▪ Abstract  The proposal that linguistic sounds such as phonemes, features, syllables, or tones can be meaningful, or sound-symbolic, contradicts the principles of arbitrariness and double articulation that are axiomatic to structural linguistics. Nevertheless, a considerable body of research that supports principles of sound symbolism has accumulated. This review discusses the most widely attested forms of sound symbolism and the research programs linked to sound symbolism that have influenced linguists and anthropologists most. Numerous reports of magnitude sound symbolism in the form of experimental studies and comparative surveys have been integrated into a biologically based theory of its motivation. Magnitude sound symbolism also catalyzed a number of experimental studies by psychologists and linguists in search of a universal sound-symbolic substrate underlying all languages. Although the search for a sound-symbolic substrate has been abandoned, the success rates of these studies have never been satisfactorily explained. Sound-symbolic processes have had a definitive impact on morphological analyses of phonesthemes and on historical linguists' understandings of diachronic processes. A typologically widespread form of sound symbolism occurs as a kind of lexical class known as the ideophone, which is conspicuously underdeveloped in standard average European languages, and highly perplexing for linguists and anthropologists. Although it has always been a respectable domain of inquiry in ethnopoetics and interpretive ethnography, the case for sound symbolism has of late been argued with renewed vigor on the part of psychological anthropologists and philosophers who see a paradigm shift under way.

This article contributes to attempts on the part of Quechua scholars to understand the evidential system of this language family, and thereby paves the way for a more complex understanding of Quechua speakers' language and culture. The author opposes the position that the most general meaning of the -mi suffix is to indicate a direct or first-hand experience; and she holds that specific claims about Quechua speakers' epistemological orientations, based on such an analysis, cannot be supported. Evidence from speakers' use of -mi indicates that it encodes two paradigmatic contrasts: one is status-like or modal, the other evidential. The patterning of -mi, including its use and nonuse in a variety of speech types, suggests that Quechua speakers from the Pastaza region of Ecuador do not share Euro-American concern for facts that transcend aesthetic and emotive significance. (Quechua language and culture, evidentiality, language in context, grammatical categories)* "He could never become a war photographer or a photographer of accidents in the street," Susan Sontag has written. "What he looks for . . . is the quiddity or "isness" of something. Not the truth about something, but the strongest version of it." About the late Robert Mapplethorpe (Newsweek July 25, 1988, pp. 56-57) The ways in which speakers of different languages make clear their basis for asserting something is referred to by the general term evidentiality (Chafe & Nichols 1986). Broadly conceived, linguistic evidentiality is considered from two very general perspectives. On the one hand, evidential markers may indicate a speaker's attitude regarding the validity of certain information, e.g., whether it is certain, probable, or untrustworthy. On the other hand, evidentially marked utterances may indicate how knowledge or information was acquired, e.g., through personal experience, inference, or report. If through experience, then a speaker may additionally specify a dominant sensory modality, such as visual or auditory, or a particular state of consciousness,

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This article examines an iconic form of communication, sound symbolism, which has been associated with oral cultures and implicated in paradigms of primitive mentality. I argue that Lowland Ecuadorean Quechua speakers use sound symbolic iconicity to create interlocutionary involvement. A speaker's performative foregrounding of a sound symbolic form simulates the salient qualities of an action, event, or process, and thereby invites a listener to project into an experience. This projected involvement, in turn, points the listener to deeper kinds of imaginative, intellectual, and emotional engagement with the narrative. The argument is based on an analysis of the formal and semantic characteristics of sound symbolic words in a conversational narrative translated from Quechua.