The notion that linguistic forms and meanings are related only by convention and not by any direct relationship between sounds and semantic concepts is a foundational principle of modern linguistics. Though the principle generally holds across the lexicon, systematic exceptions have been identified. These “sound symbolic” forms have been identified in lexical items and linguistic processes in many individual languages. This paper examines sound symbolism in the languages of Australia. We conduct a statistical investigation of the evidence for several common patterns of sound symbolism, using data from a sample of 120 languages. The patterns examined here include the association of meanings denoting “smallness” or “nearness” with front vowels or palatal consonants, and the association of meanings denoting “largeness” or “distance” with back vowels or velar consonants. Our results provide evidence for the expected associations of vowels and consonants with meanings of “smallness” and “proximity” in Australian languages. However, the patterns uncovered in this region are more complicated than predicted. Several sound-meaning relationships are only significant for segments in prominent positions in the word, and the prevailing mapping between vowel quality and magnitude meaning cannot be characterized by a simple link between gradients of magnitude and vowel F2, contrary to the claims of previous studies.

Introduction

The notion that linguistic forms and meanings are related only by convention and not by any systematic relationship between sounds and semantic concepts, articulated by de Saussure [1] as the arbitrariness of the sign, is a foundational principle of modern linguistics. Though this principle generally holds across the lexicon, exceptions to arbitrariness have been identified. These iconic and onomatopoetic forms, in contrast with most other linguistic material, are characterized by a symbolic, non-arbitrary relationship between the form of linguistic representations and the meanings they convey.

Sound symbolism is defined as “the direct linkage between sound and meaning” ([8], page 1), which we interpret to mean a non-arbitrary sound-meaning association, or the greater than chance occurrence of a particular phoneme in a particular semantic category. Sound symbolism has been identified in lexical items and linguistic processes in many individual languages [2]–[6], and comparative studies have led to generalizations about the basic patterns of sound symbolism that have some cross-linguistic basis [7]–[10]. However, few systematic studies have been undertaken to examine the extent to which common patterns of sound iconicity are found in individual languages and across language areas, and there are no comparative studies for Australian Indigenous languages.

This paper examines sound symbolism in the languages of Australia, using data from a sample of 120 languages. We conduct a statistical investigation of the evidence for several patterns of sound symbolism in individual languages and across this continent more generally. The patterns examined here include the traditional association of meanings denoting “smallness” or “nearness” with front vowels or palatal consonants, and the association of meanings denoting “largeness” or “distance” with back vowels, as identified by previous studies. We also test for a proposed association between velar consonants with “largeness”/“distance” meanings, as well as testing for symbolic patterns among classes of sounds not explicitly associated with our hypotheses, including high and low vowels, lateral consonants, and labial consonants. Lastly, we also examine correlations between patterns identified as sound symbolic, but with the opposite meaning categories (for example, front vowels and meanings associated with “largeness” rather than with “smallness”). Our results provide evidence for the expected associations of vowels and consonants with meanings of “smallness” and “proximity” in Australian languages. However, the patterns uncovered in this region are more complicated than predicted. Several sound-meaning relationships are only significant for segments in prominent positions in the word, and the prevailing mapping between vowel quality and magnitude meaning cannot be characterized by a simple link between gradients of magnitude and vowel F2, contrary to the claims of previous studies.

