The Branches of Semantics "Symbol and Referent - Euphemism"

“SYMBOL AND REFERENT”

These terms may clarify the subject. A symbol is something which we use to represent another thing - it might be a picture, a letter, a spoken or written word - anything we use conventionally for the purpose. The thing that the symbol identifies is the referent. This may sometimes be an object in the physical world (the word Rover is the symbol; a real dog is the referent). But it may be something which is not at all, or not obviously, present – like freedom, unicorns or Hamlet. Difference between both of them that referent is (semantics) the specific entity in the world that a word or phrase identifies or denotes while symbolis a character or glyph representing an idea, concept or object.

SYMBOLISM

Symbolism is the use of symbols to signify ideas and qualities by giving them symbolic meanings that are different from their literal sense.

Symbolism can take different forms. Generally, it is an object representing another to give it an entirely different meaning that is much deeper and more significant. Sometimes, however, an action, an event or a word spoken by someone may have a symbolic value. For instance, “smile” is a symbol of friendship. Similarly, the action of someone smiling at you may stand as a symbol of the feeling of affection which that person has for you.

Symbols do shift their meanings depending on the context they are used in. “A chain”, for example, may stand for “union” as well as “imprisonment”. Thus, symbolic meaning of an object or an action is understood by when, where and how it is used. It also depends on who reads them.

Common Examples of Symbolism in Everyday Life In our daily life, we can easily identify objects, which can be taken as examples of symbol such as the following :

The dove is a symbol of peace.

A red rose or red color stands for love or romance.

Black is a symbol that represents evil or death.

A ladder may stand as a symbol for a connection between the heaven and the earth.

A broken mirror may symbolize separation

Symbolism Examples in Literature

To develop symbolism in his work, a writer utilizes other figures of speech, like metaphors, similes, allegory, as tools. Some symbolism examples in literature are listed below with brief analysis :

Example 1

We find symbolic value in Shakespeare’s famous monologue in his play As you Like It :

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

they have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,”

The above lines are symbolic of the fact that men and women, in course of their life perform different roles. “A stage” here symbolizes the world and “players” is a symbol for human beings.

Example 2

William Blake goes symbolic in his poem Ah Sunflower. He says :

“Ah Sunflower, weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the sun;

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveler’s journey is done;”

Blake uses a sunflower as a symbol for human beings and “the sun” symbolizes life. Therefore, these lines symbolically refer to their life cycle and their yearning for a never-ending life.

Example 3

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights presents almost every character, house, surroundings and events in a symbolic perspective. The word “Wuthering”, which means stormy, represents the wild nature of its inhabitants. The following lines allow us to look into the symbolic nature of two characters :

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it; I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath a source of little visible delight, but necessary.”

The phrase “foliage of leaves” for Linton is a symbol for his fertile and civilized nature. On the contrary, Heathcliff is likened to an “eternal rock” which symbolizes his crude and unbendable nature.

Example 4

Sara Teasdale in her poem Wild Asters develops a number of striking symbols :

“In the spring, I asked the daisies

If his words were true,

And the clever, clear-eyed daisies

Always knew.

Now the fields are brown and barren,

Bitter autumn blows,

And of all the stupid asters

Not one knows.”

In the above lines, “spring” and “daisies” are symbols of youth. “Brown and barren” are symbols of transition from youth to old age. Moreover, “Bitter autumn” symbolizes death.

Function of Symbolism

Symbolism gives a writer freedom to add double levels of meanings to his work: a literal one that is self-evident and the symbolic one whose meaning is far more profound than the literal one. The symbolism, therefore, gives universality to the characters and the themes of a piece of literature.

EUPHEMISM

The term euphemism refers to polite, indirect expressions which replace words and phrases considered harsh and impolite or which suggest something unpleasant.

Euphemism is an idiomatic expression which loses its literal meanings and refers to something else in order to hide its unpleasantness. For example, “kick the bucket” is a euphemism that describes the death of a person. In addition, many organizations use the term “downsizing” for the distressing act of “firing” its employees.

