Quantifying Phonosemantic Iconicity Distributionally in 6 Languages

AbstractLanguage is, as commonly theorized, largely arbitrary. Yet, systematic relationships between phonetics and semantics have been observed in many specific cases. To what degree could those systematic relationships manifest themselves in large scale, quantitative investigations–both in previously identified and unidentified phenomena? This work undertakes a distributional approach to quantifying phonosemantic iconicity at scale across 6 diverse languages (English, Spanish, Hindi, Finnish, Turkish, and Tamil). In each language, we analyze the alignment of morphemes’ phonetic and semantic similarity spaces with a suite of statistical measures, and discover an array of interpretable phonosemantic alignments not previously identified in the literature, along with crosslinguistic patterns. We also analyze 5 previously hypothesized phonosemantic alignments, finding support for some such alignments and mixed results for others.