Abstract
Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative or iconic utterances by relying on vowels and consonants, leaving the suprasegmental information unexplored. To begin bridging this gap, this study looks at the interaction of lexical tone and iconicity by comparing sound symbolic (i.e., mimetic, expressive, ideophonic) strata and general (i.e., arbitrary, prosaic, non-iconic) strata from three Chinese languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese Southern Min, Hong Kong Cantonese) using corpus-based means. For all three languages the distribution of tones in the sound symbolic strata are skewed so that the majority of syllables are largely confined to two tonal categories per language, one of which is high level, while the general strata exhibit no such tonal bias. These results indicate that phonological systematicity at the prosodic level might play an important role in demarcating an iconic class of words. This cross-linguistic tendency towards high tone mappings may be derived from phonotactic strategies to facilitate prosodic foregrounding of iconic utterances as well as an embodiment of expressive voice and marked pitch use like that of Infant Directed Speech.
Highlights
Statistical inference was corrected for multiple comparisons using Bonferroni correction across 20 tests (1 test of general distribution per variety, as well as 4, 6, and 7 single-tone tests for Mandarin, Hong Kong Cantonese, and Taiwan Southern Min respectively)
Our predictions stated that (1) if the distribution of tones across the sound symbolic and general strata are comparable, it is possible that lexical tone is an essential component of iconic expression; and (2) if the distribution is not comparable, it is still possible that lexical tone is a component of iconicity but not an essential one
The distribution of tones in the general strata differs significantly from the distribution of tones in the sound symbolic strata of Hong Kong Cantonese, Mandarin, and Taiwanese Southern Min respectively
Summary
Onomatopoeia is one such example of iconicity or linguistic imitation, e.g. English woof (dog barking) or bang (explosion), which contradicts the long-held Saussurean principle of linguistic arbitrariness [1]. A growing body of research shows that certain aspects of language, known collectively as sound symbolism, are formed through linguistic imitation of the outside world [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. These findings have led to a deeper investigation into what exactly qualifies a word as iconic. A commonly held definition of iconicity is that the structure of a word is influenced by the structure of its referent, e.g., shape, sound, rhythm [7, 8, 9]
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