Jakobson revisited or why mama and…mama?
https://doi.org/10.26907/2074-0239-2021-63-1-34-45
Abstract
A closer look at the often cited Roman Jakobson’s work “Why Mama and Papa?” reveals that the concept of ‘mama’ does not always refer to Motherhood. The paper focuses on some aspects related to the derivation of the basic maternal term and describes how it developed into ‘father’/’dad’/’person’, etc. social labels, which are a prevalent (although not an exclusive) part of the inchoative verbal development of baby speech. The lexemes, comprising similar semantics and phonological contours, were taken from 1000 languages from around the world and this phenomenon is studied globally and cross-linguistically. Among the parental terms, “mama” lexemes meaning “dad”, “father”, “husband”, “male”, “man”, “person”, and “human being'” (due to semantic shifts), manifest less of a worldwide tendency for cross-linguistic distribution than “mama” “mam” and “mother”; nevertheless, they are widely represented in lexicon on the global language map. The noted lexico-semantic universals of family terms’ domains may serve as useful tools for semantic shifts’ study in lexical-semantic typology. We argue that the mentioned greatly overlooked tendency bears world-wide significance, deeply rooted in human psychology, and influences the semantic development of an individual speaker and a language community. Thus, we assume that certain language paradigms are naturally determined.
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Zeldin A. Jakobson revisited or why mama and…mama? Philology and Culture. 2021;(1):34-45. https://doi.org/10.26907/2074-0239-2021-63-1-34-45
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