Accounting for the stochastic nature of sound symbolism using Maximum Entropy model
Shigeto Kawahara, Gakuji Kumagai, Hironori Katsuda
January 2019
 

Sound symbolism refers to stochastic and systematic associations between sounds and meanings. Sound symbolism has not received much serious attention in the generative phonology literature, perhaps because most if not all sound symbolic patterns are probabilistic. Building on the recent proposal to analyze sound symbolic patterns within a formal phonological framework (Alderete & Kochetov 2017), this paper shows that MaxEnt grammars allow us to model stochastic sound symbolic patterns in a very natural way. The analyses presented in the paper show that sound symbolic relationships can be modeled in the same way that we model phonological patterns. We suggest that there is nothing fundamental that prohibits formal phonologists from analyzing sound symbolic patterns, and that studying sound symbolism using a formal framework may open up a new, interesting research domain. The current study also reports two hitherto unnoticed cases of sound symbolism, thereby expanding the empirical scope of sound symbolic patterns in natural languages.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004071
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: to appear in Open Linguistics
keywords: sound symbolism, maxent, stochastic patterns, phonology
previous versions: v2 [October 2018]
v1 [June 2018]
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