phonaesthesia
English edit
Alternative forms edit
Etymology edit
Apparently coined by British linguist John Rupert Firth.
Noun edit
phonaesthesia (uncountable)
- (linguistics) Any correspondence between the sound of a word and its meaning; examples include onomatopoeia and the use of phonaesthemes.
- 1984, Laurence Picken, Musica Asiatica, volume 4, page 214:
- For this latter term, phonaesthesia is doubtless at work, since kring is also ‘the sound of a small bell’.
- 2010, Katie Wales, “Northern English in Writing”, in Raymond Hickey, editor, Varieties of English in Writing: The written word as linguistic evidence, page 74:
- In contrast, writers of bucolic dialogues, like George Meriton, for instance, and lively song-writers like Robert Anderson in Cumberland, seem drawn to expressive lexis, marked by sound patterns of reduplication, alliteration and phonaesthesia.
- 2011, Prue Goodwin, The Literate Classroom, page 41:
- Phonaesthesia refers to the vaguer phenomenon whereby families of words with shared phonemes sometimes evoke related meanings in a not-quite-echoic manner.
- 2011, Jean Boase-Beier, A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies, page 11:
- Those in (1.15) illustrate a weaker type of iconicity, generally known as phonaesthesia: the consonant cluster ‘fl’ seems to suggest quick movement, but it is not a direct representation of movement, or speed.