Explorations of Sound Symbolism and Iconicity (original) (raw)
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The building blocks of sound symbolism
2020
Languages contain thousands of words each and are made up by a seemingly endless collection of sound combinations. Yet a subsection of these show clear signs of corresponding word shapes for the same meanings which is generally known as vocal iconicity and sound symbolism. This dissertation explores the boundaries of sound symbolism in the lexicon from typological, functional and evolutionary perspectives in an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the role sound symbolism plays in human language. In order to achieve this, the subject in question was triangulated by investigating different methodologies which included lexical data from a large number of language families, experiment participants and robust statistical tests.Study I investigates basic vocabulary items in a large number of language families in order to establish the extent of sound symbolic items in the core of the lexicon, as well as how the sound-meaning associations are mapped and interconnected. This study ...
The typology of sound symbolism: Defining macro-concepts via their semantic and phonetic features
Linguistic Typology, 2020
Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. However, as previous studies have either been lacking in scope or in phonetic granularity, the present study investigates the phonetic and semantic features involved from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the phonemes of 344 near-universal concepts in 245 language families, we establish 125 sound-meaning associations. The results also show that between 19 and 40 of the items of the Swadesh-100 list are sound symbolic, which calls into question the list's ability to determine genetic relationships. In addition, by combining co-occurring semantic and phonetic features between the sound symbolic concepts, 20 macro-concepts can be identified, e. g. basic descriptors, deictic distinctions and kinship attributes. Furthermore, all identified macro-concepts can be grounded in four types of sound symbolism: (a) unimodal imitation (onomatopoeia); (b) cross-modal imitation (vocal gestures); (c) dia-grammatic mappings based on relation (relative); or (d) situational mappings (circumstantial). These findings show that sound symbolism is rooted in the human perception of the body and its interaction with the surrounding world,
The natural motivation of sound symbolism
This dissertation examines systematic sound-meaning correspondences in sound-symbolic words from a cross-linguistic perspective, investigating whether and to what degree they are naturally motivated. Its aims are to assess empirical evidence for the Explanatory Sound-symbolism Hypothesis (ESH): that sound symbolism is primarily governed by natural motivation, in particular, by a connection between human perceptual and language systems. The languages examined are Korean and English, which are genealogically unrelated.
The Two Meanings of Sound Symbolism
Open Linguistics, 2017
This article deals with sound symbolism and the ways to interpret sound symbolic phenomena. Sound symbolism appears to be a universal phenomenon but linguists tend to neglect it or offer heterogeneous approaches and definitions. This paper is concerned with the role of motivation, as assumed in cases like cuckoo, and the question whether some sound symbolic effects might be the result of acquired statistical knowledge about the language system. The author argues that several aspects of sound symbolism such as natural/iconic or habitual relationships between sound and (facets of) referents interact but should be considered separately to gain a more realistic insight into the working of sound symbolism.
Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2017
Sound symbolism refers to an association between phonemes and stimuli containing particular perceptual and/or semantic elements (e.g., objects of a certain size or shape). Some of the best-known examples include the mil/mal effect (Sapir, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225-239, 1929) and the maluma/takete effect (Köhler, 1929). Interest in this topic has been on the rise within psychology, and studies have demonstrated that sound symbolic effects are relevant for many facets of cognition, including language, action, memory, and categorization. Sound symbolism also provides a mechanism by which words' forms can have nonarbitrary, iconic relationships with their meanings. Although various proposals have been put forth for how phonetic features (both acoustic and articulatory) come to be associated with stimuli, there is as yet no generally agreed-upon explanation. We review five proposals: statistical co-occurrence between phonetic features and associated stimuli in the environment, a shared property among phonetic features and stimuli; neural factors; species-general, evolved associations; and patterns extracted from language. We identify a number of outstanding questions that need to be addressed on this topic and suggest next steps for the field.
