Reuven Tsur, Tel Aviv University and Chen Gafni, Bar-Ilan University

This article proposes a structuralist-cognitive approach to phonetic symbolism that conceives of it as of a flexible process of feature abstraction, combination, and comparison.[1] It is opposed to an approach that treats phonetic symbolism as “fixed relationships” between sound and meaning. We conceive of speech sounds as of bundles of acoustic, articulatory and phonological features that may generate a wide range of, sometimes conflicting, perceptual qualities. Different relevant qualities of a given speech sound are selected by the meaning across lexical items and poetic contexts. Importantly, speech sounds can suggest only elementary percepts, not complex meanings or emotions. Associations of speech sounds with specific meanings are achieved by extraction of abstract features from the speech sounds. These features, in turn, can be combined and contrasted with abstract features extracted from other sensory and mental objects (e.g. images, emotions). The potential of speech sounds to generate multiple perceptual qualities is termed double-edgedness, and we assume that the cognitive mechanism allowing us to attend to various aspects of the same speech sound is Wittgenstein’s aspect-switching.

We discuss examples of phonetic symbolism in poetry, lexical items across languages, and laboratory experiments, and show how they can be accounted for in a unified way by our cognitive theory. Moreover, our theory can accommodate conflicting findings reported in the literature, e.g. regarding the emotional qualities associated with plosive and nasal consonants.  Crucially, the theory is scalable and can account for general trends in poetry and lexical semantics, as well as more local poetic effects. Thus, the proposed theory can generate predictions that are testable both in laboratory experiments and in formal literary analysis.

 

Introduction

Many current studies in phonetic symbolism begin with a list of recent works on phonetic iconicity, that allegedly challenge de Saussure’s arbitrariness conception of the linguistic sign, followed by a series of experiments that establish a statistical relationship between phonemes (or groups of phonemes) and meanings or emotional qualities. In these works iconicity is assumed to be somehow given; very few of them go systematically into the structural relationship between the phonemes and the meaning or emotional qualities. In this practice, we strongly disagree with them on three issues.

First, we argue that literary phonetic symbolism does not challenge the arbitrariness hypothesis, but rather confirms it: sound-symbolic effects are attributed to verbal constructs after the event. Second, we believe that research based on stimulus–response questionnaires is, in itself, unsatisfactory. A cognitive approach should include a hypothesis, based on cognitive and linguistic research, to account for the structures in our mind that mediate between stimulus and response. Third, many of those stimulus–response studies take it for granted that rigorous quantitative analysis is the only valid way to evaluate empirical data. Furthermore, many such studies are interested only in global, gross effects (e.g. whether the frequencies of certain phoneme groups alone can account for the perception of poems as ‘happy’ or ‘sad’). We have pointed out a welter of incongruent statistical results in phonetic symbolism (Tsur & Gafni, forthcoming). The confusion in this domain originates in the neglect of a systematic theoretical framework. This neglect may manifest, among other things, in failure to treat sound–meaning relationships at a sufficiently fine-grained level, insufficient awareness of the complexity of the subject matter, as well as confusion whether sound-symbolic effects are motivated by acoustic, articulatory or phonological aspects of speech sounds.

The aim of this article is to present a comprehensive theoretical and analytic approach to sound–emotion relationships in poetry. At the basis of our investigation are earlier works by Benjamin Hrushovski (“interaction view”; 1980) and Iván Fónagy (“Communication in Poetry”; 1961), followed by Tsur’s work in the nineteen-eighties. Both Hrushovski and Fónagy revealed, by different methods, important relationships between speech sounds and their perceived effects.

In a structuralist theoretical discussion of sound–meaning relationships in poetry, Hrushovski explored the complexity of the subject, pointing out sources of complexity, of which we shall discuss here only one: what we call the “double-edgedness” of sibilants: that in some contexts they may express noise of varying intensity, in some — a hushing quality. Alternatively, they may be “neutral”, not related to “meaning” or attitudes at all. Consider the following excerpts:

 

1. When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

       I summon up remembrance of things past,

       I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought

       And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste

       (Shakespeare, “Sonnet 30”)

 

2. And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

       Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

       So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,

       “‘Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door —

       Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; —

       This it is and nothing more.”

       (E.A. Poe, “The Raven”)

 

3. [ . . ] the deep sea swell

       [ .. .] A current under sea

       Picked his bones in whispers,

       (T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland,” IV)

 

4. And swell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

(T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”)

 

In Excerpt 1, the sibilants have a hushing quality; in Excerpt 2, they imitate the rustling of the curtains. In Excerpt 3 “there is a transition from the powerful noise of a sea swell to the sound of whispers”. In Excerpt 4, in the “patterning of sibilants hardly a trace of either sound or silence remains” (Hrushovski, 1980: 41). Hrushovski (following Kreuzer, 1955) takes it for granted that in Excerpt 1 the sibilants have a hushing effect. Intuitively this seems right. He also argues that this hushing quality focuses the sound pattern on the meaning of the words “sweet silent”. But he does not explain what it is in the sibilants that invests them with this hushing quality. We shall explore, on a more fine-grained level, how they can express such opposite qualities.

In his “Communication in Poetry”, Fónagy examined the relative frequency of phonemes in six especially tender poems and six especially aggressive poems by four poets in three languages (Hungarian, German and French). Most phonemes occur with the same frequency as in general; but the nasals and liquid [m, n, l] occur more frequently in the tender poems in all three languages, whereas the voiceless plosives [k, t] occur more frequently in the aggressive poems. [r] is aggressive in Hungarian and to some extent in German, but not in French. His method is used today frequently in research, but Fónagy’s use differs from the more recent uses in several respects. Most importantly, he did not assume some rigid iconic relationships between specific speech sounds and emotions where one may predict the emotional quality of the poem from the recurring speech sounds, as some present-day researchers do (e.g. Auracher, Albers, Zhai, Gareeva, & Stavniychuk, 2011). Rather, he probed into the possibility that there may be some significant correlation between pairs of opposite emotional qualities and pairs of opposite phonemes (or groups of phonemes). This was a ground-breaking idea at his time. He did not regard his findings as the “inmost, natural similarity association between sound and meaning” (Jakobson & Waugh, 2002: 182), but as possible examples for a principle.

Tsur, in his earlier works (e.g. Tsur, 1992), went one step further beyond Hrushovski’s and Fónagy’s works. For instance, Hrushovski defines expressive sound patternsas follows: “a certain tone or expressive quality abstracted from the sounds or sound combinations is perceived to represent a certain mood or tone abstracted from the domain of meaning”. Tsur asked the question, how can “a certain tone or expressive quality [be] abstracted from sounds or sound combinations”. In his answers, he relied on distinctive features, and on speech research done mainly at the Haskins Laboratories. The present article provides the answers to such questions as part of a comprehensive theory.

 

Cognitive Theory

Structural Model of Speech Sounds

In this article, we shall point out the complexity of phonetic symbolism at several levels, and propose a cognitive mechanism that may handle it. The basis for our theoretical account is a structural model of speech sounds: we assume that speech sounds are bundles of features, on the acoustic, articulatory and phonological levels, and that the various features may have different expressive potentials. Thus, we claim that the various phenomena related to phonetic symbolism result from the way speech sounds are coded and organized in our mental database. Here, we focus on the features of consonants.

Consonants can be abrupt: plosives (p, t, k, b, d, g) or affricates (as ts [in tsar), dž [in John or George], or pf [in German pfuj]); or, they may be continuous, as nasals (m, n), liquids (l, r), glides (w [as in wield], or y [as in yield]); or fricatives (f, v, s, š [as in shield]).[2] Continuous sounds may be periodic (nasals, liquids, glides) or aperiodic (fricatives). In periodic sounds, the same wave form is repeated indefinitely, while aperiodic sounds consist of streams of irregular sound stimuli. Consonants can be unvoiced or voiced. All nasals, liquids and glides are voiced by default. Voiced plosives, fricatives and affricates (e.g. b, v, ž, and dž) consist, acoustically, of their unvoiced counterpart plus a stream of periodic voicing. These are objective descriptions of the consonants; all language-users have strong intuitions about them, but frequently they cannot put their finger on precisely what is the object of their intuition.

The structural model described above organises consonants in our mental database in terms of acoustic features. We believe that it is the acoustic level that best accounts for the emotional and imitative aspects of sound-symbolic effects (see also: Aryani, Conrad, Schmidtke, & Jacobs, 2018; Knoeferle, Li, Maggioni, & Spence, 2017; Marks, 1975; Ohtake & Haryu, 2013; Ultan, 1978). Accordingly, we will use this organisation to account for evidence in the study of phonetic symbolism. Note that the proposed model relies on categorical acoustics features (e.g. abrupt/continuous). However, some studies explain phonetic symbolism in terms of continuous acoustic features, such as pitch and intensity (Aryani et al., 2018; Knoeferle et al., 2017). Here we assume a categorical acoustic theory of phonetic symbolism, but keep in mind that a continuous theory of phonetic symbolism can be perfectly consistent with ours.

We should note that there are additional theories of phonetic symbolism (see review in Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2015). Like the above-mentioned acoustic theories, articulatory theories of phonetic symbolism assume that there is an iconic relation between sound and meaning. However, while acoustic theories assume a direct mapping of acoustic features, articulatory theories assume that iconicity stems from articulatory sensations, such as the size of the oral cavity (A. Fischer, 1999). Finally, phonological-distributional theories attribute phonetic symbolism to systematicity. According to such theories, phonological regularities in the lexicon cue non-arbitrary mappings between sound and meaning, e.g. different distributions of consonants in nouns and verbs (Monaghan, Christiansen, & Chater, 2007). Importantly, symbolic relations resulting from statistical regularities in the lexicon are language-specific (and, in a sense, arbitrary), although some of them can be grounded in perception or articulation. According to our conception, phonetic symbolism is triggered by acoustic features, articulatory features, and phonological regularities, in descending order of importance.

 

The Expressive Potential of Speech Sounds: Double-Edgedness and Aspect-Switching

The structure of speech sounds determines their expressive potentials. Just a few hints: Periodic consonants are more like music, aperiodic consonants more like inarticulate noise; this difference affects their expressive potentials, smooth or rough to some extent or other. This can explain why some studies found that “tender emotions” or their hyponyms are best expressed by periodic consonants. In gestaltist terms, plosives have sharply-defined boundaries, and are perceived as less penetrable and “harder” than continuants. At the same time, they consist of energy transmitted outward as a shockwave, and so forth. Thus, they have various perceptual potentials: in changing contexts, listeners may switch between passive hardness and active shockwaves. Voiced stops are ambiguous: they consist of an abrupt plosive plus voicing, that is periodic. In the perceived quality of voiced plosives, the voicing stream may add resonance to the plosive element, or a more massive presence. Thus, in empirical tests, participants may give at least two systematically different responses to plosives in general, and additional two systematically different responses to voiced plosives.

