Understanding without Babblefish: Reviewing the Evidence for Universal Sound Symbolism in Natural Languages
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2007
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
Sound symbolism refers to a non-arbitrary relationship between
sound and meaning. Language-specific forms of sound symbolism are
well documented, but many scholars have also been interested in whether
some sound symbolic patterns are universal. If humans have common
intuitions about how sound should represent meaning, these intuitions
could have facilitated the origin of language. If humans share sound
symbolic intuitions, and they were influential in the origin of language,
then we would expect to see evidence of these patterns in natural
languages. Some evidence has been found in size ablauting systems,
deictic pronouns, and ethnozoological nomenclature, however, one study
in particular, Brown et al. (1955), suggests that sound symbolic patterns
may be evident even among sensory adjectives. Subjects in this study
were able to correctly match a pair of sensory antonyms in a foreign
language to their English translations at rates significantly above chance.
By conducting a similar study using a well-described sound symbolic
pattern to create a “symbolic” and “non-symbolic” list of the word pairs, I
show that subjects need symbolic cues to perform at levels above chance.
I further try to show that this was likely true of the subjects in the Brown
et al. study as well. This suggests that sensory adjectives reflect human
intuitions about how sound should represent meaning. A rough assay to
determine the extent to which big-small in many languages conforms to a
sound symbolic pattern, however, failed to find the pattern represented
more often than would be expected by chance. This suggests that sound
symbolic intuitions place at most a subtle constraint on sensory adjectives.
In general, sound symbolic patterns seem to be represented inconsistently
in language, perhaps because there is an opposing selective advantage of
arbitrariness in language.