Sound Symbolism and its Motivations Several different types of symbolism are found in language, motivated by both cognitive and communicative factors. Variation in the nature of the form-meaning relationships that define these categories predisposes certain types of sound symbolism to be exhibited through language-specific phenomena, or to occur in very specific semantic or pragmatic contexts. Specific phonemes or phoneme clusters, for example, can become associated with particular semantics through the development of phonosemantic conventions. The association of the cluster /gl/ with meanings of luminosity in English (e.g. “glitter”, “glisten”, “glow”, “glimmer”) exemplifies this conventional sound symbolism. Though this pattern may be shared across closely related languages, it is unlikely to co-occur among unrelated languages. Analyses of these sub-morphemic sound-meaning correspondences tend to focus on language-specific metaphor [11] or their function in language processing [12], rather than any universal tendencies based on phonetic iconicity. Other types of symbolism are attested more robustly in cross-linguistic data, but are restricted to specific semantic domains or pragmatic contexts. For example, the tendency for the names of body parts involved in articulation to include sounds involving those articulators, noted by Urban [13], exploits a natural link between the body and language. Another common form of sound symbolism uses sounds or intonational patterns to express emotional or physical states, as in Hinton et al.'s [8] corporeal sound symbolism, which includes phenomena like speaking with raised pitch when frightened, or even involuntary noises like coughing. In both of these types of symbolism, cross-linguistic resemblances in a very specific domain are derived from human anatomy or general communicative principles. Other cross-linguistic sound symbolic patterns arise through the use of speech sounds to imitate environmental noises. Onomatopoetic forms such as animal sounds (“squawk”), machine noises, and certain motion noises (“whoosh” or “bang”) receive their forms through the imitation of sounds that occur outside of language. Like corporeal symbolism, iconicity of this type can create cross-linguistic similarities. However, convergence in onomatopoetic forms in unrelated languages can be traced back to the extralinguistic acoustic inputs on which they are modeled, rather than any communicative function of the speech sounds themselves. The debate regarding motivations for sound symbolism and the universality of various patterns of sound-meaning linkage centers on a further type of sound symbolism. Synesthetic sound symbolism, as Hinton et al. [8] have called this category of iconicity, associates sounds or classes of sounds with properties of items in the world. The classic example of synesthetic sound symbolism is the use of contrasting sounds to represent variation in size of an object (known as magnitude sound symbolism), though properties like movement, shape, and color can also be expressed through similar patterns. For example, in Ewe, the word for ‘small’ is kítsíkítsí, with high front vowels and high tones, while the word for ‘large’ is gbàgbàgbà, with back vowels and low tone [9]. French petit ‘small’ versus gros ‘large’ shows the same vowel pattern. Synesthetic sound symbolism has been examined both cross-linguistically [7], [14], [15] and experimentally [16], [17], and while the results of these studies present conflicting evidence about the nature of synesthetic sound symbolism and the universality of sound-meaning mappings, there is robust support for the use of synesthetic sound symbolism to encode magnitude contrasts in a wide variety of languages. We focus here solely on this type of sound symbolism. Debate in this area of research has centered on the proposal that an association between acoustic frequency and certain meanings (e.g. “smallness”) predisposes certain classes of sounds to be used in the expression of these meanings. This association could be either innate or experience-based. Several different types of accoustic features have been associated with synesthetic symbolism, including the duration of sounds, formant frequency values, pitch contours, and loudness. Perhaps the most frequently discussed form of synesthetic sound symbolism is the use of pitch to convey certain linguistic and social meanings. Ohala [18] relates sound symbolic uses of fundamental (F0) frequency in human speech to a basic pattern in animal communication that associates high frequencies with submission and lower frequencies with dominance, suggesting that these communicative uses of frequency are innate to humans as well as many other species. Ohala relates this “frequency code” to the commonly observed correlation between words with connotations of smallness and high freqency sounds, and the correlation between connotations of largeness and low frequencies. Though the universality of acoustic frequency-based patterns of phonetic iconicity has been debated [7], [14], [19]–[21], many studies have noted an association between high acoustic frequencies and smallness meanings, which generally surfaces in the form of palatal (or palatalized) consonants and high, front vowels in words with such meanings [7], [14], [18]. For example, Ultan (p 531) quotes an example from the Native American isolate Karuk, where iθáriˑp ‘fir’ contrasts with itʃániˑpitʃ ‘little fir’, with the latter showing palatal affricates which are associated with small-size sound symbolism. Alternative explanations place the iconicity in the realm of articulation, as a direct relationship between the size of the space between the tongue body and the palate and the acoustic energy associated with such articulation [22], [23]. Most studies, however, characterize magnitude symbolism in terms of acoustic frequency either instead of, or in addition to, these articulatory parameters. Frontness or F2 is most commonly cited as being responsible for the overall perception of vowel pitch [15], [16], [20]. For some phoneme classes, articulatory and acoustic associations coincide. For example, high front vowels have higher inherent pitch, smaller closure, shorter inherent duration, and higher F2 frequency than low back vowels [24], [25]. The reasoning described here does not exclusively pick out palatal obstruents and front vowels as candidates for iconic markers of magnitude concepts, however. For example, back vowels could be argued to belong to the “small” category because their articulation involves backing the tongue body and compressing the area of the velo-pharyngeal region (see further [24], especially p 261ff). In fact, magnitude sound symbolism potentially suffers from the problem that Roberts and Winters [26] discuss with respect to correlations between linguistic features and sociological or cultural ones; namely, that there are often multiple (more or less plausible) post-hoc explanations for correlations that are difficult to test rigorously. We recognize this problem. Others [7], [14], [19]–[21] have grounded explanations for these tendencies in universal acoustic and articulatory properties of the speech signal. However, because there are so many potential ways in which a “frequency code” might map onto magnitude sound symbolic categories, motivating unique phoneme classes is impossible. Our concern here is therefore to test the sound symbolic correlations among Australian languages that have been repeatedly identified (as discussed above and in the following section) with languages from other parts of the world.

