Tsur Size – Sound Symbolism Revisited

In many of my writings I have argued that poetic images have no fixed predetermined meanings. In my 1992 book What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?—The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception (originally published in 1987) I propounded the view that speech sounds do not have fixed predetermined symbolic values either.1 Poetic images as well as speech sounds are clusters of features, each of which may serve as ground for some combinational potential. The resulting combinations of images and speech sounds give rise to figurative meanings and sound symbolism. Unforeseen contexts may actualise unforeseen potentials of images and speech sounds. Language users may shift attention from one potential to another in the same speech sound or poetic image, and realize new figurative meanings and soundsymbolic qualities. Thus, the handling of figurative language and sound symbolism in poetry is governed by a set of homogeneous principles. The acquisition and use of language require considerable creativity. This creativity is heightened and turned to an aesthetic end in the writing and understanding of poetry. In my writings I have explored the sources of these potentials, and how human intuition handles them in generating poetic qualities. In this way, a sophisticated interplay between sound and meaning is generated. Relevant features can be multiplied indefinitely, and one may discover unexpected phonetic or phonological features. In my 2001 paper “Onomatopoeia: Cuckoo-Language and Tick-Tacking: The Constraints of Semiotic Systems” I consider a minimal pair that can illustrate this. In Hebrew, m!taktek means “ticktacking”; we attend to the repeated voiceless plosives and perceive the word as onomatopoeic. m!taktak, by contrast, means “sweetish”, derived from matok (sweet). In Hebrew, the repetition of the last syllable is lexicalized, suggesting “somewhat (sweet)”. A wide range of such “moderate” adjectives can be derived in this way from “main-entry” adjectives: TM hamaTM smaTM s (sourish) from TMhamuTMs (sour), adamdam (reddish) from adom (red), y!rakrak (greenish), from yarok (green), and so forth. Hebrew slang even derives g!varbar (“somewhat man”) from g!v!r (man). The meaning directs our attention to this redoubling of the syllable, and we attend away from the acoustic features of the specific consonants. Benjamin Hrushovski (1968; 1980) pointed out that the sibilants have different (even opposite) effects in “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past” and in “And the silken, sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain”. In my book I explore the different aspects of the sibilants that may generate such conflicting effects. In the former quote, meaning