Euphemism depends largely on the social context of the speakers and writers where they feel the need to replace certain words which may prove embarrassing for particular listeners or readers in a particular situation. 

Some examples :

Direct and blunt	Euphemism
die	pass away, pass on, go to be with the Lord, called home, gone to heaven, departed
copulate	engage in sexual intercourse, make love, have marital relations, pitching woo
urinate	pass water, number one, go to the toilet, go to the bathroom, wee wee, relieve yourself

Often a euphemism is used to make something bad sound better, and in this case, the disguise is usually deceptive or wrong.

Direct and blunt	Euphemism
murder	terminate, neutralize, put a hit on
lie	misstatement; misspeaking; plausible denial
steal	appropriate from
civilian deaths	collateral damage
abortion	interruption of pregnancy
pro-abortion	pro-choice
whore house	cat house, house of the rising sun, massage parlor, sporting house, Turkish bath, body shop

Techniques for Creating Euphemism

Euphemism masks a rude or impolite expression but conveys the concept clearly and politely. Several techniques are employed to create euphemism.

It may be in the form of abbreviations
e.g. B.O. (body odor), W.C. (toilet) etc.

Foreign words may be used to replace an impolite expression
e.g. faux (fake), or faux pas (foolish error) etc.

Sometimes, they are abstractions
e.g. before I go (before I die).

They may also be indirect expressions replacing direct ones which may sound offensive
e.g. rear-end, unmentionables etc.

Using longer words or phrases can also mask unpleasant words
e.g. flatulence for farting, perspiration for sweat, mentally challenged for stupid etc.

Using technical terms may reduce the rudeness exhibited by words
e.g. gluteus maximus.

Deliberately mispronouncing an offensive word may reduce its severity
e.g. darn, shoot etc.

Euphemism Examples in Everyday Life

Euphemism is frequently used in everyday life. Let us look at some common euphemism examples :

You are becoming a little thin on top (bald).

Our teacher is in the family way (pregnant).

He is always tired and emotional (drunk).

We do not hire mentally challenged (stupid) people.

He is a special child (disabled or retarded).

Examples of Euphemism in Literature

Example 1

Examples of euphemism referring to sex are found in William Shakespeare’s “Othello” and “Antony and Cleopatra”. In “Othello”, Act 1 Scene 1, Iago tells Brabantio :

“I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.”

Here, the expression “making the beast with two backs” refers to the act of having sex.

Similarly, we notice Shakespeare using euphemism for sexual intercourse in his play “Antony and Cleopatra”. In Act 2 Scene 2, Agrippa says about Cleopatra :

“Royal wench!

She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed.

He plowed her, and she cropped.”

The word “plowed” refers to the act of sexual intercourse and the word “cropped” is a euphemism for becoming pregnant.

Example 2

John Donne in his poem “The Flea” employs euphemism. He says :

“Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou denies me is;

It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;

Yet this enjoys before it woo,

And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two;

And this, alas! is more than we would do.”

In order to persuade his beloved to sleep with him, the speaker in the poem tells her how a flea bit both of them and their blood got mixed in it. This is a euphemism.

Example 3

“The Squealer”, a character in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, uses euphemisms to help “the pigs” achieve their political ends. To announce the reduction of food to the animals of the farm, Orwell quotes him saying :

“For the time being,” he explains, “it had been found necessary to make a readjustment of rations.”

Substituting the word “reduction” with “readjustment” was an attempt to suppress the complaints of other animals about hunger. It works because reduction means “cutting” food supply while readjustment implies changing the current amount of food.

