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Iconicity and systematicity in phonaesthemes: A cross-linguistic study

  • Jose A. Mompean EMAIL logo , Amandine Fregier and Javier Valenzuela
Published/Copyright: April 1, 2020

Abstract

This study aims to find out whether speakers of different language backgrounds (English, French, Spanish, and Macedonian) are sensitive to semantic associations (‘fluid’ and ‘forcible contact’) attached respectively to two purported phonaesthemes (/fl-/ and /tr-/). Participants completed the task in oral and written conditions. They had to match phonaestheme-related definitions with either of two non-words (one phonaestheme-bearing and the other containing a distractor). The results obtained indicate that participants significantly chose non-words beginning with /tr-/ when the definition activated a meaning related to forcible contact, and non-words starting with /fl-/ when the definitions made reference to fluids in the four languages. The results point to the existence of non-arbitrary sound-meaning relations. A corpus-driven study of frequencies of lemmas and word tokens starting with the purported phonaesthemes also sheds light on the possible origin of the phonaesthemic associations, suggesting that both iconicity and systematicity motivate such associations. The results obtained are interpreted in the context of a functional, usage-based model of language, which can accommodate the existence of iconic tendencies, the role of learning and linguistic experience in language, and arbitrariness.

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by MICINN projects PGC2018-095050-B-I00 and PGC2018-097658-B-I00 (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Spanish Government). We would also like to offer our special thanks to Anastazija Kirkova-Naskova and Andrijana Pavlova (Ss. Cyril and Methodius University) for their help with stimulus preparation and recording in Macedonian as well as Jonás Fouz-González (University of Murcia), and Estíbaliz Encarnación Pinedo (Centro Universitario de la Defensa, UPCT) for stimulus recording.

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (DOI:https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2018-0079).


Received: 2018-07-25
Revised: 2020-01-30
Accepted: 2020-02-29
Published Online: 2020-04-01
Published in Print: 2020-08-27

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