Phonaesthemes: A Corpus-Based Analysis

Abstract

The association between sound and meaning is commonly thought of as symbolic and arbitrary. While this appears to be mostly correct, there is some evidence that specific phonetic groupings can be indicative of word meaning. In this paper we present a corpus-based method that can be used to test whether such an association exists in a given corpus for a specified phonetic grouping. The results we obtain using this method are compared with other empirical findings in the field and its implications are discussed.