Phonosemantics

According to etymological dictionaries of Slavic languages there should not be any words of synesthetic sound symbolic origin (i.e. words with a direct linkage between their sound form and non-sound meaning) in these languages or their number should be very small. This fact, however, contradicts the typological assumption of primitiveness and universality of phonetically motivated words.
This book discusses two main points of the etymological analysis of words of synesthetic sound symbolic origin: (1) how to recognize them and (2) how to define the groups of cognates between them in Slavic languages. In the identification of synesthetic sound-symbolic words reduplication is regarded as a most reliable criterion. If a series of words which convey the same non-sound meaning contain reduplicated clusters of sounds, they could be continuants of a synesthetic sound symbolic etymon. In discussing the possibilities of defining the groups of cognates between these words following points are emphasized. Since the relationship between the continuants of the same phonetically motivated etymon cannot be established by phonetic laws and the continuants of different sound-symbolic origin in different languages and dialects can have the same or similar phonetic forms and convey the same meaning, the groups of cognates between these words cannot be defined with much confidence. Since similar reduplicated forms can be created as synesthetic sound symbolic denominations of different meanings, the blending of synesthetic sound-symbolic groups of cognates is possible during their evolution. There exist parallel forms with full and partial reduplication, which convey the same meaning of synesthetic sound-symbolic origin. This fact supports the hypothesis that partial reduplication is historically nothing else but a reduction of full re-duplication.

Based on the vocabulary of 66 genealogically distinct languages, this study reveals the biased association between phonological features and the 100 lexical meanings of the Leipzig-Jakarta List. Morphemes whose meanings are related to round shapes ('egg', 'navel', 'neck', and 'knee') tend to contain phon-emes that bear the [+round] feature. Also observable is the positive association between buccal actions and the phonological features they resemble ('to blow' with [+labial] and 'to suck' with [+delayed release]). Grammatical morphemes related to proximity ('this', 'in', 1SG and 2SG pronoun) are positively associated with [+nasal]. The phonosemantic patterns found in the most basic vocabulary of spoken languages further confirm that the sound-meaning association in natural languages is not completely arbitrary but may be motivated by human cognitive biases.

The present research considers crowdsourcing as a method of linguistic
experiment. The paper features an experiment with the following algorithm:
1) problem statement, 2) development, 3) and questionnaire testing. The paper
includes recommendations on crowdsourcing project organization, as well as some
issues of respondents’ motivation, questionnaire design, choice of crowdsourcing
platform, data export, etc. The linguistic experiment made it possible to obtain
data on the potential of the phonosemantic analysis in solving naming problems
in marketing. The associations of the brand name designer matched those of the
majority of the Internet pannellists. The experiment showed that crowdsourcing
proves to be an available method within the network society. It gives an opportunity
to receive objective data and demonstrates high research capabilities. The described
procedure of the crowdsourcing project can be used in various linguistic experiments

In this paper, we present the results of preliminary experiments on finding the link between the surface forms of Russian nouns (as represented by their graphic forms) and their meanings (as represented by vectors in a distributional model trained on the Russian National Corpus). We show that there is a strongly significant correlation between these two sides of a linguistic sign (in our case, word). This correlation coefficient is equal to 0.03 as calculated on a set of 1 729 mono-syllabic nouns, and in some subsets of words starting with particular two-letter sequences the correlation raises as high as 0.57. The overall correlation value is higher than the one reported in similar experiments for English (0.016).

Additionally, we report correlation values for the noun subsets related to different phonaesthemes, supposedly represented by the initial characters of these nouns.

The article deals with the problem of diachronic development of onomatopoeic lexicon and discusses how regular sound changes affect imitative words. The classification according to the degrees of the impact of regular sound changes is devised and applied to the bulk of English sound-imitative words. The aim of the article is to establish which regular sound changes of the English language had the most detrimental effect. In order to achieve this aim, all major English regular sound changes are classified into phonosemantically significant and phonosemantically insignificant. This classification is based on the use of methods of historical-comparative linguistics and etymological analysis. The main result is the revelation of the fact that not all regular sound changes are equally detrimental to the iconic lexicon of a language. They are only so if: 1) touch upon salient, meaning-bearing phonemes of an iconic word; 2) change the original phonotype of a phoneme; and 3) take place when the word still retains its original sound-meaning coherence. The devised classification is potentially universal and applicable to the onomatopoeic lexicons of related and unrelated languages.

Sur la base des analyses effectuées par Lévi-Strauss et Severi sur l'efficacité thérapeutique du chant curatif guna "Muu Igala", et en s'inspirant des considérations de Jakobson sur la morphophonologie, cet essai formule l'hypothèse que la puissance mythopoïétique du chant dépend en partie, sur le plan sémiologique, des configurations phonosymboliques présentes dans son texte et enracinées dans la structure phonologique de la langue guna.

Abstract

Based on the analyses carried out by Lévi-Strauss and Severi on the therapeutic effectiveness of the guna healing song "Muu Igala", and inspired by Jakobson's considerations on morphophonology, this essay hypothesizes that the mythopoetic power of the song depends in part, in semiological terms, on the phonosymbolic configurations present in its text and rooted in the phonological structure of the guna language.

The article attempts to trace how the difference in approaches to the question of
language origin in the Democritus’ and Epicurus’ traditions is reflected in modern
linguistics. According to the monograph by Alexander Verlinsky (2006), Democritus
insisted on the arbitrary connection between objects and words, while
Epicurus insisted on a necessary correlation between them. At first glance,
Democritus’ tradition has ultimately won, being reflected in the ideas of Ferdinand
de Saussure that remain of crucial importance for modern linguistics. If looking
further, however, the research on motivation or iconicity of language sign is still
quite alive, with a number of relevant studies. This paper argues that the majority
of studies on the motivation of language signs still follow the Democritus’ tradition
rather than Epicurus’ one. They tend to find the motivation based on purely
intralingual data rather than in the “world of denotata”, the works by Roman
Jakobson being of especial importance in this sense. Jacobson offered the idea of
paradigmatically motivated signs that are segmentally smaller than morphemes,
and this idea was further developed by Konstantin Pozdniakov and other linguists
into the theory of submorphemic signs and submorphemic neutralizations. In
support of this theory, this paper illustrates how the submorphemic level of the
language can be used for the description of Latin personal pronouns.

This paper deals with the most burning issues of phonosemantics, iconicity, and sound symbolism. The problem of iconic nature of a linguistic sign is capturing the attention of more and more linguists. Widening the perspectives of phonosemantics and studying it not only as phoneme semantics but as prosodic semantics as well, could open new challenges for the linguists in the future. As a matter of fact, segmental phonology has already gathered a vast majority of works dedicated to sound symbolism, whereas suprasegmental phonology lacks thorough investigations of the iconic nature of all the prosodic features.

The paper represents the results of a linguistic experiment aimed at establishing if the sounding of different fantasy brand names can cause the same associations in collective consciousness. The experiment drew upon crowdsourcing. The data received can be useful for marketing phonosemantics in relation to the methods used for the creation of new brand names.

La fonestesia è un fenomeno linguistico particolarmente studiato nell'ambito anglofono per le peculiarità della lingua inglese, ma si trova in diverse lingue e ricade nell'ambito più generale del fonosimbolismo, di cui è un caso particolare. A fronte di numerosi studi sulle lingue viventi, la ricerca è carente nei riguardi delle lingue antiche, sebbene il primo esempio documentato di fonestesia risalga almeno al IV sec. a.C. ovvero al Cratilo di Platone. Questo studio si occupa in particolare della fonestesia nel Latino.