Exploring a sound-meaning association in swear words of English and French
Robin Vallery | Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 – STL – Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille, France
Maarten Lemmens | Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8163 – STL – Savoirs Textes Langage, F-59000 Lille, France
Swear words of English and French, both real and fictional ones, significantly tend to contain the least sonorous
consonants, compared to the rest of the lexicon. What can explain the overrepresentation of such sounds among swear words? This
might be a case of sound symbolism, when sounds are unconsciously associated with a meaning. We examine the pragmatic vs. semantic
nature of the meaning involved, as well as two explanations in terms of iconicity (plosives may be associated with “violation of
hearer’s space”, or unsonorous consonants may be associated with “aggression”). This unusual sound-meaning pairing would involve
an emotional-contextual, non-truth-conditional meaning, and be powerful enough that it influences a strong sociolinguistic
convention – which words are swear words and which ones are not – suggesting that sounds convey meaning in yet unsuspected
ways.
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Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Lev-Ari, Shiri & Ryan McKay
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