grip, smile, smirk and smooch, and sneeze, sniff and snore respectively, to Proto-Indo-European and beyond. After a discussion of the links between phonesthemes, sound symbolism and arbitrariness, it investigates gr-, sm- and sn- within a psychomechanical approach. The three relations are contextualized by an exploration of their existence in Indo-European languages and, at featural level, in language families other than Indo-European. The second goal of the paper is embedded in the claim that the phonetic characteristics of the ‘core invariants’ in English gr-, sm- and sn- reconstructable for PIE (the tectal <*G(h)> in *G(h)r-, and the nasals <*m> and <*n> in *sm- and *sn- respectively) can be projected back, within the above relations, to the putative conditions of the origins of speech, by adopting a semiogenetic perspective. The framework adopted to do so is STEELS, a neo-Darwinian theory of the emergence and evolution of the linguistic sign which postulates that the initial use of resonances produced by the human vocal tract was both self-referential and vocomimetic.