Sound Symbolism in Insults in British English

Sound symbolism is problematic for three key reasons. It disrupts De Saussure’s semantic axiom that the relationship between the form and meaning of a word is arbitrary (De Saussure 1916). It conflicts with the notion that sounds are distinct and meaningful through contrast as opposed to inherent structures. Most problematic of all, it seems to exist. Since the early maluma/takete, kiki/bouba experiments (Kohler 1929 cited in Ćwiek et al. 2022), researchers have broadened their scope. Sound symbolism has been observed in many pronominal forms including first names (Sidhu et al 2019), brands (Abel & Glinhert 2008, Klink 2013, Klink & Wu 2015), and animals both real (Berlin 2006) and fictional (Shih et al 2018). These newer studies have found that participants attribute synesthetic and proprioceptive qualities to the entities represented by certain nominal forms depending on common segmental and suprasegmental features. Repeated research has made it clear that sound symbolism is available and identifiable to speakers of almost all languages. I intend to investigate sound symbolism in single-word insults in British English by mapping how different phonetics and suprasegmentals are common to insults, then using a prototype approach (Rosch 1975) to assess how these features are associated with perceptual harm amongst British English speakers. Insults and their seemingly unique neuro-linguistic typology also have been extensively studied from a cognitive, sociological and psychological standpoint (Van Lancker, Cummings 1999, Burns 2008, Lockwood & Dingemanse 2015) but not particularly from a linguistic one. Insults in discourse are treated more as pragmemes, specified by the social reactions they receive (Allan 2016). While this approach makes sense from a discourse perspective I propose investigating insults as lexemes to see if sound is one of the criteria that means a word can pass from the innocent into the offensive. The experiment starts by analysing frequent insults used in BrE for common and co-occurent features. These common features are then used to generate a list of “insults'' which, though completely invented, have similar phonetic characteristics to insults. These invented insults are then distributed to participants via a survey where they are ranked from most to least offensive. A positive result would contribute to the wider body of research around sound symbolism. It would also uncover the role linguistic iconicity plays in the life cycle of British insults and, given the cross-linguistic nature of iconicity (Ćwiek et al. 2022) how insults across many languages are acquired and evolve. This could have direct implications across multiple areas of the field including cognitive and psycholinguistics concerning taboo language as well as studies of language as it changes over time. This study could also form the groundwork for further cross-linguistic studies in sound symbolism and insults as a universal phenomenon.

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