In spoken language, it is not clear that absolute iconicity could occur without relative iconicity. Nevertheless, in the literature, both of these forms of iconicity have been referred to as systematicity in sound–meaning mappings, to contrast with arbitrariness. Other phonoaesthemes may indeed represent absolute iconicity (such as sn- referring to the nose via onomatopoeic properties of its functions), and there is debate about which phonoaesthemes are indeed absolute or relative in their iconicity. An example of this is for certain phonoaesthemes, such as sl- referring to negative or repellent properties (e.g. In this case, the iconicity is not transparent, but is generally only observable once knowledge of the sound- and meaning-relationships is determined. Second, the sound–meaning mapping could be an instance of relative iconicity, where statistical regularities can be detected between similar sounds and similar meanings though these may not be restricted to imitative forms. woof woof) is one example of this absolute iconicity. For example, incorporating the sound that a dog makes into the sign for the sound itself (i.e. First, through absolute iconic representation where some feature of the language directly imitates the referent, as in onomatopoeia. Sound–meaning mappings may be non-arbitrary in two ways. So, is spoken language arbitrary or systematic? By contrast, throughout most of human intellectual history, the sound of a word was often assumed to directly express its meaning, a view recently revived in studies exploring sound symbolism. Since de Saussure's notion of the arbitrariness of the sign, such a property has been assumed to be a language-universal property and has even assumed a definitional characteristic: according to Hockett, for instance, a communication system will not count as a language unless it demonstrates such arbitrariness. Such a view has been the conventional perspective on vocabulary structure and language processing in the language sciences throughout much of the past century (see for review). One of the central ‘design features’ of human language is that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary given the sound of an unknown word, it is not possible to infer its meaning.
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