Essay taken from Mysteriosophy Vol.II (Published Steve Drury) A review into sound association. How people choose certain objects, and whether objects, shapes, names or colours could have associative characteristics
Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary
Entropy, 2010
The relationship between meanings of words and their sound shapes is to a large extent arbitrary, but it is well known that languages exhibit sound symbolism effects violating arbitrariness. Evidence for sound symbolism is typically anecdotal, however. Here we present a systematic approach. Using a selection of basic vocabulary in nearly one half of the world's languages we find commonalities among sound shapes for words referring to same concepts. These are interpreted as due to sound symbolism. Studying the effects of sound symbolism cross-linguistically is of key importance for the understanding of language evolution.
Sound symbolism is not a very satisfactory term but it is a familiar one to cover a phenomenon which has been noted and studied over very many years, the apparent appropriateness of the sound-structures of many individual words for their meanings. A better description for this might be 'natural expressiveness'. What is unsatisfactory about the term 'sound symbolism' is its use of the radically confused concept 'symbol'. This is one of the words used extensively and with confidence in many different disciplines, but with no clear idea of what a 'symbol' is. Often there is total contradiction between the use of 'symbol' by different authors. So, Peterfalvi (1970), author of perhaps the best book in French on sound symbolism (commended warmly by Roman Jakobson 1987), says that the term 'symbol' in its modern sense always includes the idea of a natural, and not conventional, analogical correspondence between the concrete form and the object which it symbolises. , a leading American linguist, takes the radically opposite view: meanings in which form imitates nature are called iconic: meanings that are arbitrary and conventional are called symbolic. A clash of symbols indeed! More serious than the right name for the phenomenon of 'sound symbolism' is the cast-iron orthodoxy formulated by leading authorities in linguistics that the phenomenon does not exist at all. Saussure (1915) is notorious for the slogan 'l'arbitraire du signe', by which he denied onomatopoeia (and all other natural expressiveness of words) other than as marginal, and treated even apparent onomatopoeic words as no more than conventionalised forms. This dogma was restated and reinforced by Charles Hockett (1958, 1963) in his influential identification of what he described as 'design features' of language: The relation between a meaningful element in language and its denotation is independent of any physical and geometrical resemblance between the two. The semantic relation is arbitrary rather than iconic.. Other influential linguists concurred; Firth(1964) warned students to beware of sound symbolism, saying that the sounds of words in themselves paint nothing.
Phonetic symbolism : double-edgedness and aspect switching
2019
This article proposes a structuralist-cognitive approach to phonetic symbolism that conceives of it as of a flexible process of feature abstraction, combination, and comparison. It is opposed to an approach that treats phonetic symbolism as “fixed relationships” between sound and meaning. We conceive of speech sounds as of bundles of acoustic, articulatory and phonological features that may generate a wide range of, sometimes conflicting, perceptual qualities. Different relevant qualities of a given speech sound are selected by the meaning across lexical items and poetic contexts. Importantly, speech sounds can suggest only elementary percepts, not complex meanings or emotions. Associations of speech sounds with specific meanings are achieved by extraction of abstract features from the speech sounds. These features, in turn, can be combined and contrasted with abstract features extracted from other sensory and mental objects (e.g. images, emotions). The potential of speech sounds to...
Cross-modal iconicity: A cognitive semiotic approach to sound symbolism
Sign Systems Studies, 2010
It is being increasingly recognized that the Saussurean dictum of "the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign" is in conflict with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon commonly known as "sound symbolism". After first presenting a historical overview of the debate, however, we conclude that both positions have been exaggerated, and that an adequate explanation of sound symbolism is still lacking. How can there, for example, be (perceived) similarity between expressions and contents across different sensory modalities? We offer an answer, based on the Peircian notion of iconic ground, and G. Sonesson's distinction between primary and secondary iconicity. Furthermore, we describe an experimental study, in a paradigm first pioneered by W. Köhler, and recently popularized by V. Ramachandran, in which we varied vowels and consonants in fictive word-forms, and conclude that both types of sounds play a role in perceiving an iconic ground between the word-forms and visual figures. The combination of historical conceptual analysis, semiotic explication and psychological experimentation presented in this article is characteristic of the emerging paradigm of cognitive semiotics.