Function of Euphemism

Euphemism helps writers to convey

A euphemism /ˈjufəˌmɪzəm/ is a generally innocuous word or expression used in place of one that may be found offensive or suggest something unpleasant.[1] Some euphemisms are intended to amuse; while others use bland, inoffensive terms for things the user wishes to downplay. Euphemisms are used to refer to taboo topics (such as disability, sex, excretion, and death) in a polite way, or to mask profanity.[2]

There are three antonyms of euphemism: dysphemism, cacophemism, and loaded language. Dysphemism can be either offensive or merely ironic; cacophemism is deliberately offensive. Loaded language evokes a visceral response beyond the meaning of the words.

Etymology

Euphemism comes from the Greek word εὐφημία (euphemia), meaning "the use of words of good omen", which in turn is derived from the Greek root-words eû (εὖ), "good, well" and phḗmē (φήμη) "prophetic speech; rumour, talk".[3] Etymologically, the eupheme is the opposite of the blaspheme "evil-speaking." The term euphemism itself was used as a euphemism by the ancient Greeks, meaning "to keep a holy silence" (speaking well by not speaking at all).[4]

Purpose

Euphemism use ranges from a polite concern for propriety, to attempting to escape responsibility for war crimes. For instance one reason for the comparative scarcity of written evidence documenting the exterminations at Auschwitz (at least given the scale) is "directives for the extermination process obscured in bureaucratic euphemisms."[5] Columnist David Brooks called the euphemisms for torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and elsewhere an effort to "dull the moral sensibility."[6]

Formation

Phonetic modification

Phonetic euphemism is used to replace profanities, giving them the intensity of a mere interjection.
Shortening or "clipping" the term ("Jeez" for Jesus, "What the—" for "What the hell")

Mispronunciations, such as "Frak", "Frig" "What the fudge", "What the truck", "Oh my gosh", "Frickin", "Darn", "Oh, shoot", "Be-yotch", etc.

Using the first letter ("SOB", "What the eff", "Suck my D", "BS"). Sometimes, the word "word" is added after it ("F word", "S word", "B word"). Also, the letter can be phonetically respelled, for example, the word "piss" was shortened to "pee" (pronounced as the letter P) in this way.

NOTE : Contrary to popular belief, the words "crap" and "freaking" are not euphemisms for "shit" and "fucking." However, crap is a synonym and is nearly as vulgar as shit, and freaking can refer to obscene and sexual dancing. Crap, on the other hand, can refer to a dice game; to which the word "shit" isn't associated with.

Figures of speech

Ambiguous statements (it for excrement, the situation or "a girl in trouble" for pregnancy, going to the other side for death, do it or come together in reference to a sexual act, tired and emotional for drunkenness)

Understatements ("asleep" for "dead", "drinking" for "consuming alcohol", "hurt" for "injured", etc.)

Metaphors ("beat the meat" or "choke the chicken" for masturbation, "take a dump" and "drain the main vein" for defecation and urination respectively).

Comparisons ("buns" for "buttocks", "weed" for "cannabis").

Metonymy ("lose a person" for "coping with a person's death", "pass away" for "die", "men's room" for "men's toilet").

Rhetoric Edit

Euphemism may be used as a rhetorical strategy, in which case its goal is to change the valence of a description from positive to negative.

Using a less harsh term with similar meaning. For instance, "screwed up" is a euphemism for "fucked up"; "hook-up", "we hooked up", or "laid" for sexual intercourse.

There is some disagreement over whether certain terms are or are not euphemisms. For example, sometimes the phrase visually impaired is labeled as a politically correct euphemism for blind. However, visual impairment can be a broader term, including, for example, people who have partial sight in one eye, those with uncorrectable mild to moderate poor vision.

References :
www.teachit.co.uk
www.literarydevices.net/euphemism/
www.virtualsalt.com

Study Tour to West Sumatera - Class IV C, Faculty of Teacher Training, University of Lancang Kuning (March, 17th-20th 2016)

The Branches of Semantics "Polysemy, Homophones, Homographs, and Homonymy"

A.      POLYSEMY

Polysemy is the existence of several meanings for a single word or phrase. The word polysemy comes from the Greek words πολυ-, poly-, “many” and σήμα, sêma, “sign”. In other words it is the capacity for a word, phrase, or sign to have multiple meanings i.e., a large semantic field. Polysemy is a pivotal concept within the humanities, such as media studies and linguistics.

