Expressives and axiological models : some remarks on motivation in linguistics

Abstract

Motivation constitutes one of the differences between logical as opposed to expres­sive signs (cf. Guiraud, 1974). Accordingly, expressive signs are considered to be motiva­ted, while logical signs are regarded as arbitrary. The question for a linguist is where he should put linguistic signs. For a long time we were taught, in the spirit of de Saussure, that by and large linguistic signs were conventional, threfore arbitrary ( cf. eg. Lyons, 1968).The only linguistic phenomena that were granted a certain degree of motivation were onomatopoeia and expressives ( cf. Grabias, 1981) .1 However, recently G. Lako ff ( esp. in Lakoff 1980 and 1987, but cf. also Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff and Kovacses, 1987) has shown that in fact a much wider range of linguistic phenomena can be analysed in terms of motivation. In particular, idiomatic expressions in English are motivated by the way we, as human beings, construe our everyday experiences in terms of conventional images[...]