It should be noted that the overall testing scheme is conservative and that it is likely to have a large false-negative rate. Mid and low back vowel, rounded and unrounded High and mid central vowel, rounded and unrounded
Voiceless and voiced uvular fricative, voiceless and voiced pharyngeal fricative In this paper, we therefore conduct a comprehensive set of analyses involving a semantically diverse set of words from close to two-thirds of the world’s languages. These limitations may help explain, at least in part, why language scientists typically consider nonarbitrary associations to be marginal phenomena that may only apply to small, strictly circumscribed regions of the vocabulary ( 3). These studies involve confirmatory analyses, aiming to test specific hypotheses regarding sound–meaning correspondences as a consequence, they are guided by a priori intuitions or indirectly by findings from other disciplines. At a larger scale, there is evidence that the phonological properties of whole morphosyntactic classes of words (like verbs and nouns) are distinct in several languages ( 8).Ī further issue with current studies of nonarbitrariness in sound–meaning correspondences is that, save for a single exception ( 20), cross-linguistic corpus studies of nonarbitrary associations have tended to rely on a small number of languages (maximally 200) and focusing on small semantically restricted sets of words, ranging from phonation-related organs ( 21) to South American animals ( 15), to spatial orientation (demonstratives) ( 14, 22), repair initiators (like huh? in English) ( 23), and the conceptualization of magnitude in Australian languages ( 24). For example, word-initial gl- in English evokes the idea of a visual phenomenon (as in glare, glance, glimmer) ( 7). “Systemacity,” in contrast, refers to (statistical) regularities that are common to particular set of words, created by historical contingencies and analogical processes ( 5). More generally, the resemblance between certain aspects of the acoustic basis of speech and their referents, “iconicity,” is the most researched and well-known case of nonarbitrary associations between sound and meaning ( 5, 6).
In the Mel language Kisi Kisi (spoken in Sierra Leone), hábá means “(human) wobbly, clumsy movement,” and hábá-hábá-hábá “(human) prolonged, extreme wobbling” here, repetition serves as a way to convey the meaning of intensity.
For instance, ideophones-a class of words found in many languages-convey a communicative function (or meaning) through the depiction of sensory imagery ( 4). Plenty of exceptions exist, however, within individual languages.
Our results therefore have important implications for the language sciences, given that nonarbitrary associations have been proposed to play a critical role in the emergence of cross-modal mappings, the acquisition of language, and the evolution of our species’ unique communication system.Īlthough there is substantial debate in the language sciences over how to best characterize the features of spoken language, there is nonetheless a general consensus that the relationship between sound and meaning is largely arbitrary ( 1– 3). The areal and historical distribution of these associations suggests that they often emerge independently rather than being inherited or borrowed. Prominently among these relations, we find property words (“small” and i, “full” and p or b) and body part terms (“tongue” and l, “nose” and n). By analyzing word lists covering nearly two-thirds of the world’s languages, we demonstrate that a considerable proportion of 100 basic vocabulary items carry strong associations with specific kinds of human speech sounds, occurring persistently across continents and linguistic lineages (linguistic families or isolates). Some exceptions in the form of nonarbitrary associations have been documented in linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, but these studies only involved small subsets of the 6,000+ languages spoken in the world today. It is widely assumed that one of the fundamental properties of spoken language is the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning.