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A semantic field:
The names of the domestic animals in French *
&dquo;k’~’;;1
1: I!:
*
Translated by Dr. Peter Wexler (School of Comparative Studies, University of Essex)
from &dquo;Un champ s~mantique: La denomination des animaux domestiques&dquo;, La linguistique
1, 1965, pp. 31-54.
1. F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 5th ed., Paris, Payot, 1960, p. 160.
2. J. Trier, Der deutsche Wortschatze im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, Heidelberg, 1931.
3. E. Haugen, "The semantics of Icelandic direction", Word 7, 1951, pp. 1-14.
4. G. Matoré, La méthode en lexicologie, Paris, Didier, 1953.
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173-190.
174
5. Only L.J. Prieto, in his Principes de noologie, The Hague, Mouton, 1964, has proposed
an overall theory for the structural analysis of meanings.
6. Saussure, op. cit., p. 173.
7. J. Dubois, Le vocabulaire politique et social en France de 1869 à 1872, Paris, Larousse,
1963, p. 41.
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175
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176
and to define the overall content of the political and social vocabulary he
treats. This field, he says, &dquo;is defined by the specific [semantic] function it
fulfills in the system of communication constituted by language&dquo;. It is &dquo;that
field which gives immediate expression to the economic, social and political
relations between the various classes of society [...]] The homogeneity of a
field is a reflection of the specificity of its [semantic] function ; and where
could one find a more clearly-defined lexicon than that which describes the
overall structure of society ?&dquo;8 But how is one to decide, by a formal pro-
cedure, whether a given term qualifies for membership of the lexicon of imme-
diate social relationships, or of domestic animals?1
Choosing a corpus, as Trier and Dubois do, may seem to be a linguistic
operation. But the fact that a word is found in the corpus and can be shown
to have the required meaning cannot of itself constitute formal grounds for
including it in the field unless the corpus has been chosen at random, which
is not the case either for Trier or Dubois. Each chose his corpus by concep-
tual criteria -
a collection of texts considered a priori to be of a theological
or political nature. Moreover a second purely conceptual operation excludes
from consideration terms attested in the selective corpus but subjectively
judged not to form part of the field being investigated.
If we relied on a random corpus to provide the material for the semantic
field labelled &dquo;Domestic Animal&dquo;, it would have to be of immense size and
even so would almost certainly be incomplete: the corpus consisting of all
the writer’s conversations and ordinary reading over a two-month period
provided occurrences only of exotic animals and the names for mule, dog,
chicken, goat, fowl, sheep, pig, swarm, stallion, bullock and bull.
A statistically and linguistically arbitrary (but conceptually justifiable)
decision was therefore taken to confine the corpus to six volumes of the &dquo;Que
sais-je?&dquo; paperbacks. These are generally popular treatments of high qual-
ity, and as such may be taken to represent a vocabulary neither too technical
nor too non-technical. The titles chosen were: Thevenin’s Animaux domes-
tiques, Amiot’s Le cheval, Mathis’ Le peuple des abeilles, Chauchard’s Sociitis
animales, socijtjs humaines, Gibassier and Guyot’s Les noms des plantes, and
Guyot’s Origine des plantes cultivies.
In this corpus of about 200 000 words, the frequency of terms for the name
of the field (domestique, domestiqué, domestication, domestiquer, domestica-
teur, domesticable, domesticabilité, domesticité) varies from 196 occurrences
in Thevenin to 5 in Chauchard, 4 in Mathis, 3 in Amiot, 2 in Guyot, and none
in Gibassier. This confirms Gougenheim’s illuminating remark9 that &dquo;a
concrete word has no frequency&dquo; meaning that certain very common words
-
may not occur at all, even in an enormous corpus, unless steps have been taken
In order to introduce greater formal rigour (of a linguistic kind) into the des-
cription of the internal structure of a lexicon, Dubois has advocated, in addi-
tion to the choice of corpus, two further procedures: the exploitation of lexical
equations and lexical oppositions within the sentence relationships which -
seem to be purely formal and distributional, but from which lexical or seman-
tic relationships can nevertheless be derived.
