Studies in Sound Symbolism

Abstract: This thesis investigates how the Swedish lexicon is structured with respect to sound symbolism, the productivity of phonesthemes and cross language similarities in certain areas of sound symbolism. The Swedish lexicon has been analyzed with emphasis on the sound symbolic properties of initial and final consonant clusters, and to a certain extent of vowels. Approximately 1, 000 lexemes were judged to be sound symbolic and the outcome of the analysis are tentative phonesthemes, i.e. motivated connections between meanings and consonant clusters. Almost all Swedish initial consonant clusters and many of the final consonant clusters may carry sound symbolic meanings. Lexically infrequent clusters are utilized to a larger extent than lexically frequent clusters. No two consonant clusters have exactly the same semantic profile. Phonesthemes have different sound symbolic strength, i.e. some are clearly sound symbolic (i.e. a high percentage of the words beginning with a certain cluster are sound symbolic), and carry either one meaning or several meanings. Other (candidates for) phonesthemes are weaker and not so clearly sound symbolic. The meanings of most phonesthemes are relatable to the senses: hearing, vision or tactile sensation, or they are metaphorically or metonymically connected to the senses. The most common semantic features occurring are often related to synaesthesia. The productivity of phonesthemes was tested in experiments of production and understanding. The experiments show that in interpretation no constructed word is interpreted as expected by all subjects, but that all of the constructed words are interpreted correctly by some subjects. The most common semantic features found in the lexical analysis are also often the most successfully interpreted by subjects. For production, the experiments indicate that subjects tend to encode the semantic features in initial clusters rather than in final clusters. Final consonant clusters seem to be of less importance than the initial clusters in new sound symbolic words in Swedish. For the contrastive studies, the general results are that there are both similarities and differences between the expressions in the different languages. The variation is greater for some semantic fields than for others.