In linguistics, sound symbolism, phonesthesia or phonosemantics is the idea that vocal sounds or phonemes carry meaning in and of themselves.

1 sound symbolism

In linguistics, sound symbolism, phonesthesia or phonosemantics is the idea that vocal sounds or phonemes carry meaning in and of themselves.

Types of sound symbolism

Margaret Magnus is the author of a comprehensive book designed to explain phonosemantics to the lay reader: Gods of the Word. This work describes three types of sound symbol using a model first proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt

Onomatopoeia

This is the least significant type of symbolism. It is simply imitative of sounds or suggests something that makes a sound. Some examples are crash, bang, whoosh.

Clustering

Words that share a sound sometimes have something in common. If we take, for example, words that have no prefix or suffix and group them according to meaning, some of them will fall into a number of categories. So we find that there is a group of words beginning with /b/ that are about barriers, bulges and bursting, and some other group of /b/ words that are about being banged, beaten, battered, bruised, blistered and bashed. This proportion is, according to Magnus, above the average for other letters.

Another hypothesis states that if a word begins with a particular phoneme, then there is likely to be a number of other words starting with that phoneme that refer to the same thing. An example given by Magnus is if the basic word for 'house' in a given language starts with a /h/, then by clustering, disproportionately many words containing /h/ can be expected to concern housing: hut, home, hovel, habitat...

Clustering is language dependent, although closely related languages will have similar clustering relationships.

Iconism

Iconism, according to Magnus, becomes apparent when comparing words which have the same sort of referent. One way is to look at a group of words that all refer to the same thing and that differ only in their sound, such as 'stamp', 'stomp', 'tamp', 'tromp', 'tramp', and 'step'. An /m/ before the /p/ in some words makes the action more forceful; compare 'stamp' with 'step' or 'tamp' with 'tap'. According to Magnus, the /r/ sets the word in motion, especially after a /t/ so a 'tamp' is in one place, but a 'tramp' goes for a walk. The /p/ in all those words would be what emphasizes the individual steps.

Magnus suggests that this kind of iconism is universal across languages.

Phenomimes and psychomimes [

Some languages possess a category of words midway between onomatopoeia and usual words. Whereas onomatopoeia refers to the use of words to imitate actual sounds, there are languages known for having a special class of words that "imitate" soundless states or events, called phenomimes (when they describe external phenomena) and psychomimes (when they describe psychological states). On a scale that orders all words according to the correlation between their meaning and their sound, with the sound-imitating words like meow and whack at one end, and with the conventional words like water and blue at the other end, the phenomimes and the psychomimes would be somewhere in the middle. In the case of the Japanese language, for example, such words are learned in early childhood and are considerably more effective than usual words in conveying feelings and states of mind or in describing states, motions, and transformations.^[2] They are not found, however, only in children's vocabulary, but widely used in daily conversation among adults and even in more formal writing. Like Japanese, the Korean language also has a relatively high proportion of phenomimes and psychomimes.

2 patterns of rhythm and rhyme in modern poetry

RHYTHM & RHYME

Rhyme is a pattern of words that contain similar sounds.

Example:
go/show/glow/know/though

Rhythm: The dictionary tells us it is "a movement with uniform recurrence of a beat or accent." In its crudest form rhythm has a beat with little or no meaning. Children use them in games and counting-out rhymes. In poetry, rhythm, broadly speaking, is a recognizable pulse, or "recurrence," which gives a distinct beat to a line and also gives it a shape.

Rhyme is not only a recurrence but a matching of sounds. The pleasure of pairing words to make a kind of musical echo is as old as mankind. The child of this generation may be millions of years away from prehistoric man, but the lullabies and dancing games of today are not much different from those of the cave-dweller. As in the old days, there is a real connection between poetry and magic, between poetry and memory. Children begin with rhyme and rhythm; even before they can talk, boys and girls echo nursery rhymes and the jingles of Mother Goose. They learn their numbers painlessly by repeating such rhymes as:

One, two,
Buckle my shoe.
Three, four,
Shut the door.

They know the days of the month by memorizing:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November....