A word like walk is polysemous :

1.    I  went walking this morning

2.    We went for a walk last Sunday

3.    Do you walk the dog every day?

4.    I live near Meadow Walk Drive

5.    The wardrobe is too heavy to lift; we’ll have to walk it into the bedroom (move a large object by rocking).

6.    She walks the tower (to haunt a place as a ghost).

7.    The workers threatened to walk (to go on strike).

8.    Walk with God! (to live your life in a particular way)

B.   HOMOPHONES

Homophones are words that have exactly the same sound (pronunciation) but different meanings and (usually) spelling.

For example, the following two words have the same sound, but different meanings and spelling :

·   Hour
·   our

In the next example, the two words have the same sound and spelling, but different meanings :

·   bear (the animal)
·   bear (to carry)

Usually homophones are in groups of two (our, hour), but very occasionally they can be in groups of three (to, too, two) or even four. If we take our "bear" example, we can add another word to the group.

·    bare (naked)
·    bear (the animal)
·    bear (to tolerant)

C.      HOMOGRAPHS

Homographs are words with different pronunciation, meanings and origins but the same spelling. They are not to be confused with homonyms, homophones and heteronyms. In order to work out which pronunciation and which meaning is appropriate, you need to be aware of the context. Here are a few homographs and their meaning.

Examples :

·            agape - wide open/a Greek word meaning “love”

·            attribute - a characteristic or quality/to think of as belonging to ororiginating in some person,place or thing

·            axes - the plural of ax or axe/the plural of axis

·            bass - a deep voice or tone/a kind of fish

·            bat - a piece of sporting equipment used in baseball/a winged animal associated with vampires

·            bow - to bend at the waist/the front of a boat/a pair of tied loops

·            buffet - to hit, punch or slap/a self-serve food bar

·            bustier - an undergarment/more busty

D.      HOMONYMY

The word homonym comes from the Greek ὁμώνυμος (homonumos), meaning “having the same name”, which is the conjunction of ὁμός (homos), meaning “common” and ὄνομα (onoma) meaning “name”. In other words, homonymy refers to two or more distinct concepts sharing the “same name”.

Examples include the following nouns, verbs and adjectives :

1.    Fleet: all the ships of a nation’s navy, e.g., The Greek fleet disappeared behind the huge mountains.

2.    Fleet: a number of road vehicles, boats, or aircraft owned, working, or managed as a unit, usually by a commercial enterprise e.g., The new company has a large fleet of service vehicles.

3.    Plane, e.g., I like to travel by airplane.

4.    Plain, pronounced the same but spelt differently, means clearly visible, e.g., The wallet was in plain view.

5.    Sow, the verb, means to plant seeds, e.g., He sowed the seeds of revolution.

6.    Sow, the noun, refers to an adult female pig, e.g., Have you fed the sow?

7.    Bank, the noun, means a business offering financial services, e. g., He went to the bank to deposit some money.

8.    Bank, the noun, refers to the steep side of a river, stream, lake, or canal, e.g., We climbed the river bank safely.

9.    Bank, the noun, also refers row of similar things, e.g., There was a bank of switches on the wall.

The Branches of Semantics "Metaphor"

METAPHOR

Metaphor is described as “a figure of speech that makes a comparison between two things that are basically dissimilar. “1 in other words, it describes one thing in terms of another. It is comparative, and thus goes beyond a mere descriptive adjective (e.g The “Bright Moon” is not a metaphor). A metaphor describes one object as being or having the characteristics of a second object.

Examples :

1.    Her home was a prison

2.    Life is journey, purposes are destinations, means are routes, difficulties are obstacles, counselors are guides, achievements are landmarks and choices are crossroads.