Evidence for Magnitude-related Sound Symbolism The basic pattern of magnitude-related sound symbolism was probed in the early twentieth century by Sapir [10] and Newman [16]. These studies investigated preferences in invented word names for small/large pairs of items and found that subjects preferred to associate higher-frequency vowels (e.g. [i]) with the smaller member of a contrastive pair and lower-frequency vowels (e.g. [ɑ]) with the larger item. These early experiments have since been questioned on methodological grounds, as the stimuli they used forced subjects to associate sounds with a contrast, and the experiment design may have made the expected associations clear to study participants [17], [27]. A more sophisticated experiment by Thompson and Estes [17] also used name-object matching tasks to test whether the preferred names for objects of graded sizes demonstrated graded phonetic symbolism. However, these more nuanced results reaffirm the relationship between frequency and size, and further suggest that magnitude sound symbolism may be gradient in nature, rather than dichotomous, as earlier studies suggested. Shinohara and Kawahara [28] conducted a similar experiment among speakers of Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean, requiring participants to guess the size of the referent of invented words. Their results demonstrate a clear difference in the backness of vowels associated with smallness versus largeness among speakers of all four languages, and positive but less straightforward link between smallness and vowel height, particularly in Chinese and Japanese. The question of universality of sound symbolic patterns has also stimulated a number of cross-linguistic studies of magnitude symbolism. Early in the twentieth century, Jespersen [19] collected a number of examples of size-related words whose phonetic forms follow the frequency-related pattern noted above and exemplified by Ewe and French. Subsequent studies expanded upon Jespersen's Indo-European-heavy sample and looked more systematically at cross-linguistic patterns of magnitude-related sound symbolism. Ultan's [7] survey of sound symbolism in 136 languages included not only size and distance categories, but also several semantic categories that could be considered physical or metaphorical extensions of a size parameter (e.g. duration, grammatical distance). Though the sample used by Ultan was skewed by the inclusion of a large number of Native American languages, he found that the overall incidence of size symbolism was low; it was found in only 38 of his 136 sample languages. Somewhat more robust evidence is presented for distance symbolism (found in 46 sample languages). Yet among the languages that do exhibit size symbolism, he found that vowel ablaut, or sound alternation associated with morphological function, was a common strategy for expressing diminutive meaning, with front vowels being the predominant phonological category associated with diminutive meaning. Consonant ablaut, in contrast, he describes as “a complex of universal types due to its extremely localized distribution,” though he notes that palatal/fronted consonants, manner/degree of closure, and glottalization are commonly associated with diminutive meanings ([7], page 554). This thus implies that although sound symbolism might affect only a small part of the lexicon, it is robustly attested. More recently, cross-linguistic studies of symbolism have focused on proximity/distance, rather than the broad array of magnitude symbolic meanings that Ultan surveyed. Woodworth [29] demonstrated support for the link between vowel F2 frequency and distance in a survey of demonstrative pronouns and locative adverbials. Half of the 26 languages in her sample exhibited higher F2 of vowels in proximal forms than distal forms, consistent with the frequency code hypothesis outlined by Ohala [18]. Traunmüller's [15] survey of deictic forms was couched in terms of pragmatic motivations for sound symbolism; nevertheless, the 37 proximal/distal demonstrative pronoun pairs he surveys show a striking consistency with the predictions of the frequency hypothesis and the scale of vowel magnitude symbolism developed by Newman [16]. A full 32 of the examples presented by Traunmüller are counted as supporting the symbolism hypothesis, and the percentages of proximal and distal forms that contain each vowel fit quite well along a cline [i, e, a, o, u] of vowel magnitude symbolism. Existing literature on size and distance sound symbolism points toward an association between high frequency sounds and small/proximal meanings, in opposition with lower frequency sounds associated with larger/more distant meanings [7], [10], [15], [18], [29]. Some, such as Ohala [18], believe this frequency association to be universal or even innate, yet others argue against the universalist view. Bauer [14], for example, draws on a comparison of augmentative and diminutive morphology in a sample of 50 languages to argue against the innate frequency hypothesis that scholars like Ohala [18] have proposed. Her small dataset shows roughly even occurrences of high vowels, front vowels, and palatal consonants in diminutive and augmentative morphemes. A handful of authors have pointed out direct counterexamples to proposed universals of magnitude symbolism [3], [21]. Diffloth's examples from the Mon-Khmer language Bahnar serve as an anecdotal counterexample to the possibility that vowel height is universally linked to size sound symbolism, but this does not bear on hypotheses that link magnitude meanings to the F2 (or backness) of vowels. A further apparent counterexample is Korean [3], where lower vowels are associated with small meanings. Compare, for example, the pair phuŋtʌŋ ‘splash (of a large object)’ and phoŋtaŋ ‘splash (of a small object)’ ([3], page 437). However, as Ohala [9] points out, it is unclear whether the Korean pattern is an example of magnitude sound symbolism, or simply a case of grammatically marked intensification. Independent of the question of universal motivation, the occurrence of sound symbolism in the world's languages has been claimed to be influenced by areality and borrowing. The languages in the Ultan [7] sample that exhibit sound symbolism, for example, are predominantly Native American languages, though they belong to a number of language families. Areality in North American sound symbolism, and in particular diminutive consonant patterns, was also noted by Nichols [30], who found specific types of diminutive consonant shifts distributed in geographic clusters in this region, suggesting spread through borrowing. Thus in summary, from the existing literature we find widespread evidence for sound symbolism in individual languages, but conflicting views as to its manifestations. None of the previous cross-linguistic studies of sound symbolism have utilized data from Australian languages to any extent. This study of sound symbolism in Australian languages provides further evidence for the relationship between frequency and magnitude, and bears on several of the unresolved questions in the arena of size sound symbolism. If the association between front vowels or palatal consonants and small meanings is universal, for example, we would expect to find these sounds in words with “small” meanings in Australian languages. The current study investigates phonological associations with magnitude generally, as well as two subtypes of magnitude symbolism, using the same sample of languages. To do so we test specific hypotheses regarding symbolic relationships between natural classes of sounds and magnitude-related meanings, which are based upon the literature discussed in this section. The ability to compare these subdomains of magnitude symbolism across a single language sample allows us to test whether the dominance of distance symbolism in Ultan's America-skewed sample holds for Australia or whether there are significant areal differences in these types of symbolism. Finally, we are able to quantify the evidence for symbolism on a language-by-language basis and by doing so look for trends in genealogically related languages as well as the sorts of areal patterns that Nichols [30] and Ultan [7] have identified in North America, and Jespersen [19] for Indo-European.

