Why%20sound%20symbolism?

1
Why sound symbolism?

• Moving the study of variation beyond sound change
  in progress.
• Expanding the limits of social indexicality
• Exploring the limits of arbitrariness in language.

2
Hinton, Nichols and Ohala's typology

• Corporeal
• Use of sounds or intonation patterns to express
  the internal state of the speaker, emotional or
  physical. From coughing to expressive intonation
• Imitative
• Onomatopoeic words and phrases representing
  environmental sounds.
• Syn(a)esthetic
• Acoustic symbolization of non-acoustic sounds.
• Conventional
• Analogical association of certain phonemes and
  clusters with certain meanings.
• Metalinguistic
• Choice of segment and intonation patterns that
  signal aspects of linguistic structure and
  function.

3
Where to look for sound symbolism

• Segments
• Individual segments, phonetic detail, clusters,
  unusual segments or combinations.
• Phonotactics syllable structure
• Processes reduplication, ablaut
• Pitch
• F0, Contour
• Amplitude
• Voice quality
• Rhythm

4
Semantic pragmatic realms (à la HNO)

• Mimicry of environmental internal sounds
• Expression of internal states
• Expressions of social relationships
• Salient characteristics of objects activities
• Grammatical discourse indicators
• Expression of the evaluative affective
  relationship of speaker to subject.

5
Where to look for sound symbolism at work

• Lexical inventories
• Grammatical categories
• Historical viability
• Processing
• Variation
• Word play
• Verbal art

6
de Saussure's sign
7
Pierce's sign (opens up orders of indexicality)

• Object
• the object places constraints or conditions on
  successful signification by the object, rather
  than the object causing or generating the sign.
  
• Sign-vehicle
• the sign refined to those elements most crucial
  to its functioning as a signifier.
• Interpretant
• the understanding we reach of some sign/object
  relation/the translation or development of the
  original sign.

8
Nature of connection between sign and object

• Icon - shared quality
• Index - correspondence in fact
• Symbol - general or conventional

Continuum of iconicity/arbitrariness
9
Smoke indexes fire
10
Smoke isn't just smoke
the sign determines an interpretant by using
certain features of the way the sign signifies
its object to generate and shape our understanding
11
removing the extraneous
12
and then there's smoke
13
Social Indexicality (à la Wickipedia which is not
bad in this case.)

• an indexical behavior or utterance points to (or
  indicates) some state of affairs. For example, I
  refers to whoever is speaking now refers to the
  time at which that word is uttered and here
  refers to the place of utterance.
• Anything we can construe as a sign that points
  to something including a weathervane (an index
  of wind direction), or smoke (an index of fire)
  is operating indexically.
• In the human realm, social indexicality includes
  any sign (clothing, speech variety, table
  manners) that points to, and helps create, a
  social state of affairs.

14
Some kinds of units

• Phonesthemes. Quasi-productive pairings of sound
  and meaning.
• glow, glitter, glisten, gleam, glare, glint,
  glance
• twist, twine, twiddle, tweeze twerp, twaddle
• Ideophones. Often defy syntactic categorization.
• Clip-clop, tick-tock, hippety-hop, ding, bang
• Exclamatives.
• Wow! Phew!

15

• fancy-schmancy - symbol, icon, and index.