There are two traditional positions on the role of metaphor in language, they are as follows :

1.        Classical view.

This is so called since it can be traced back to Aristotle’s writings on metaphor. It sees metaphor as a kind of decorative addition to ordinary plain language. It also views metaphor as a rhetorical device to be used at certain times to gain certain effects. In this view metaphor is often seen as a departure from literal language.

2.        Romantic view.

This is so called since it is associated with eighteenth and nineteenth century romantic views of the imagination. It takes a different view of metaphor. In this view metaphor is an integral to language and thought as a way of experiencing the world. All important characteristic of cognitive semantics is the central role in thought and language assigned to metaphor. Thus cognitive semantics can be seen as an extension of the romantic view. In emphasizing the important role of metaphor in ordinary language, Lakoff and his colleagues have identified a large number of common metaphors. For example they describe one group of metaphor as SPATIAL Metaphor. For instance the many metaphors associated with an UP-DOWN orientation.

They are as follows :

Ø Happy is up; sad is down

Ø I’m feeling up. My spirits rose. I’m feeling down. I’m depressed.

Ø Conscious is up; un conscious is down

Ø Wake up. He fell asleep. He dropped off to sleep. He sank into a coma.

Ø Virtue is up; depravity is down.

Ø He is high minded. She has high standards. Don’t be under handed.

 Features of metaphor :

1.  Conventionality

It raises the issue of the novelty of the metaphor. Some writers claimed that some metaphors have become dead metaphors. In the literal language theory this means that they have ceased to be metaphors and have passed into literal language.

Dead metaphor :

The original sentence meaning is bypassed and the sentence acquires a new literal meaning identical with the former metaphorical meaning. This is a shift from the metaphorical utterance to the literal utterance.

Example : My spirits rose.

2.  Systematicity

It refers to the way that a metaphor does not set up a single point of comparison. Here feature of the source and target domain are joined so that the metaphor may be extended. This systematicity has been an important focus in cognitive semantic views of metaphor. Lake off and Turner identify a systematicity in this mapping between the two concepts.

For instance :

Ø Life is a Journey

Ø The person leading a life is a traveller

Ø His purposes are destinations.

Ø Progress is the distance travelled

Conventionalized metaphors of body parts in English :

·      Head of department, of state, of a flower, of a page, of a queue

·      Face of a mountain, of a watch

·      Mouth of a hole, of a cave

·      Eye of a potato, of a needle

·      Hands of a watch, of an altimeter

3.  Asymmetry

It refers to the way that metaphors are directional. They do not set up a symmetrical comparison between two concepts, establishing points of similarity. Instead they provoke the listener to transfer feature from the source to the target.

For example : life is a journey.

This metaphor exhibits this feature: the common, every day experience of physically moving about the earth is used to characterize the mysterious process of birth and death, and the mysterious process of ageing. This is not a necessary feature of metaphor.

The Influence of Metaphor

Cognitivists argue that because of the presence in speakers’ minds, metaphor s exert influence over a wide range of linguistic behavior. Sweester identifies a cross linguistic metaphor MIND-AS-BODY, as when in English we speak of grasping an idea or holding a thought. Thus in English the verb SEE has two meanings: the basic principle one of perceiving with the eyes and the metaphorically extended one of understanding as in I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN. According to sweester words of seeing come to mean understanding, words of hearing to mean obeying, and words of tasting to mean choosing. Some of her examples are given below.

SEEING Understanding

HEARING Paying attention to, obeying

TASTING Choosing, expressing preferences

Summary of Material "Syntax"

SYNTAX

William Cobbett on Syntax (1818) says :

“Syntax is a word which comes from the Greek. It means, in that language, the joining of several things together; and, as used by grammarians, it means those principles and rules which teach us how to put words together so as to form sentences. It means, in short, sentence-making. Having been taught by the rules of Etymology what are the relationships of words, how words grow out of each other, how they are varied in their letters in order to correspond with the variation in the circumstances to which they apply, Syntax will teach you how to give all your words their proper situations or places, when you come to put them together into sentences.”