One of the main questions in the study of phonetic symbolism is how the same speech sounds give rise to fundamentally different effects. We attribute this flexible affective potential of speech sounds to what we call double-edgedness[3]: speech sounds have multiple features, each having its own expressive potential. In any given context, the expressive potential of one feature can be emphasized at the expense of the potentials associated with the other features. The cognitive mechanism to handle changing sound effects and relationships, we claim, is Wittgenstein’s (1976) aspect-switching.[4] According to Wittgenstein, aspect-switching is the capability of understanding the request “pronounce the word ‘till’ and mean it as a verb or a preposition, or the word ‘March’ and mean it as a month name or an imperative verb” (1976: 214e). In the present context, aspect-switching is the capability of attending to different features of the same phones. Here we will demonstrate the notions of double-edgedness and aspect-switching in relation to two classes of speech sounds: voiced plosives and voiceless fricatives ([f] and the sibilants ([s] and [š]).[5]

We have argued that voiced plosives are ambiguous: they consist of an abrupt plosion plus voicing, that is continuous and periodic; consequently, they are double-edged. In the perceived quality of voiced plosives, the voicing stream may add resonance to the plosive element or a more massive presence. In physical terms, we define ‘resonant’ as ‘tending to reinforce or prolong sounds, especially by synchronous vibration; full-bodied, vibrant’; in phonetic terms, as ‘where intense precategorical auditory information lingers in short-term memory’. In the ‘tender’ context, the voiced stops [d] and [g] seem to have a fuller, richer, more resonant, more rounded body. The ‘tender’ context seems to increase the share of the periodic ‘voiced’ feature in them. By contrast, in the ‘angry’ context, they are perceived as more compact and abrupt unitary speech sound.

Hrushovski points out that sibilants may both induce a hushing psychological atmosphere, or may imitate noises of varying intensity. How can sibilants express hushing or noise? We claim that the double-edgedness of sibilants is related to different aspects of the same noises. Sibilants are continuous but not periodic, a stream of irregular noises. We propose to point out three different perceptual potentials in this structure: it is perceived as fluid, as fricative (rough) or as unpredictable (and as such, threatening). The tender or hushing quality of [s, š] may have to do with their fluidity aspect. The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary defines ‘fluid’ as “having particles that easily move and change their relative position without a separation of the mass; capable of flowing; subject to change or movement; characterized by a smooth easy style”. This physical description of liquid substances (e.g. hot pitch) draws attention to two apparently contradicting aspects: their smoothly-moving overall mass and their particles that are easily moving and relatively changing their position. This is a convenient metaphor for the contradictory effects of the voiceless sibilants (and of [f]). Language users switch between these two aspects, according to the context. When a mother hushes her baby by sounding a prolonged [š], they both attend to the smoothly-moving mass of the fluid ššššš.

The “noisy” quality of voiceless sibilants and [f] is likely related to their fricative (or aperiodic) aspect. “Fricative” denotes a type of consonant made by the friction of breath in a narrow opening, producing a turbulent air flow. In “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain”, listeners attend to the randomly changing particles of the fricatives, imitating noise. Thus, different meanings may foreground a smooth or a turbulent aspect of fricatives.

 

Encodedness of Speech Sounds and Modes of Speech Perception

So far, we seemed to have taken for granted that speech sounds have expressive potential and that listeners are able to switch between different potentials. Yet, we have not explained how these expressive potentials are perceived and how they are related to the primary use of speech sounds – conveying lexical meaning. In short, we claim that the two functions of speech sounds are related to different modes of auditory perception. Liberman and his colleagues (e.g. Liberman & Mattingly, 1985) distinguish between the speech mode and the non-speech mode. In the auditory, or non-speech mode, we hear, as in the sonar, the sound shape as shown by the machine. In the phonetic, or speech mode, listeners hear speech sounds categorically, i.e. as unitary phonemes. In this mode, speech sounds are typically encoded: the precategorical acoustic information that transmits the speech sounds is restructured into an abstract phonetic category and excluded from consciousness. Tsur (1992) assumes that there is a third, poetic mode of speech perception. In the “poetic” mode, some of the precategorical sound information reaches awareness from behind the unitary linguistic category. We claim that attending to this precategorical auditory information is what enables listeners to attribute emotional effects to speech sounds independently of semantic effects. Moreover, we claim that whether precategorical auditory information can reach awareness depends on the degree of encodedness of speech sounds.

Consonants are encoded to varying degrees, that is to say, in some consonants one may consciously perceive only a hard and fast category, not the precategorical auditory information that transmitted it. Voiceless plosives are “thoroughly encoded”, that is, no precategorical acoustic information reaches awareness (hence compact, tight, and solid in perception). Voiced plosives are also highly encoded. For example, if you ask “which one is acoustically higher, [ba], [da], or [ga]”, most people will answer that they don’t know what you are talking about.

