Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, twenty-four leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. They consider sound-symbolic processes in a wide range of languages from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America. Beginning with an evocative typology of sound-symbolic processes, they go on to examine not only the well-known areas of study, such as onomatopoeia and size-sound symbolism, but also less frequently discussed topics such as the sound-symbolic value of vocatives and of involuntary noises, and the marginal areas of "conventional sound symbolism", such as phonesthemes. The book concludes with a series of studies on the biological basis of sound symbolism, and draws comparisons with the communication systems of other species. This is a definitive work on the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. The wide-ranging new research presented here reveals that sound symbolism plays a far more significant role in language than scholarship has hitherto recognized.

List of contributors; 1. Introduction: Sound-symbolic processes Leanne Hinton, Johanna Nichols, John Ohala; Part I. Native American Languages North of Mexico: 2. Symbolism in Nez Perce Haruo Aoki; 3. Nootkan vocative vocalism and its implications William H. Jacobsen Jr; 4. Relative motivation in denotational and indexical sound symbolism of Wasco-Wishram Chinookan Michael Silverstein; Part II. Native Languages of Latin America: 5. Symbolism and change in the sound system of Huastec Terrence Kaufman; 6. Evidence for pervasive synesthetic sound symbolism in ethnozoological nomenclature Brent Berlin; 7. Noise words in Guaraní Margaret Langdon; Part III. Asia: 8. i: big a: small Gérard Diffloth; 9. Tone, intonation, and sound symbolism in Lahu: loading the syllable canon James A. Matisoff; 10. An experimental investigation into phonetic symbolism as it relates to Mandarin Chinese Randy J. Lapolla; 11. Palatalization in Japanese sound symbolism Shoko Hamano; Part IV. Australia and Africa: 12. Yir-Yiront ideophones Barry Alpher; 13. African ideophones G. Tucker Childs; Part V. Europe: 14. Regular sound development, phonosymbolic orchestration, disambiguation of homonyms Yakov Malkiel; 15. Modern Greek ts: beyond sound symbolism Brian D. Joseph; 16. On levels of analysis of sound symbolism in poetry, with an application to Russian poetry Tom M. S. Priestly; 17. Finnish and Gilyak sound symbolism - the interplay between system and history Robert Austerlitz; Part VI. English: 18. Phonosyntactics Joan A. Sereno; 19. Aural images Richard Rhodes; 20. Inanimate imitatives in English Robert L. Oswalt; Part VII. The Biological Bases of Sound Symbolism: 21. Some observations on the function of sound in clinical work Peter F. Ostwald; 22. The frequency code underlies the sound-symbolic use of voice pitch John J. Ohala; 23. Sound symbolism and its role in non-human vertebrate communication Eugene S. Morton; Index.