Physical Qualities in Goidelic: A Corpus Study of Polysemy and Collocability

Abstract

This is a small case study of Goidelic adjectives denoting the physical qualities of heaviness and lightness, namely trom and éadrom in Irish and trom and aotrom (eutrom) in Scottish Gaelic. Both go back to Old Irish. I will refer to them by their Old Irish forms tromm and étromm in generalisations. Étromm is derived from tromm with a negative prefix é, suggesting a high level of structural symmetry. However, this proves not to be the case, and étromm appears to be a lot more than just “not tromm” even at the earliest stage. Moreover, distribution of both trom and étromm differs substiantially in Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic although these languages are closely related. What makes this kind of adjective especially interesting is A. Wierzbicka and C. Goddard’s assumption that “physical quality concepts refer to embodied human experiences and embodied human sensations” (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2007: 765). In other words, we call something ‘heavy’ not because it has some specific weight, but rather because we feel this weight. The analysed Goidelic data fully support this statement.