Sound Symbolism and an Attempt on A Different Classification of Sound-Meaning Relationship

Sound Symbolism

Sound symbolism is the term for a hypothesized systematic relationship between sound and meaning (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala 1994). The idea that there might be a non-arbitrary relationship between the physical aspect of a speech signal and its meaning is quite an old idea, dating back at least to the time of Plato who, in his work Cratylus, had Socrates debating with two pupils the issue of whet...

Synthesized size-sound sound-symbolism

Studies of sound symbolism have shown that people can associate sound and meaning in consistent ways when presented with maximally contrastive stimulus pairs of nonwords such as bouba/kiki (rounded/sharp) or mil/mal (small/big). Recent work has shown the effect extends to antonymic words from natural languages and has proposed a role for shared cross-modal correspondences in biasing formto-mean...

South Siberian Sound Symbolism

South Siberian Turkic languages are rich in sound symbolic subsystems, both in their lexica and in the productive morphophonology, but these systems remain to be adequately documented. This paper presents new field data on sound symbolism in two South Siberian Turkic languages: Tofa(lar) and Tuvan (including the unwritten Tsengel and Hovd dialects spoken in Mongolia). Sound symbolic word format...

Sex, Sound Symbolism, and Sociolinguistics

Affect, Sound Symbolism, and Variation

I will show how two preadolescent girls use the quality of /o/ and of the nucleus of /ay/ to index affect. Most particularly, how they use backed and raised occurrences to express what one might generally (and inadequately) call negative affect, and fronted occurrences to express what one might call sweetness and light, or a kind of childhood innocence. It remains to be seen how this kind of va...