The typology of sound symbolism: Defining macro-concepts via their semantic and phonetic features

Abstract

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) diagrammatic 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, and could therefore have originated as a bootstrapping mechanism, which can help us understand the bio-cultural origins of human language, the mental lexicon and language diversity.

Color sound symbolism in natural languages

“…The language data in text form was gathered from the corpus compiled by Johansson et al (in press) for a cross-linguistic examination of 344 basic vocabulary items in 245 language families. Description concepts, including color words, constituted a large proportion of the items and appeared to be among the domains most affected by sound symbolism.…”

“…This experimental work enabled us to formulate concrete hypotheses regarding the expected patterns of sound symbolism in color words. In the present study we report the results of testing these hypotheses using linguistic evidence from a large corpus of basic vocabulary (Johansson, Anikin, Carling, & Holmer, in press). We begin by introducing sound symbolism and sound–meaning associations in general, followed by a discussion of the domain of color and its cross-modal and sound symbolic associations across and within languages.…”

“…However, an increasing number of studies have demonstrated that a motivated association between sound and meaning, known as iconicity in general and sound symbolism in regard to spoken words, is far from being a fringe phenomenon and plays a crucial role for our ability to understand human language. In particular, the growing availability of written language description has made it possible to conduct large-scale cross-linguistic comparisons, which have revealed numerous over-representations of sounds, primarily in what is considered basic vocabulary (Blasi, Wichmann, Hammarström, Stadler, & Christiansen, 2016; Johansson et al, in press; Wichmann, Holman, & Brown, 2010). Furthermore, for almost a century sound symbolism has been investigated experimentally in a range of semantic fields, which have often included semantically oppositional adjectival pairs (e.g., Diffloth, 1994; Newman, 1933; Sapir, 1929).…”

“…The domain of color, which belongs to basic vocabulary, is estimated to have a relatively high frequency of use both currently and prehistorically (Haspelmath & Tadmor, 2009; Swadesh, 1971). It is also perceptually salient and confirmed to be sound symbolically affected (Blasi et al, 2016; Johansson et al, in press; Wichmann et al, 2010), which makes it a good candidate for bridging the gulf between cross-modal associations on a perceptual level and sound symbolism in natural languages. A considerable amount of psychological research has focused on color synesthesia – a type of cross-modal sensory integration in which stimuli in one sensory modality involuntarily and automatically cause experiences in another sensory modality (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001).…”

“…Based on the observed cross-modal correspondences of color luminance and saturation with acoustic loudness and frequency (Anikin & Johansson, 2019), we hypothesized that sound symbolism in color words would be manifested in a tendency to find sonorous and bright phonemes in the words for bright and saturated colors. To test this hypothesis, we obtained color words from a large sample of unrelated languages, which represented a large portion of the world’s language families (Johansson et al, in press), and analyzed the sonority and brightness of phonemes in these words. We obtained sonority ranks from an earlier study (Parker, 2002) and investigated the acoustic correlates of perceived phonemic brightness in a pilot study.…”