However, in some consonants, some of the precategorical auditory information does reach awareness. If you ask which one is higher [s] or [š] most people will easily answer that [s] is higher. This is because some of the precategorical sound information does reach awareness from behind the unitary speech category. In other words, voiceless sibilants are less encoded than plosives. In sibilant continuants, more of the rich precategorical information is available than in most of the consonants, and is more apt to draw attention than in nasals or glides, for instance. This may explain how very different perceptual qualities can be associated with voiceless sibilants.

The foregoing discussion on encodedness can benefit from an interesting analogy from personality psychology. Psychologists of perception-and-personality put forward a series of personality dichotomies, such as levelers and sharpeners, or rigid and flexible: one pole tends to be more rigid, the other more flexible. Persons at the rigid pole tend to be intolerant of meaningless sense perceptions, as the following paragraph by Richard Ohmann may indicate:

The leveler is more anxious to categorize sensations and less willing to give up a category once he has established it. Red is red, and there’s an end on’t. He levels (suppresses) differences and emphasizes similarities in the interest of perceptual stability. For him the unique, unclassifiable sensation is particularly offensive, while the sharpener at least tolerates such anomalies, and may actually seek out ambiguity and variability of classification. (Ohmann, 1970: 231)

Briefly, categories afford greater perceptual stability; readiness to abandon oneself to unique, unclassifiable sensations suggests greater emotional receptiveness. Tender attitudes are characterized by openness to rich sensory information; rigid attitudes tend to cling to abstract categories. Going back to the double-edgedness of sibilants: as opposed to the rigid linguistic category, the stream of rich precategorical auditory information available in [š] has a flexible, soothing effect, and babies seem to be sensitive to it.[6] Thus, the tender or hushing quality of [s, š] may have to do with their fluidity aspect, treated as unique, unclassifiable sensations in the stream of rich precategorical auditory information. The “noisy” quality of these sibilants springs from the aperiodic nature of the very same sensory information, a stream of irregular noises; we are switching from one aspect to another of the auditory stream.

 

Phonetic Symbolism in the Lexicon and in Poetry

In this section, we will demonstrate how our cognitive model can account for cases of phonetic symbolism found in the lexicons of various languages and in literary pieces.

 

Phonetic Symbolism in the Lexicon

The claim Tsur has elaborated in his 1992 book (Tsur, 1992)[7] is that in different contexts, different potentials of the various features of the same sounds may be realized. Thus, for instance, the sibilants [s] and [š] may have at some level of description features with noisy potentials, as well as features with hushing potentials. Evidence for these opposite potentials can be found cross-linguistically in lexical items related to both silence and noise. In such lexical items, the meaning picks out the appropriate meaning potential from a number of meaning potentials of its speech sounds. For example, in English, ‘silence’, ‘hush’, ‘still’, but also ‘rustle’, ‘shout’ and ‘scream’ contain sibilants; the German words for silence are Stille and Schweigen; in Hebrew, two words for silence contain sibilants, šɛkɛt, has; in Japanese, Shizukesa means something like ‘calmness’, ‘tranquillity’ or ‘stillness’; in Chinese, sùjìng means ‘silence, solemnly silent, peaceful’, while shāshā and shēng mean ‘rustle’. In Hungarian, the word for silence is csend, beginning with the affricate [tš], csitt! means ‘whisht!’, kuss! means ‘shut up!’, ‘zaj’, ‘nesz’ mean noise, the verbs suhog, susog, zörg mean ‘rustle’, and pisszen in negative sentences suggests ‘slightest noise’ (‘does not make even the slightest noise’).

 

Literary Phonetic Symbolism

As we said in the introduction, many scholars take phonetic symbolism as counter evidence for the arbitrariness of the relation between sound and meaning. Our approach to the question of arbitrariness can be exemplified by the first line of Excerpt 2, repeated here.

 

2. And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

       Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

       So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,

       “‘Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door —

       Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; —

       This it is and nothing more.”

       (E.A. Poe, “The Raven”)

 

The word “rustling” involves onomatopoeia proper. In the string “silken, sad, uncertain”, the alliterating speech sounds are arbitrary; only after the event they become non-arbitrary icons of the noise. It is only the unforeseeable combinations of symbolic language that afford the generation of this sound effect. It does not challenge de Saussure’s “arbitrariness” conception, but rather, supports it. Yet, even in literary phonetic symbolism, it is not the case that “anything goes”. In the next paragraph, we will apply the proposed cognitive theory to account for what may seem like arbitrary use of phonetic symbolism in poetry.

The double-edgedness of voiced plosives can explain one of Fónagy’s most intriguing findings regarding the relative frequency of /g/ and /d/ in Victor Hugo’s and Paul Verlaine’s poems. /g/ occurs over one and a half times more frequently in Verlaine’s tender poems than in his angry ones (1.63:1.07), whereas we find almost the reverse proportion in Hugo’s poems: 0.96% in his tender poems, and 1.35% in his angry ones. As to /d/, again, the same sound has opposite emotional tendencies for the two poets, but with reverse effects. For Verlaine it has a basically aggressive quality (7.93:10.11), whereas for Hugo it has a basically tender quality (7.09:5.76) – again, in almost the same reverse proportion.

