In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Although the sound-meaning relationship is often arbitrary (Saussure 1916), cases exist in which some sounds correspond to certain meanings. Such association between sounds and meanings is known as sound symbolism, and there has been a longstanding interest in the existence and the nature of sound symbolism. This paper reports an experiment on size-related sound symbolism, which shows that certain sound symbolisms hold robustly across languages. In particular, we investigate how the images of size (small or large) are affected by three phonetic factors: the height of vowels, the backness of vowels, and voicing in obstruents. Our rating experiment of four languages—Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean—shows that these three factors contribute to the images of size, with only a few exceptions. To explain the results, we offer phonetic grounding of these size-related sound symbolic patterns. We further raise the possibility that these phonetically grounded sound symbolic patterns are ‘embodied’ in the sense of Johnson (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999).

Four new isoprenylated xanthones, cudraxanthones L, M, N, and O were isolated from the ethanol extract of the root bark of CUDRANIA TRICUSPIDATA (Carr.) Bur. (Moraceae), collected in China. The structures of cudraxanthones L, M, N, and O were shown to be 1-4, respectively, on the basis of chemical and spectral evidences.

Despite Saussure’s famous observation that sound-meaning relationships are in principle arbitrary, we now have a substantial body of evidence that sounds themselves can have meanings, patterns often referred to as “sound symbolism”. Previous studies have found that particular sounds can be associated with particular meanings, and also with particular static visual shapes. Less well studied is the association between sounds and dynamic movements. Using a free elicitation method, the current experiment shows that several sound symbolic associations between sounds and dynamic movements exist: (1) front vowels are more likely to be associated with small movements than with large movements; (2) front vowels are more likely to be associated with angular movements than with round movements; (3) obstruents are more likely to be associated with angular movements than with round movements; (4) voiced obstruents are more likely to be associated with large movements than with small movements. All of these results are compatible with the results of the previous studies of sound symbolism using static images or meanings. Overall, the current study supports the hypothesis that particular dynamic motions can be associated with particular sounds. Building on the current results, we discuss a possible practical application of these sound symbolic associations in sports instructions.

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This paper reports two case studies of sound symbolism using the naturalistic name corpora of characters from Disney and Pokémon. Building upon previous studies of sound symbolism, we tested two hypotheses: (1) voiced obstruents, which are generally associated with negative images, are favored in villainous characters’ names, while (2) bilabial consonants, which are symbolically associated with cuteness, are disfavored in such names. The results show that these tendencies hold in our corpora, suggesting that a concept that is as complex as “villain” can be signaled via sound symbolism. Theoretical implications for cognitive linguistics based on our results are discussed.