Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London.
Cogn Sci. 2023 Apr;47(4):e13287. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13287.
A classic example of the arbitrary relation between the way a word sounds and its meaning is that microorganism is a very long word that refers to a very small entity, whereas whale is a very short word that refers to something very big. This example, originally presented in Hockett's list of language's design features, has been often cited over the years, not only by those discussing the arbitrary nature of language, but also by researchers of sound symbolism. While the two groups disagreed regarding the role of arbitrariness and sound symbolism in language, they both agreed there is a nonsound symbolic relation between word length and entity size in this case. This paper shows that the length of the words whale and microorganism in fact reflects a sound symbolic pattern. An analysis of >600 languages from >100 language families shows that languages use longer words to denote the concept small than they do to denote the concept big. The paper thus shows how explicit judgments might differ from implicit cognitive association and the problem of relying on these in sound symbolism research.
一个单词的发音与其所指意义之间任意关系的典型例子是，microorganism（微生物）是一个非常长的单词，却指代非常小的实体，而 whale（鲸鱼）是一个非常短的单词，却指代非常大的东西。这个例子最初出现在霍凯特的语言设计特征列表中，多年来被经常引用，不仅被讨论语言任意性的人引用，也被声音象征主义的研究人员引用。虽然这两组人在语言的任意性和声音象征主义的作用上存在分歧，但他们都同意在这种情况下，单词的长度和实体的大小之间存在非声音象征关系。本文表明，单词 whale 和 microorganism 的长度实际上反映了一种声音象征模式。对来自 100 多个语系的 >600 种语言的分析表明，语言用更长的单词来表示小的概念，而不是大的概念。因此，本文展示了明确的判断如何与隐含的认知关联存在差异，以及在声音象征主义研究中依赖这些关联的问题。