They even pick up bits of history by remembering such simple rhymes as:

Columbus sailed the ocean blue
In fourteen-hundred-ninety-two

But it is not only children who find things easier when they are said in rhyme and rhythm. Farmers and housewives prefer verse to prose for their wise sayings; the music of a rhyme helps them to remember. It points up their proverbs and gives a quick turn to the meaning:

A sunshiny shower
Won't last an hour.

Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

The devices of poetry are always being used - and abused in daily life. Not only children and farmers but businessmen understand the value of verse and "apt alliteration's artful aid." Roadside signs, cards in buses, advertisements in newspapers, commercials on radio and television, prove that an idea fastens itself quickly in the mind when it is rhymed. Christmas cards, birthday wishes, condolences, and greetings are most effective when they are in verse. The fourteenth of February brings out the poet in everyone.

Even on the lowest plane, poetry is rarely "rhyme without reason." It sharpens the wit's cleverness and heightens the lover's dearest sentiments. Poetry ranges all the way from the childish " Roses are red, violets are blue" to Robert Burns's immortal song "My love is like a red, red rose." When we are deeply aroused, we express ourselves in some sort of poetry; our emotions spill over into a football cheer, a ballad, or a love lyric. A poem expresses our inner excitement, eases our pain, and glorifies our joy. Because of its strongly accented beat ana its ability to convey intense feeling, poetry is the most powerful form of speech.

Rhyme has been called a kind of musical punctuation. It is not only an aid to memory, as we have discovered in proverbs and nursery rhymes, but it is also a pleasure to the ear. Poetry should not only be read, it should be read aloud. To see it on the printed page is not enough; poetry should be heard as well as seen. "The Ballad of Father Gilligan" by William Butler Yeats and "Gunga Din" by Rudyard Kipling are both narrative. Totally different in theme, they have one thing in common: a simple but superb use of rhyme. The strong accent of the rhyming captivates the reader and lifts the story above its prose statement into poetry.

Rhyme is the matching of vowels and the coupling of vowel sounds. Like rhythm, it is a kind of recurrence - but rhyme has a recurrence of sound as well as beat. The following jingle has rhythm:

One, two,
Buckle my belt;
Three, four,
Snap the lock.

The rhythm of these lines becomes more musical - and much easier to remember -when rhyme is added. We then get the recurring vowel sound of:

One, two,
Buckle my shoe;
Three, four,
Shut the door.

. Low-flown vocabulary in modern literary and media discourse

2. COLLOQUIAL WORDS - literary colloquial - familiar colloquial - low colloquial

3. 3 subgroups a) change of their phonetic or morphological form; b) change of both their form and lexicostylistic meaning; c) words which resulted from the change of their lexical and/or lexico-stylistic meaning.

4. The 1st Subgroup: a) clipping (shortening): caff – caffeteria; b) contamination of a word combination: kinna – kind of; c) contamination of grammatical forms: I'd go, there's.

5. The 2nd Subgroup a) the change of the grammatical form which brings the change of the lexicostylistic meaning: a handful – a person causing a lot of trouble

6. b) The chqnge of word-building pattern - affixation: oldie, tenner; - compounding: backroom boy, clip-joint; - conversion: to bag, teach-in; - telescopy: flush, fruice; - shortening and affixation: Archie; -compounding and affixation: strap-hanger.

7. Slang general slang interjargon special slang social,professional WOW! WOW! OH! OH!!? TD TD AWOL AWOL

8. Examples of Internet Jargon BTW - By the way CYA - See you around FAQ - Frequently asked questions LOL - Laugh out loud TTYL - Talk to you later

9. Vulgarisms are the words which are not generally used in public. However, they can be found in modern literature nowadays

10. Dialectal words are used to intensify the emotive and expressive colouring of speech ‘ud – would, ‘im – him, ‘ud – would, ‘im – him, ‘aseen – have seen, ‘aseen – have seen, canna – cannot, canna – cannot, dinna – don’t dinna – don’t

11. Conversational words of all kinds are widely used for stylistic purposes: - everyday speech newspaper language poetry fiction

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