Abstract
AbstractSound symbolism refers to stochastic and systematic associations between sounds and meanings. Sound symbolism has not received much serious attention in the generative phonology literature, perhaps because most if not all sound symbolic patterns are probabilistic. Building on the recent proposal to analyze sound symbolic patterns within a formal phonological framework (Alderete and Kochetov 2017), this paper shows that MaxEnt grammars allow us to model stochastic sound symbolic patterns in a very natural way. The analyses presented in the paper show that sound symbolic relationships can be modeled in the same way that we model phonological patterns. We suggest that there is nothing fundamental that prohibits formal phonologists from analyzing sound symbolic patterns, and that studying sound symbolism using a formal framework may open up a new, interesting research domain. The current study also reports two hitherto unnoticed cases of sound symbolism, thereby expanding the empirical scope of sound symbolic patterns in natural languages.
Highlights
IntroductionIt is almost standard to assume that the relationships between sounds and meanings are arbitrary
In recent linguistic theories, it is almost standard to assume that the relationships between sounds and meanings are arbitrary
Building on the recent proposal to analyze sound symbolic patterns within a formal phonological framework (Alderete and Kochetov 2017), this paper shows that MaxEnt grammars allow us to model stochastic sound symbolic patterns in a very natural way
Summary
It is almost standard to assume that the relationships between sounds and meanings are arbitrary. Sapir (1929) and many subsequent studies have shown that low vowels tend to be judged to be larger than high vowels, and front vowels tend to be judged to be smaller than back vowels (Berlin, 2006; Coulter and Coulter, 2010; Jakobson, 1978; Jespersen, 1922; Newman, 1933; Ohala, 1994; Shinohara and Kawahara, 2016; Ultan, 1978) In both English and Japanese, there are stochastic tendencies for sonorants to be associated with female names and for obstruents to be associated with male names (Shinohara and Kawahara, 2013; Uemura, 1965; Wright and Hay, 2002; Wright et al, 2005).
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