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📄 Abstract
Abstract: Language is, as commonly theorized, largely arbitrary. Yet, systematic
relationships between phonetics and semantics have been observed in many
specific cases. To what degree could those systematic relationships manifest
themselves in large scale, quantitative investigations--both in previously
identified and unidentified phenomena? This work undertakes a distributional
approach to quantifying phonosemantic iconicity at scale across 6 diverse
languages (English, Spanish, Hindi, Finnish, Turkish, and Tamil). In each
language, we analyze the alignment of morphemes' phonetic and semantic
similarity spaces with a suite of statistical measures, and discover an array
of interpretable phonosemantic alignments not previously identified in the
literature, along with crosslinguistic patterns. We also analyze 5 previously
hypothesized phonosemantic alignments, finding support for some such alignments
and mixed results for others.
Authors (2)
George Flint
Kaustubh Kislay
Submitted
October 15, 2025
Key Contributions
This work presents a novel distributional approach to quantitatively measure phonosemantic iconicity across six diverse languages. It discovers new interpretable phonosemantic alignments and cross-linguistic patterns, contributing to a deeper understanding of the non-arbitrary aspects of language.
Business Value
Understanding the systematic relationships between sound and meaning can inform the design of more intuitive and effective natural language processing systems, potentially improving machine translation, speech recognition, and text generation.