Predictions of existing magnitude sound symbolism literature The conclusions of experimental and cross-linguistic studies that have investigated size and distance sound symbolism make several predictions about the sound-meaning patterns we expect to find in Australian languages. The most frequently cited phonetic correlate of magnitude symbolism is the backness of vowels, or F2 in acoustic terms. Hinton et al.'s formulation of the “frequency code” explicitly associates this hypothesis with the claim that “vowels with high second formants … are associated with high frequency sounds” ([8], page 10). The F2 patterns reported by Shinohara and Kawahara, Fischer-Jorgensen, Thompson and Estes, and by Woodworth for distance meanings [17], [20], [28], [29] would also predict that front vowels are more likely to occur in forms for “smallness” and “proximity” meanings, while back vowels are more likely to occur in “largeness” and “distance” meanings. Several studies make less clear predictions about the correlation of magnitude meanings with either vowel “backness” (F2) or vowel height (F1). Ultan finds high front vowels to be associated with diminutive categories, and while he does not present a definitive conclusion regarding the roles of height and backness in that symbolic relationship, he entertains the idea that F2 may be the relevant acoustic parameter in this pattern ([7], page 545). Shinohara and Kawahara also report an association between vowel height and magnitude, though this pattern is not as strongly supported as their findings regarding backness [28]. Newman [16] presents a vowel scale that does not neatly correspond to height and backness, and several subsequent papers also represent the symbolic magnitude of a vowel in terms of a cline. Though Newman's cline does not exactly correspond to F2, front vowels tend to fall on the “small” side of th spectrum, with /i/ at the far end, while back vowels tend to fall on the “large” side of the spectrum, with /u/ at the other extreme. Thus, while these works predict the involvement of both height and backness in vowel magnitude symbolism, they all make relatively stronger cases for the involvement of backness. Predictions regarding consonants are murkier. Hinton et al.'s statement of the “frequency code” only claims that “high frequency consonants” and “low frequency consonants” in general will be associated with “small”/“proximal” and “large”/“distant” meanings respectively ([8], page 10). Interpretations of “high acoustic frequency” in the consonant domain vary quite substantially. Ultan's link between consonant fronting and diminutive meanings, if interpreted as evidence of a universal tendency, would predict that consonants with a forward place of articulation would be more likely to occur in “small”/“proximal” meanings than similar consonants with a farther back place of articulation. Experimental studies have tended to focus on voicing as the phonetic correlate of magnitude symbolism in consonants [17], [28]. However, voicing contrasts are not common in Australian languages, so testing this prediction is unlikely to yield meaningful results in this study area. Finally, Newman once again presents his findings in the form of a scale of “smallness”/“largeness” [16]. While consonants on the “large” end of Newman's spectrum are all voiced, voicing varies on the “small” end of the spectrum, with /p/, /n/, /d/, and /s/ at the extreme “small” end ([16], page 63). Newman's theory does not make predictions regarding natural classes. Expectations regarding the association of classes of consonants with magnitude meanings are little discussed in the literature.