Lecture: The Phonaestheme /bl-/

An Investigation of Sound Symbolism

The term phonaestheme refers to a sound or a combination of sounds that are commonly associated with specific meaning components or connotations shared by lexemes containing this combination of sounds (cf. Schmid 2016: 44). In the English language, the lexeme-initial phonaestheme /bl/ has been previously identified as having the meaning components ‘blow, blow up, swell’, ‘vocal sound’ and ‘color’ (cf. Marchand 1969: 407, Rhodes & Lawler 1981: 334).

This study investigated two further meaning components 1. ‘negative’ 2. ‘unintentional, disruptive’, compared /bl/ in English and German to test language-specificity of phonaesthemes, and analyzed /pl/ in both English and German to see whether /bl/ and /pl/ are variants of the same phonaestheme. The lexemes used for analysis were taken from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (230 000 lemmata) for English and the Duden – Deutsches Universalwörterbuch (250 000 lemmata).

The results showed that 77.1% of English lexemes with lexeme-initial /bl/ had one or more negative meanings associated with them, while 38.5% shared the meaning component ‘unintentional, disruptive’. By comparison, 63.8% of German lexemes had negative meaning and only 23,4 had the meaning component ‘unintentional, disruptive’. Analysis of lexeme-initial /pl/ showed that /bl/ and /pl/ are neither variants of the same phonaestheme in English nor in German.

Info

Day: 2020-05-21
Start time: 15:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: Chomsky
Track: Diverse
Language: en

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