KEYWORDS:
sound symbolism, sound-meaning interplay, language learning, EFL, classroom experiments.
A foundation for
sound symbolism and cross-modal matching comes from the study of synesthesia.
The second type, wild language, refers to such phenomena as
sound symbolism, aspects of child language, and lengthening of vowels for emphasis.
Jespersen (1933) in his contribution to the search for the universality of
sound symbolism found many confirming instances of the vowel [i] occurring in words carrying the meaning of "sm all, insignificant, weak and rapid" (Brown 1958: 118) in several Indo-European languages.
Such
sound symbolism, according to some scholars, goes beyond the onomatopoeia of words like "bow wow" and reflects an intuitive attempt to capture in human speech the salient or essential traits, like size or shape, of at least certain objects.
The set of correspondences thus described is not only numerically greater than expectation to a level of significance beyond 0.0001, but by being phonetically cryptic it excludes the possibility that the correspondence is due to '
sound symbolism', that imagined exception to the arbitrariness of the sign which is still capable of commanding belief though it has never been shown to have any objective existence.
In the wake of Sapir, Fonagy (1980: 89-109) developped the kinaesthetic basis for
sound symbolism into the concept of phonetic metaphor, said to be speakers' symbolic projection of their intersensory image of sounds.
An international group of scholars of languages, literature, music, and other fields contributed papers on theoretical and applied novel approaches to iconicity on the aural, visual conceptual, and structural levels; the iconic properties of film and multimedia performance; and language, poetry,
sound symbolism, concept formation, and multimedia performance.
Most discussions in the linguistic literature that touch on wild language are limited to
sound symbolism and other phonological phenomena.
Visual aids are particularly effective in foregrounding elements of a lecture, and perhaps the most well remembered on LING 131 comes during the lecture on
sound symbolism in poetry.