Are tones in the expressive lexicon iconic? Evidence from three Chinese languages.

ABSTRACT: Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative or iconic utterances by relying on vowels and consonants, leaving the suprasegmental information unexplored. To begin bridging this gap, this study looks at the interaction of lexical tone and iconicity by comparing sound symbolic (i.e., mimetic, expressive, ideophonic) strata and general (i.e., arbitrary, prosaic, non-iconic) strata from three Chinese languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese Southern Min, Hong Kong Cantonese) using corpus-based means. For all three languages the distribution of tones in the sound symbolic strata are skewed so that the majority of syllables are largely confined to two tonal categories per language, one of which is high level, while the general strata exhibit no such tonal

SUBMITTER: Thompson AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6279048 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature