Phonaesthesia
Alternative forms
Origin
Apparently coined by British linguist John Rupert Firth.
Full definition of phonaesthesia
Noun
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, 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.