Abstract
AbstractSound 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, 20macro-conceptscan 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.
Highlights
Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language
The main purpose of the paper is to answer the following questions: (a) What is the cross-linguistic extent of sound symbolism in basic vocabulary? (b) Which types of sound symbolism can be distinguished? (c) What does sound symbolism reveal about fundamental categories of human cognition?
We have shown that sound symbolism is an influential force in language, reaching beyond what are typically proposed as lexical universals. (a) What is the cross-linguistic extent of sound symbolism in basic vocabulary?
Summary
Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. All identified macroconcepts 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, Notes: Contributions. E. the most fundamental and language-independent associations and their accompanying semantic and phonetic features, is a way of looking into the most basic meanings in language and elucidating how lexical fields are related to each other and develop over time. The present paper achieves this by excluding genetic bias and including a wider range of investigated concepts compared to previous comparable studies It includes a sound feature system designed to facilitate analysis of lexical sound symbolism and demonstrates how sound-meaning associations can be arranged into semantically and phonetically superordinate concepts, referred to as macro-concepts. There have been several attempts to describe various sound-meaning associations and their causes, the vast majority of studies have based their findings on only a few languages and concepts (Köhler 1929; Sapir 1929; Newman 1933; Fónagy 1963; Diffloth 1994; Sereno 1994; Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001, etc.)
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