Fromkin and Rodman (1983) says :

“Syntax is that part of our linguistics knowledge which concerns the structure of sentences. Knowing a language also means being able to put words together to form sentences to express our thoughts”.

O’grady (1989) says :

“Syntax is the system of rules and categories that allows words to be combined to the form of sentence. The data that linguists use to study syntax consists primarily of judgments about grammaticality of individual sentence. Roughly speaking, a sentence is considered grammatical if speakers judge it to be a possible sentence of their language”.

Hawkins (2001) says :

“The syntax of a language is the set of properties which determine the construction of sentences in that language. If a sentence is constructed according to those properties it is well formed or grammatical. If a sentence is constructed  in violation of those properties it is ill-formed or ungrammatical. The study of syntax involves uncovering those properties of language which are involved in the construction of grammatical sentence in particular languages”.

Robert and Van Valin (2001) says :

“Syntax is a central component of human language. Language has often been characterized as a systematic correlation between certain types of gestures and meaning. It is not the case that every possible meaning that can be expressed is correlated with a unique, unanalyzable gesture, be it oral or manual. Rather, each language has stock of meaning-bearing elements and different ways of combining them to express different meaning, and these ways of combining them are themselves meaningful”.

Syntax can thus be given the following characterization, taken from Matthews (1982:1) the term ‘syntax’ is from the Ancient Greek syntaxis, a verbal noun which literally means ‘arrangement’ or ‘setting out together’. Traditionally, it refers to the branch of grammar dealing with the ways in which words, with or without appropriate inflections, are arranged to show connections of meaning within the sentence.

Similar to the explanation of Matthew, Robert and Van Valin (2001) expresses the essence of itself as the following syntax: “First and foremost, syntax deals with how sentences are constructed, and users of human language employ a striking variety of possible arrangements of the element in sentences”.

Chomsky (2002) says :

“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis”.

Tserdanelis and Wong (2004) says :

“The study of syntax is the study of how words combine to from phrases and ultimately sentences in languages. Because it consists of phrases that are put together in a particular way, a sentences has a structure. The structure consists of way in which the words are organized into phrases and the phrases are organized into larger phrases. The study of phrases and sentences structure is sometimes called grammar”.

From the experts’ explanation above we can conclude that syntax is the study of internal structure of sentences. In this case, it explains how words are arranged become phrases and clauses for constructing sentence. It is commonly we call structure. Structure manages how words can be combined with another for creating good sentence.

Basic idea of Syntax :

1.      Word ordering and meaning

The order of words in a sentences or phrases is connected to its literal meaning. The basic underlying word order in an English sentence is subject-verb-object (S-V-O). (Murcia and Freeman, 1999). Consider the English sentences :

a.       Joe writes poetry

The factors determines the meaning of sentences: (1) the selection of words plays a role in determining the literal meaning of the sentences, (2) the orders of words play a role the literal meaning of the sentences. (Tserdanelis and Wong, 2004). See the two examples :

a.   The mat is on the cat

b.   The cat is on the mat

2.      AmbiguityAs we have studied before, there is factor determining what a sentence means. Consider the following examples :

a.       Can you tell me the time?

b.      We had the president for dinner.

c.       We need more intelligent administrators.

d.      Pat shot the soldier with a telescope.

All three sentences are ambiguous-that is, they have more than one meaning. The first sentences is ambiguous because it can be used either as a straightforward question (“ are you able to tell me the time?”) . we  call this pragmatic ambiguity. The second  sentence is ambiguous because the expression have for dinner can mean either “ host for dinner” or “ have for dinner”. This type of ambiguity is called lexical ambiguity. The third sentence , this sentence also has two meaning. On one meaning, we need administrators who are more intelligent. On the other meaning, we need a grater number of intelligent administrators. The type of ambiguity is called structure ambiguity. (Tserdanelis and Wong, 2004).