For example, if, in a sufficient number of contexts, the lexicalized syntagm
domestic animals is contrasted (in the logical, not the linguistic sense) with
the syntagm wild animals, we can be sure that their &dquo;values&dquo; (as Saussure
puts it) are semantically interdependent, and in fact mutually exclusive. But
are these relationships expressed often enough for our purposes? Of the 196
contexts in Th6venin in which the word domestic (or one of its seven deriva-
tives) occurs, 57 express a contrast between domestic and wild; in 25 of these
the contrast is within the same sentence, in the remainder within a slightly
longer context. Two of Chauchard’s 5 examples express the same contrast,
one of Mathis’ 4, two of Amiot’s 3, and one of Guyot’s two. The opposition
domestic/wild is therefore well attested; but it has still not been established
on formal linguistic grounds. Neither commutation nor distributional anal-
ysis can handle contexts like &dquo;On October 31 the workers’ battalions and
those of the bourgeoisie clashed on the Place de Gr6ve&dquo;, or &dquo;Indications of
domestication in ancient times may be revealed by the state of the skeleton,
particularly by features not present in the wild animal&dquo;. The contrast is
there, but it is a logical one. It may be expressed linguistically by coordin-
ation, or negation, or by an adversative, or by a term implying antonymy (&dquo;do-
mestic [...] reverting to wildness&dquo;). The only real formal element is the
use of authentic contexts: it is this which gives the procedure such linguistic
validity as it possesses.
In any case the procedure throws up a whole series of other oppositions
-
on grounds that cannot be called linguistic. And in any case the contexts
cannot be made to reveal, by formal linguistic procedures, either the struc-
ture of the &dquo;semantic system&dquo; or the precise differences between the elements
of the system. What contexts provide is usages, by a scientific extension of
the empirical method by which dictionaries use quotations to fill out the mean-
ing of a: term. Contexts cannot provide formal analysis with the &dquo;semantic
distinctive features&dquo; (if such exist) on which alone a structural semantics might
be built.
*
10. Saussure, op. cit., p. 158. E. Buyssens has attempted a solution of this problem in "Le
structuralisme et l’arbitraire du signe", Studii si cercetâri linguistice 9, 1960, pp. 403-416.
11. L. Couturat, La logique de Leibniz, Paris, Alcan, 1901, p. 181.
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179
zoo.animals, as well as many animals which may have the run of a house (par-
rot, magpie, lion-cub, monkey, etc.) but which one would normally hesitate
to call domestic; and to exclude other obviously domestic animals which could
hardly be called tame (the rabbit, for example). The definitional feature
/tame/ turns out to cover a wide range of cases, both in non-linguistic reality
and in linguistic usage, from animals which merely tolerate the presence of
man to those which allow themselves to be touched, fed, etc. ; from those which
can obey a wide range of commands to those which obey none
(many song-
birds, rabbits, etc.); from those which may be allowed to run completely
free (chickens, pigeons, dogs, etc.), to those which can be trained to form a
wide variety of activities but which can be kept only in captivity (from the
lion to the canary). Quillet’s criterion, derived from the word’s etymology,
raises problems no less numerous: the definition fits pets (white mice, tor-
toises, guinea-pigs, hamsters, etc.) as much as farm-animals. Robert’s four-
feature definition avoids some of these problems, but raises others of the same
order. We are bound to conclude that linguistics and logic are at logger-
heads in lexicological practice: logical definition and linguistic usage do not
always, or even usually, coincide. The fact has been observed by specialists
in the terminology of science and technology, a domain where (in theory)
higher standards of rigour are set. As Holmstrom points out 12 : &dquo;It is impor-
tant to remember also that the mere existence of a standard glossary does not
compel writers to .~use, translators to translate, and readers to understand
terms in the senses which are therein defined. The most it can do indirectly
and after a time-lag, is to influence them in the direction. It is this influence,
however long delayed, which alone justifies the effort of standardization&dquo;.
12. J.E. Holmstrom, "The multilingual terminology project", Bulletin of the Provisional
International Computation Center 8, 1960, pp. 1-16.
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180
The logic here is indeed more rigorous, but even these features do not en-
able us to demarcate the field of Domestic Animals in an entirely unambiguous
manner. Some of them (/in or near the house/, /fed by man/) are consequences
of another (/reproduction controlled by man/); but is this always the case?
The feature /fed by man/ would nowadays include the fruit-fly and microbe
cultures, as would the feature /products and services/. But the feature /con-
trolled reproduction/ (omitted by Robert) would exclude the domestic ele-
phant. Many wild animals game and fur-bearing
-
provide -
pet sparrow and pet donkey, between tame squirrel and tame lamb, etc.
In short, the concept &dquo;Domestic Animals&dquo; turns out to be a kind of empir-
ical concept, a complex logical structure with a long history; in linguistic
usage it coincides exactly neither with the set of animals defined by all five
of the above criteria taken together, nor with the set defined by any of them
taken sperately.