There are two ways to account for this discrepancy between Hugo’s and Verlaine’s handling of the emotional quality of [d] and [g]. One possibility is that it is sheer arbitrary, idiosyncratic attribution of emotional qualities to the phonemes that has nothing to do with systematic phonetic symbolism: that anything goes, provided that it is statistically significant. Another possibility is that Hugo and Verlaine make use of the afore-said universal ambiguous structure of voiced plosives combined with aspect-switching. In Wittgenstein’s terminology, we may rephrase the request “pronounce the phoneme /d/” as “pronounce the phoneme /d/, and attend to the massive presence bestowed on it by voicing, or to the resonance of voicing”. In all instances the pronunciation is the same; there is a mental shift.[8] If you attend to the massive-presence aspect of /g/ or /d/, they may have a strong aggressive potential; if you attend to their resonant aspect, they may contribute to a tender quality. Obviously, Hugo and Verlaine applied the same cognitive mechanism to these voiced stops, but with a reverse focus. This finding supports our claim that sound symbolism relies on sometimes conflicting latent qualities, and the poet has freedom which one to realize. Obviously, the voiced plosives [d] and [g] have two conflicting potentials each, and the two poets realized them in opposing ways. Thus, the poets’ preferences are idiosyncratic, but rely on an objectively describable ambiguity.

 

Phonetic Symbolism in the Laboratory

In this section, we describe results of laboratory experiments related to the issue of phonetic symbolism. We discuss studies demonstrating the cognitive mechanisms assumed to underlie phonetic symbolism, as well as studies directly related to phonetic symbolism. The results of these experiments will be discussed in relation to the cognitive model proposed in this article

 

Experimental Evidence for the Cognitive Model Underlying Phonetic Symbolism

There is rich experimental evidence for aspect-switching in speech perception, namely that speakers are capable of switching between hearing a speech sound as a unitary phoneme or a phoneme plus precategorical information.[9] Repp (1981) found that subjects could be trained to perceive some of the precategorical sensory information behind a s–š continuum. In this study, subjects listened to pairs of SV stimuli, where S was a synthesised fricative along the s–š continuum (7 artificial categories with different spectral properties), and V was a vowel ([a] or [u]) isolated from natural speech. The task was to decide whether the fricatives in a pair were identical or different, disregarding the vocalic context. It was found that most participants performed poorly at this task and their responses relied mostly on whether the vocalic contexts were similar or different across the stimuli in the pair. Such performance pattern was referred to as categorical perception, and it was attributed to the lack of ability to segregate the fricative noise from the vocalic context. However, after some training that included listening to the isolated fricatives, most participants improved significantly in the discrimination task in a vocalic context; that is, they were able to focus on the acoustic properties of the fricative noise. This pattern of performance was referred to as noncategorical perception. Thus, there is evidence that listeners are able to switch between modes (or aspects) of speech perception.

There is also compelling experimental evidence that listeners have subliminal access to precategorical auditory information in identifying voiced (but not voiceless) plosives. In a series of meticulously controlled experiments, Louis C. W. Pols (1986) presented subjects with spoken Dutch sentences or with vowel-plosive-vowel segments isolated from the spoken sentences. The recorded stimuli were modified in several ways, including deletion of the plosive burst and deletion of the transition between the plosive and one or both of the surrounding vowels (deletion means replacing the modified section with a silent interval of the same duration). The task was to identify the plosive out of several candidates. It was found that in natural sentences (as opposed to isolated VCV segments) the burst is less important than the vocalic formant transitions for the identification of voiced plosives (but not of voiceless plosives) (p. 149–150).[10] Thus, the perception of the formant structure is not merely possible, but necessary for the identification of plosives.

We further investigated the idea that people have access to pre-categorical features of speech sounds in a pre-aesthetic experiment (Gafni & Tsur, forthcoming). We asked participants to read out loud pairs of consonant-vowel sequences (e.g. ma–ba) and compare the consonants on various bipolar perceptual scales (e.g. whether m sounds smoother and b sounds jerkier, or vice versa). Our experiment was designed specifically to test the hypothesis that voiced plosives are double-edged by contrasting them with voiceless plosives, on the one hand, and with nasals, on the other hand. Our hypothesis was largely supported. On the smoothness scale, we obtained a three-way contrast that was statistically significant: nasals were perceived smoother than voiced plosives that, in turn, were perceived as smoother than voiceless plosives. On other scales, we obtained only partial contrasts (possibly due to lack of statistical power): nasals were perceived as having fuzzier boundaries than voiced plosives that, in turn, were perceived as having fuzzier boundaries than voiceless plosives. However, the latter contrast was only ‘near significant’. In addition, we received two one-sided contrasts: first, voiced plosives were perceived as harder than nasals, but voiceless plosives were not perceived as harder than voiced plosives. Second, voiced plosives were perceived as thicker than voiceless plosives, but nasals were not perceived as thicker than voiced plosives. Whether these imperfect results reflect the true state-of-affairs or not, they clearly demonstrate that voiced plosives are perceptually ambiguous: in certain contexts, they contrast with nasals and, in others, with voiceless plosives.

Our experiment also yielded a puzzling finding. Voiced plosives were perceived as having more resonance than voiceless plosives, though the result was only near significant. This was well expected. However, contrary to expectation, voiced plosives were also perceived as having more resonance than nasals (the result fell short of statistical significance after correction for multiple comparisons).[11] A simple explanation for this unexpected result is that the task was not clear to the participants. As a matter of fact, two participants commented that they had trouble evaluating resonance, and, in general, it became clear to us that many people don’t know what resonance means. However, there is also a possibility that the results are genuine, namely that voicing couples with plosion and endows voiced plosives with a resonating quality, which can be perceived, at least in controlled experiments, out of context. This hypothesis is supported by experimental evidence that voiced plosives are perceived as larger than voiceless plosives cross-linguistically (Shinohara & Kawahara, 2016).

To conclude, there is experimental evidence supporting the cognitive mechanisms we claim to underlie phonetic symbolism, including both double-edgedness and aspect-switching. To be sure, these experiments do not prove that these mechanisms are directly involved in phonetic symbolism. However, they do demonstrate that participants have access to information underlying phonemic categories. We argue that having access to such precategorical information is the basis of phonetic symbolism.

 

Experimental Evidence for Sound Symbolism

One of the most discussed examples of phonetic symbolism is that of sound-shape symbolism. Back in the nineteen twenties, Köhler (1929) took two nonsense words, takete and baluma, and asked people to match them with two nonsense figures, one with angular edges and one with rounded edges (see Figure 1). An overwhelming majority of respondents matched takete with the angular shape, baluma with the rounded shape.[12] Since Köhler’s study, there were many replications of this effect, including a study by Ramachandran & Hubbard (2001), which used the nonsense words bouba and kiki. So, this effect came to be called the ‘bouba/kiki’ effect.

Recent studies have used more systematic manipulations in attempt to account for the ‘bouba/kiki’ effect. For example, participants in a study by Knoeferle et al. (2017) heard non-word sequences of consonant + vowel (e.g. /ba/, /ni/) and were asked to rate each sequence on a scale. One end of the scale indicated greater association with an angular shape and the other end indicated greater association with a rounded shape. It was found that when the stimulus contained a glide (w, y) or a liquid (l, r), participants tended to associate the stimulus with a rounded shape. This tendency was reduced for stimuli containing a voiceless fricative (f, s) or a nasal (m, n), followed by stimuli containing a voiced fricative (v, z) or a voiced plosive (b, d), followed by stimuli containing a voiceless plosive (p, t). The results are summarised in Figure 2.[13]

We can use the structural theory of speech sounds to account for these results. The left end of this figure is marked by [+abrupt], that is, [–continuous,–periodic]. This acoustic characteristic of voiceless plosives is analogous to the contour of angular shapes, which involves abrupt changes of direction. By contrast, the right end of Figure 2 is marked by [+continuous, +periodic]. This acoustic characteristic of glides and liquids is analogous to the smooth, gradually changing contour of rounded shapes. Thus, we can account for the tendency to associate voiceless plosives with an angular shape and glides and liquids with a rounded shape.

Let us now turn from the edges of the scale in Figure 2 towards the middle, ignoring fricatives for a moment. Nasals, like glides and liquids are continuous, periodic and voiced by default. Accordingly, they are associated more with a rounded shape than with an angular shape. It is not entirely clear why nasals would be rated lower on the scale than glides and liquids. One possibility is that another feature is at play here. For example, in articulatory terms, liquids are [+continuant], while nasals are [-continuant], since air flows continuously through the oral cavity in liquids but not in nasals. Thus, nasals might be considered more abrupt than glides and liquids, presumably since the nasal cavity is narrower and more disruptive for airflow than the oral cavity.

Moving further left on the scale, we see that voiced plosives are associated more with an angular shape than with a rounded shape. Like with voiceless plosives this can be attributed to their abrupt nature. But voiced plosives are ambiguous: they consist of an abrupt plosion and voicing, which is continuous and periodic. Thus, they are relatively abrupt, but not quite as voiceless plosives, and this difference is reflected in their rating on the shape scale.

We have replicated the results reported by Knoeferle et al.in an experiment that was designed specifically to test the contrast between voiceless plosives, voiced plosives, and nasals (Gafni & Tsur, forthcoming).[14] In addition to establishing the effects of abruptness and voicing, we also found an effect of place-of-articulation. Labels containing labial consonants (b, p) were judged as more appropriate names for the rounded shape, compared to labels containing alveolar (d, t) or velar consonants (g, k). The results are illustrated in Figure 3. The source of this effect could be either acoustic or articulatory (Knoeferle et al., 2017). An articulatory account builds on analogy between lip rounding and a rounded shape. An acoustic account might be based on spectral differences among different places of articulation. A support for this view can be found in previous studies, e.g. “In /k, g/ spectral energy is concentrated, whereas in /t, d/, and /p, b/ is spread, with an emphasis on lower frequencies in /p, b/ and on higher frequencies in /t, d/… [velar stops] display a stronger concentration of explosion [than labials and dentals]” (Jakobson & Waugh, 2002).

It is interesting to note that the basic demonstration of the bouba/kiki effect (Hung, Styles, & Hsieh, 2017; Ozturk, Krehm, & Vouloumanos, 2013; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001) contrasts a voiceless velar plosive (k) with a voiced bilabial plosive (b). The on-going discussion over the effect of place-of-articulation can explain why /b/ was preferred over other voiced plosives in these demonstrations (but note that this choice inadvertently introduces a confounding factor to the experiment). In addition, the effect of place-of-articulation might help explaining the difference between liquids and nasals found by Knoeferle et al. (if it was, indeed, significant). Both experiments included bilabial (m) and alveolar (n) nasal consonants that were analysed as one group. In our experiment, m was rated higher (i.e. closer to the rounded shape) than n (mean ratings: 4.07 and 3.93, respectively, on a scale of 1-5), and l was rated slightly higher than m (mean rating: 4.09). Although the differences were not significant, it is possible that lip rounding (or its acoustic correlates) should be included in the structural model of phonetic symbolism.

At this point, let us reintroduce fricatives to our discussion. As can be seen in Figure 2, voiceless fricatives tended to be associated with a rounded shape more than with an angular shape. One possible explanation for this finding is that shape judgments are somehow affected by relative encodedness. As mentioned earlier, glides, liquids, nasals, but also voiceless sibilants are unencoded relative to plosives. In other words, rich precategorical auditory information is more accessible in the voiceless fricatives, liquids, nasals and glides than in plosives. Perception of this information seems to blur the sharp outlines of the categories, rendering these phonemes more appropriate to designate rounded than angular shapes (that is also one reason why they are perceived as ‘softer’).

However, if shape judgments depend on encodedness, one might ask, why voiced fricatives do not group with their voiceless counterparts. In the voiced fricatives, there are two parallel continuous streams, one periodic (voicing), and one aperiodic (friction); one might cautiously speculate that the two kinds of parallel streams blur each other and their perceived shape is less pronounced. This would suggest that the perceived roundness of speech sounds might be correlated with the relatively clear perception of the precategorical auditory information lingering in short-term memory.

 

Resonance, Co-Articulation, and Precategorical Perception

As we have said, resonating phones promote the perception of precategorical auditory information. Yet, there is evidence that the effect of resonance is modulated by context. For example, it was found that vowels in consonantal context are perceived more linguistically than isolated vowels (Rakerd, 1984); that is, precategorical sensory information can be better perceived in isolated vowels than in consonantal context. In other words, co-articulation seems to prevent access to precategorical auditory information. Some symbolist poets exploited this property of isolated speech sounds, to amplify the resonance of their poems. The French symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, wrote in his sonnet “Voyelles”:

 

5. A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles

       (A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue, vowels)

 

The Hungarian symbolist poet, Dezső Kosztolányi, wrote in a poem on his wife’s name, “Ilona”:

 

6. Csupa l,       It’s all l

       csupa i,            all i,    

       csupa o,           all o,

       csupa a.           all a.

 

Thus, the examples above demonstrate that access to precategorical information, both in vowels and voiceless sibilants (and, probably, in liquids and nasals too), depends on isolating the vowels from the consonants, generating a resonating effect. Such a strategy would not work, however, with voiced plosives, because they cannot be pronounced without any vocalic context; in fact, formant transitions — that give information about plosives — give, by the same token, information about the adjacent vowels (speech researchers call this “dual transmission”). Nevertheless, the results of our experiment (Gafni & Tsur, forthcoming), demonstrated that, in minimal contexts (consonant-vowel sequences), voiced plosives can be perceived at least as resonant as nasals (though these results should be regarded with caution). We then thought to test whether voiced plosives are perceived differently in a reverberating or non-reverberating context, using an implicit task that does not require participants to have an explicit concept of resonance (see descriptions of such tasks in the next section). Consider Tennyson’s line and John Crowe Ransom’s rewriting of it:

7. And murmuring of innumerable bees
8. And murdering of innumerable beeves

There is general consensus that in the sound structure of Excerpt 7 the repeated nasals and liquids are perceived differently from Excerpt 8. In 8 “the euphony is destroyed […] we lose the echoic effect” (Abrams & Harpham, 2009). This is not only because in 7 there is one nasal more than in 8, but also because in 7 the meaning foregrounds the resonant quality of voicing, so that the nasals and the liquids have a fuller, richer, more resonant body. There is an intuition that even [b] is perceived as more resonant in Excerpt 7 than in Excerpt 8. To put it bluntly, in Excerpt 8 it sounds hard and compact as plosives are supposed to sound; in Excerpt 7 it drifts slightly toward the more resonant quality of [m]. This intuition is supported by our experiment. However, testing it explicitly is more difficult because the effect of the phonological context (reverberating/non-reverberating) is confounded with the meaning of the line. Thus, if [b] is perceived as less resonant in 8, it could be due to the change of phonological context or the change of meaning.

 

Phonetic Symbolism, Innateness, and the Brain

The Bouba/kiki effect (see earlier) has been demonstrated cross-culturally, even with Himba participants of Northern Namibia who had little exposure to Western cultural and environmental influences, and who do not use a written language (Bremner et al., 2013). Thus, the tendency to associate certain shapes with certain speech sounds is a cross-cultural phenomenon. Moreover, the effect has been demonstrated not only in forced-choice matching tasks, but also with implicit interference tasks. In a study by Westbury (2005), participants performed a lexical decision task on words and nonwords presented within curvy and spiky frames. Within each lexical category (word and nonword), some stimuli contained only stop consonants (e.g. toad and kide), some stimuli contained only continuous (e.g. moon and lole), and some stimuli that contained both stops and continuous sounds (e.g. flag and nuck). It was found that responses were faster for congruent shape-string pairs (continuous sounds in curvy shapes, plosives in spiky shapes) than for incongruent pairs.[15] Using a masking technique, Hung, Styles, & Hsieh (2017) showed that the mapping for the bouba/kiki effect occurs prior to conscious awareness of the visual stimuli. Under continuous flash suppression, congruent stimuli (e.g. “kiki” inside a spiky shape) broke through to conscious awareness faster than incongruent stimuli. This was true even for participants who were trained to pair unfamiliar letters with auditory word forms. These results show that the effect was driven by the phonology, not the visual features, of the letters.

