The Animal Kingdom as a Donor Domain for Metalinguistic Expressions

A property of human language which makes it stand out among the ways living creatures communicate is its reflexive capacity. This capacity manifests itself as what is called metalanguage, i.e. reference to general regularities of language, reports or explicit descriptions of linguistic action, indexical forms varying with the actual event of speaking, or prosodic variation forming illocutions. Why a seemingly marginal object for this paper? As Vanparys points out, "various linguistic action verbials (eg scream, shout, whisper, yell, ...) pick out the acoustic quality of the reported speech event as their major meaning component", and among these linguistic action verbials specifying the acoustic quality of a particular reported speech event "two donor domains stand out for their prominence: animal sounds and music. Indeed, a whole range of verbials expressing the production of sounds by animals can be applied to human communication."

Résumé
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Hauptseminar "Metalanguage - abstract and imagistic", language: English, abstract: A property of human language which makes it stand out among the ways living creatures communicate is its reflexive capacity. This capacity manifests itself as what is called metalanguage, i.e. reference to general regularities of language, reports or explicit descriptions of linguistic action, indexical forms varying with the actual event of speaking, or prosodic variation forming illocutions.Why a seemingly marginal object for this paper? As Vanparys points out, various linguistic action verbials (eg scream, shout, whisper, yell, ) pick out the acoustic quality of the reported speech event as their major meaning component, and among these linguistic action verbials specifying the acoustic quality of a particular reported speech event two donor domains stand out for their prominence: animal sounds and music. Indeed, a whole range of verbials expressing the production of sounds by animals can be applied to human communication.