*
bullock, etc. But even this procedure cannot give a clear-cut solution, since
usage varies from one author to the next, according to their definitional cri-
teria. For Thevenin not only goats, sheep and pigs but also gazelle, ante-
lope, jackal, ferret, otter, civet-cat, guinea-pig, mink, skunk, pheasant, swan,
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181
cormorant, ostrich, carp, trout, silkworm, bee, drosophila, oyster and mussel
are or have been domesticated; but he includes none of the animals which do
not reproduce in captivity, such as the elephant, cheetah or hunting falcon.
Mathis refuses to count bees as domestic animals, on the grounds that they
&dquo;have undergone no degeneration of their ability to survive in nature&dquo; (thus
introducing yet another classificatory feature the inability to return to the
-
wild state -
which is indeed implicit in several authors); man merely shel-
ters, protects and exploits them. For Chauchard the essence of the matter
is &dquo;a substantial influence on an animal species, in contact with mankind&dquo; ;
animals which show this influence he calls &dquo;humanized&dquo; ; and &dquo;the relation-
ship with animals like bees is a minimal one; we modify their environment
but have no relationship with them that could be called social&dquo;.
(The case of apiculture &dquo;bee-keeping&dquo;, aviculture &dquo;bird-rearing&dquo;, piscicul-
ture, ostriiculture and mytiliculture &dquo;fish-, oyster- and mussel-farming&dquo;
shows a formally-marked transition to uses of domestic(ated) applied to the
vegetable kingdom - uses which could not therefore be excluded from the
semantic field by formal linguistic criteria: Guyot uses the opposition &dquo;domes-
tication of flora/wild flora&dquo; and the equation &dquo;cultivated/domesticated plants&dquo;.
The standard opposition in Floras is &dquo;cultivated/wild&dquo;, but (in French) the
adjective domestique is occasionally found, for example with sorbier &dquo;sorb-
apple&dquo; and prunier &dquo;plum-tree&dquo;.)
Ostensive definition can therefore demarcate our semantic field only if we
confine our corpus to an idiolect, i.e., to the works of a no-longer-productive
author. Hence the possible value of applying this procedure to the lexis of
an author who is dead. Essentially we are driven to the conclusion that the
notion of a semantic field is not a linguistic one, however much it may appeal
to the imagination; it is by origin and nature an empirical conceptual category.
The concept &dquo;Domestic Animals&dquo; was not deliberately chosen to demons-
trate the impossibility of accepting Trier’s theory that the entire vocabulary
of a language must be describable as an overall structure of contiguous fields,
each made up of a mosaic of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive
expressions. (It was in fact chosen because of certain examples suggested
by Hjelmslev and Cantineau in their analyses of semantic structures.) But
our case-study does illustrate some of the unsatisfactory aspects of Trier’s
ideas. The same piece may form part of more than one mosaic: the same
lexical items would be patterned differently in the two conceptual fields &dquo;use-
ful/harmful animals&dquo; and &dquo;mammals&dquo;. In the second place, there may be
some areas of the conceptual field not covered by the available names: many
animals (partridge, pheasant, hare, trout, etc.) must still be called wild even
though they are nowadays manipulated by man, protected, reared, caught,
transplanted and often directly or indirectly fed, using techniques not adequa-
tely covered by any of the words domestication, rearing or acclimatization.
And even if acclimatization were an acceptable designation for this whole
group of operations, would the opposition acclimatized/native form a part
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182
of the domestic-wild field, or would it form a field in its own right ? It is evi-
dent that the variety of attitudes to the world of non-linguistic experience
(which is to say, in the last analysis, the ever-changing complexity of human
praxis) suggests that semantic fields are not contiguous but often overlap in
conceptual hierarchies whose structure is not always so easy to define as the
biological ones. We have here what seems to be an excellent example of the
way our view of the world is conditioned by our terminology: Trier chose to
designate the phenoma he was investigating phenoma whose existence in
-
some sense is undeniable by the term field, which carries inevitable meta-
-
*
1 : ,.~ .’ ¡ ¡..~
,,
- - -
j - . 1
horse, bull, cockerel, etc. ;
ram, ,
.-.
,
-
.,_
-;
_
°’
,&dquo; &dquo;
_.
’
’
colt, calf, lamb, pullet, etc.
