Abstract
AbstractThis 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.
Highlights
Research on sound symbolism was never really popular, perhaps due to the dominance of Western European and US-American research and Ferdinand de Saussure’s conclusion that the relation between form and meaning of the linguistic sign was arbitrary - except for a few onomatopoetic terms
The number of reports and experiments dealing with sound symbolism and its cross-linguistic implications is growing
Authors postulate a natural relationship, cf. “the term ‘sound symbolism’, designating an inmost, natural similarity association between sound and meaning” (Jakobson & Waugh 1987: 182). We find characterizations such as “the sound of the spoken word-forms is felt to be appropriate to the meaning of the lexemes of which they are forms, though the words do not denote sounds or the source of sounds, illustrate the phenomenon known as sound-symbolism“ (Lyons 1977: 104) or “[h]abitual association of a particular phoneme, or a category of phonemes, with a concept such as largeness or smallness, proximity or distance, beauty or ugliness, curved or angular shapes, and the like“ (Anderson 1998: 340)
Summary
Research on sound symbolism was never really popular, perhaps due to the dominance of Western European and US-American research and Ferdinand de Saussure’s conclusion that the relation between form and meaning of the linguistic sign was arbitrary - except for a few onomatopoetic terms. From time to time, authors would offer experiments and new ideas on sound symbolism, including some of the most cited ones such as Sapir (1929), Köhler (1929), Jespersen (1933), Jakobson (1971), French (1976), Ultan (1978), Hinton/Nichols/Ohala (1994) and Nuckolls (1999), to name just a few. The number of reports and experiments dealing with sound symbolism and its cross-linguistic implications is growing. Non-Indo-Germanic languages reveal much more sound symbolic lexemes than Indo-Germanic, e.g. Basque (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2006), Turkish (Jendraschek 2002), Tamil (Yoshida 2012) or Japanese and Korean (Taylor 1966; Kim 1977; Ivanova 2006; Parault & Parkinson 2008; Akita 2011, 2013; Kantartzis et al 2011). Japanese dictionaries list around 4.500 sound symbolic words (Imai & Kita 2014; Oszmiańska 2001).
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