The Two Meanings of Sound Symbolism

Abstract

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.

Implicit Vocabulary Learning during Sleep Is Bound to Slow-Wave Peaks

“…Pseudoword-Inherent Size Semantics (Sound Symbolism) Do Not Account for Above-Chance Retrieval Performance Instead of using a real foreign language, we created foreignsounding pseudowords to avoid any influence of previous language experiences (see Stimuli in STAR Methods). Nevertheless, the sounds of pseudowords may be associated with a particular meaning [45], a phenomenon known as sound symbolism [46]. For example, most people will think that ''galnoog'' refers to a larger object than ''biktum,'' even though neither has been semantically bound to a real object.…”

“…The word ''biktum,'' for instance, may sound like an object smaller than a shoebox, while ''galnoog'' may sound like an object larger than a shoebox. We refer to this phenomenon as ''inherent size semantics''; in Linguistics it is an example of sound symbolism [46]. We asked half of the participants to give impartial size ratings for those pseudowords that were played during sleep to the other half of participants, and vice versa.…”

Phonesthetics and the etymologies ofbloodandbone

“…Nonetheless, many researchers still associate phonesthemes with sound symbolism, going to far as to identify the phonestheme as ‘a type of sound symbolic entity’ (Abelin 2015: 20). Drawing a firm distinction between phonesthemes and sound symbolism is troublesome because sound symbolism is inconsistently defined (Elsen 2017: 491–2).…”

“…It is worth mentioning here that the medial [gg] is not apparently imitative in any way. Rather, it may be understood as a phonestheme, one of several ‘frequent pairings of phonemes and aspects of meanings’ (Elsen 2017: 492), in this case expressing the fact that a given animal name is hypocoristic.…”

Iconicity ratings for 10,995 Spanish words and their relationship with psycholinguistic variables

“…In recent years the term iconicity has become the most fitting cover-all term to define the resemblance-based mapping between the form of a linguistic sign and the object or idea it represents (Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2015;Lockwood & Dingemanse, 2015; see also Dingemanse, 2018, Elsen, 2017and Nielsen & Dingemanse, 2020, for theoretical considerations about other aspects of the relationship between word forms and meanings). The prototypical examples of iconic words or ideophones are onomatopoeias (words that phonetically resemble the sound that they describe, e.g., plop).…”