This correlation may also be expressed as a ratio between the terms of each
series (exactly as /p/ is said to be to /b/ as /f/ is to /v/ or as /t/ is to /d/):
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185
swallows or sparrows, perhaps because we neither breed them nor use them
(for some species, when a useful distinction was needed for a bird young enough
to capture and old enough to survive capture, the term oiseau niais
&dquo;fledgling&dquo;
was created). Similarly for the verbs of parturition: pouliner &dquo;to drop a
foal&dquo;, veler &dquo;to calve&dquo;, or the names of the worker responsible for the ani-
mal : bouvier &dquo;drover&dquo;, muletier &dquo;muleteer&dquo;, berger &dquo;shepherd&dquo;. The name
of the animals’ shelter is also included, initially because of the frequency of
derivational correlations (bergerie &dquo;sheepfold&dquo;, porcherie &dquo;pigsty&dquo;, poulailler
&dquo;hen roost&dquo;, colombier &dquo;dovecote&dquo;, lapinie3re &dquo;rabbit-hutch, etc.) and also
because of equally well-established correlations other than derivational:
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18
Selec
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187
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188
linguistic criteria and on distinctive semantic features (also called simple ele-
ments or simple truths by Leibniz) provided by the extra-linguistic analysis
of experience. J.-C. Gardin’s considerable experience with this type of clas-
sification-by-concept has led him to the conclusion that &dquo;there are essential
differences in the general mode of research, and consequently in the way obser-
vations are categorized, as between, say, chemistry, cookery, and philosophy.
No doubt the intellectual processes involved are similar, but the way the expe-
rimental field is organized by the vocabulary varies so widely that it seems
unreasonable to attempt to reduce them all to a single pattern&dquo; 13. It follows
that every semantic system will require separate empirical research: the dis-
tinctive semantic features will in each case express different non-linguistic
relationships.
The point has been discussed incidentally by Rulon S. Wells; but the ulti-
mate obstacle to the procedure suggested above may not be the one he indi-
cates 14. He under-estimates the possibility of establishing the semantic
content of Latin tabul by distinctive-feature (or componential) analysis, and
doubts whether all semantic contents are or may be reducible to systems of
paradigms like those set up above for hongre &dquo;gelding&dquo;, jument &dquo;mare&dquo;,
poulain &dquo;colt&dquo;, pouliner &dquo;to foal&dquo;, hennir &dquo;to neigh&dquo;, etc. (or like those by
which B. Pottier constructs the semantic field of siège &dquo;seat&dquo;, including chaise
&dquo;chair&dquo;, fauteuil &dquo;armchair&dquo;, tabouret &dquo;stool&dquo;, caflapé &dquo;couch&dquo;, pouf, etc.,
on the basis of six definitional features 15). Improvements in dictionary-
making, a subject now attracting much thought and effort, suggest that we
may reasonably look forward to an enormous improvement over the archaic
instruments we now call by that name, and provide an admittedly empirical
but relatively optimistic reply to Wells 16.
A more truly linguistic obstacle to any complete structuring of the voca-
bulary may lie in the arbitrary nature of the sign, or more appropriately the
arbitrary nature of lexicalization. The hypothesis of a reasonably rigorous
parallelism between the structure of experience and the structure of the voca-
bulary rests on the intuition that every relatively stable and relatively frequent
aspect of reality must eventually be lexicalized as is on the whole confir--
13. M. Allard, M. Elzière, J.-C. Gardin, and F. Hours, Analyse conceptuelle du Coran.
II: Commentaire, Paris-La Haye, Mouton, 1963, p. 18.
14. Proceedings of the VIIth International Congress of Linguists, Oslo, Oslo University
Press, 1958, p. 616.
15. B. Pottier, Recherches sur l’analyse sémantique en linguistique et en traduction méca-
nique, series A, II, Publications de la Faculté de Lettres de Nancy, 1963, pp. 11-18.
16. See the report on the November 1961 conference on lexicography in the IJAL volume
On Lexicography.
17. A. Martinet, Eléments de linguistique générale, Paris, A. Colin, 1960, pp. 190-199.
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190
ing to French pouliner &dquo;to foal&dquo;, veler &dquo;to calf&dquo;, cochonner &dquo;to farrow&dquo;,
agneler &dquo;to lamb&dquo;, chatonner &dquo;to kitten&dquo;, etc. (preferring the converse solu-
tion) -
tempts -
little theoretical progress has been made since Meillet, for whom
&dquo;Words [unlike the units of phonology or grammar] do not constitute a sys-
tem, at most a collection of little groups &dquo; &dquo;. It is true that a great deal of
valuable research has been devoted to the description of these &dquo;little groups&dquo;;
but the techniques used have been so varied using lexical structuralism,
-
A linguist, Georges Mounin teaches at the Faculté des Lettres of Aix en Provence, and has
already published : Teoria e gloria della traduzione (1965), Histoire de la linguistique des
origines au xxe siècle (1965), Saussure, (1968), Clefs pour la linguistique (1969),
La communication poétique (1969).
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