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...

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, drawing on a wide range of linguistic data. The extensive new research presented here reveals that sound symbolism plays a far more significant role in language than scholarship has hitherto recognized.