Article published in:
Interaction and Iconicity in the Evolution of LanguageEdited by Stefan Hartmann, Michael Pleyer, James Winters and Jordan Zlatev
[Interaction Studies 18:3] 2017
► pp. 443–464
Which words are most iconic?
Iconicity in English sensory words
Bodo Winter | University of Birmingham
Lynn K. Perry | University of Miami
Gary Lupyan | University of Wisconsin-Madison
Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell). First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularity between form and meaning). We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English.
Keywords: sound symbolism, onomatopoeia, perception, sound, touch
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Iconicity and the senses
- 2.Methods
- 2.1Variables
- 2.2Analyses
- 3.Results
- 3.1Replication and extension of Perry et al. (2015)
- 3.2Systematicity and iconicity
- 3.3Sensory meanings and iconicity
- 3.4Modality differences in iconicity
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
Published online: 08 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18.3.07win
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18.3.07win
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