Questioning Arbitrariness in Language: a Data-Driven Study of Conventional Iconicity

This paper presents a data-driven investigation of phonesthemes, phonetic units said to carry meaning associations, thus challenging the traditionally assumed arbitrariness of language. Phonesthemes have received a substantial amount of attention within the cognitive science literature on sound iconicity, but nevertheless remain a controversial and understudied phenomenon. Here we employ NLP techniques to address two main questions: How can the existence of phonesthemes be tested at a large scale with quantitative methods? And how can the meaning arguably carried by a phonestheme be induced automatically from word embeddings? We develop novel methods to make progress on these fronts and compare our results to previous work, obtaining substantial improvements.