Sound Symbolism

A study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning.

Leanne Hinton (Edited by), Johanna Nichols (Edited by), John J. Ohala (Edited by)

9780521452199, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 January 1995

384 pages, 4 b/w illus. 32 tables
23.6 x 15.8 x 3.5 cm, 0.695 kg

"All of the papers are sources of tantalizing, testable hypotheses....of considerable value and evidence of a welcome renewal of interest in some very old questions." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, twenty-four leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. They consider sound symbolic processes in a wide range of languages from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America. Beginning with an evocative typology of sound symbolic processes, they go on to examine not only the well-known areas of study, such as onomatopoeia and size sound symbolism, but also less frequently discussed topics such as the sound symbolic value of vocatives and of involuntary noises, and the marginal areas of 'conventional sound symbolism', such as phonesthemes. The book concludes with a series of studies on the biological basis of sound symbolism, and draws comparisons with the communication systems of other species. This is a definitive work on the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language.

List of contributors
1. Introduction: Sound-symbolic processes Leanne Hinton, Johanna Nichols, John Ohala
Part I. Native American Languages North of Mexico: 2. Symbolism in Nez Perce Haruo Aoki
3. Nootkan vocative vocalism and its implications William H. Jacobsen Jr
4. Relative motivation in denotational and indexical sound symbolism of Wasco-Wishram Chinookan Michael Silverstein
Part II. Native Languages of Latin America: 5. Symbolism and change in the sound system of Huastec Terrence Kaufman
6. Evidence for pervasive synesthetic sound symbolism in ethnozoological nomenclature Brent Berlin
7. Noise words in Guaraní Margaret Langdon
Part III. Asia: 8. i: big a: small Gérard Diffloth
9. Tone, intonation, and sound symbolism in Lahu: loading the syllable canon James A. Matisoff
10. An experimental investigation into phonetic symbolism as it relates to Mandarin Chinese Randy J. Lapolla
11. Palatalization in Japanese sound symbolism Shoko Hamano
Part IV. Australia and Africa: 12. Yir-Yiront ideophones Barry Alpher
13. African ideophones G. Tucker Childs
Part V. Europe: 14. Regular sound development, phonosymbolic orchestration, disambiguation of homonyms Yakov Malkiel
15. Modern Greek ts: beyond sound symbolism Brian D. Joseph
16. On levels of analysis of sound symbolism in poetry, with an application to Russian poetry Tom M. S. Priestly
17. Finnish and Gilyak sound symbolism - the interplay between system and history Robert Austerlitz
Part VI. English: 18. Phonosyntactics Joan A. Sereno
19. Aural images Richard Rhodes
20. Inanimate imitatives in English Robert L. Oswalt
Part VII. The Biological Bases of Sound Symbolism: 21. Some observations on the function of sound in clinical work Peter F. Ostwald
22. The frequency code underlies the sound-symbolic use of voice pitch John J. Ohala
23. Sound symbolism and its role in non-human vertebrate communication Eugene S. Morton
Index.

Subject Areas: Phonetics, phonology [CFH]