Phonaesthemes: non-arbitrariness in the mental lexicon?

Abstract

For the most part, the sounds of words in a language are arbitrary, given their meanings. But in fact, there are two ways in which words can be non-arbitrary. For one, there can be external reasons why a particular form would go with a given meaning, such as sound symbolism. Second, there are systematicities in languages, where words with similar forms are more likely than chance to have similar meanings. Such systematic form-meaning pairings, as observed in gleam, glow, and glimmer, are known as phonæsthemes. But are these systematicities psychologically real, or do they merely distributional relics of language change? Experimental work, including my own, suggests that these systematic form-meaning pairings are more than distributional facts about a lexicon—they also reflect organizational characteristics of the mental representation of words, their meanings, and their parts. My work also relates to a priming methodology used to test what it is that leads phonæsthemes to be mentally represented, measuring effects of frequency, cue validity, and sound symbolism.

Keywords

• arbitrariness
• frequency
• mental representation
• phonæstheme
• priming
• sound symbolism