Publications

Publication details [#64073]

Winter, Bodo, Marcus Perlman, Lynn K. Perry and Gary Lupyan. 2018. Which words are most iconic? Iconicity in English sensory words. Interaction Studies 18 (3) : 443–464.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/is

Annotation

Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. This paper 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, the paper replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. It further shows 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, it examined the relationship between iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularity between form and meaning). The paper finds that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, the results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English. Keywords: sound symbolism, onomatopoeia, touch, perception, sound