How widespread is Sound symbolism

[Jess Tauber]

Just a note: it may be possible that there is a developmental implicational
hierarchy behind the aug/dim observations. Using Trubetzkoyan/Jakobsonian
features as a jumping off point, it seems that "acute" phonemes are far more
commonly shifted, crosslinguistically, than the corresponding "graves". Even
in the most elaborated system I know of, that of the Chinookan languages, the
system isn't completely extended to all the graves. One might even be able to
suggest that the presence of shifting in graves implies shifts in acutes. It
would be interesting to look at the data from Boas' Dakota again to see
whether /s/ and /sh/ were more common than corresponding /x/ in shifted forms
statistically.

Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com