In another study, Ozturk, Krehm, & Vouloumanos (2013) presented 4-month-old infants with pairs of shapes and auditory stimuli. They found that the infants looked longer at the screen during trials with incongruent pairs (i.e. ‘bubu’ with an angular shape or ‘kiki’ with a curvy shape) than during trials with congruent pairs (i.e. ‘bubu’ with a curvy shape or ‘kiki’ with an angular shape). This finding, together with cross-cultural evidence, suggests that at least some aspect of sound-shape symbolism is pre-linguistic, perhaps even innate. But which aspect exactly? We claim that what is innate is not the symbolic relation per se, but rather the propensity to extract, abstract and compare abstract features from sensory stimuli. In what follows, we discuss other manifestations of this principle.

Roman Jakobson (1968) has shown that children’s acquisition of the phonological system of their mother tongue, the universal structure of phonological systems, as well as aphasic breakdowns are governed by the same principles based on abstracting and contrasting distinctive features. Assuming that we have similar capabilities with semantic and visual features, this would suggest that, whatever the brain processes involved, there is a universally available cognitive mechanism of abstracting, comparing and contrasting features that may be responsible for generating an indefinite number of unforeseeable sound-symbolic combinations.

One of the most striking pieces of evidence for our innate ability to contrast and combine abstract features in different domains can be seen in Synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is intersense perception, in which a person experiences sensations in one modality when a second modality is stimulated (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). For example, a person may experience a specific colour whenever seeing a specific numeral (Galton, 1880). This trait seems to run in families, suggesting that it has a genetic and, thus, innate basis (Ward & Simner, 2005). In addition, neuroimaging studies have confirmed that synaesthesia is genuine, namely that the sensory experiences reported by synaesthetes are accompanied by activation in the related sensory cortical areas. Moreover, there is evidence that synaesthesia is related to an increase in structural connectivity among cortical areas involved in the synaesthetic experience (Rouw & Scholte, 2007).

Mature consciousness is based on the dissociation of the senses, but certain cognitive tasks, e.g. the bouba/kiki experiment still rely on synaesthetic mechanisms. Thus, although many adults do not experience synaesthesia on a regular basis, the cognitive mechanisms underlying synaesthesia seem to be present universally. Moreover, many languages have metaphors derived from the field of two senses, as in soft colour and warm sound— these are fossilized synaesthetic metaphors. The existence of such metaphors depend on, and attest to, the ability of individuals to extract and combine abstract features from different sensory and conceptual domains.

The use of such synaesthetic metaphors can be further extended in literary works via literary synaesthesia. Literary synaesthesia combines terms derived from different senses in unpredictable phrases, as in Keats’s “And taste the music of this vision pale”, where terms derived from three different senses are combined to suggest some elusive, nameless experience. Phonetic symbolism in poetry is a special case of literary synaesthesia, where the imitative sound patterns are generated by unpredictable combinations of words. In Tennyson’s “And murmuring of innumerable bees” sound imitation is generated by repeating the speech sounds of murmur in innumerable— a word that has nothing to do with sounds.

Thus, it seems that writers have access to cognitive mechanisms, similar or identical to those involved in synaesthesia. Note, however, that despite the common surface similarity between “real-life” synaesthesia and literary synaesthesia, there is an important difference between the two phenomena. “Real-life” synaesthesia is automatic and involuntary, and involves stable and fixed cross-modal associations. By contrast, literary synaesthesia is a conscious, productive process that can give rise to an indefinite number of associations.

 

Objections to the Foregoing Conception

Auracher et al. (2011) criticized our conception that sound-symbolic effects are generated by an interaction between phonetic and semantic features as follows:

One plausible solution to cope with the contradictions between single studies is to follow Tsur’s (2006) and Miall’s (2001) hypothesis. Both authors conceive “speech sounds as of bundles of acoustic and articulatory features each of which may have certain (sometimes conflicting) combinational potentials, which may be activated, after the event, by certain meaning components” (Tsur, 2006, p. 905). However, this would not explain the high significance of the results within most studies. Why, as an example, would randomly chosen poems from different language families apply the same sound structure, expressing the same emotions, if the sound–meaning relation is content-dependent? (p. 22)

Part of our answer to this objection runs as follows: first, this question has a false presupposition, namely that poems that apply the same sound structure express the same emotions. It is false even with reference to the state of the art in our Western tradition. Auracher et al. found that sadness (and negative emotions in general) are best expressed by nasals, joy (and positive emotions in general) by plosives, whereas Fónagy (1961) found that tender emotions (that can be positive or negative) are typically associated with nasals, aggression (which is a negative emotion) with plosives.

Second, the “content-dependent” argument seems to us particularly invalid. Auracher et al. seem to assume that sounds express emotions irrespective of meaning (indeed, they hope to predict the emotion of a poem from the sound patterns). Furthermore, they seem to take Tsur’s (2006) claim as suggesting that sound-meaning relations in phonetic symbolism are arbitrary. Accordingly, they claim that if one takes the position that “sound–meaning relation is content-dependent”, one should not expect sound effects to be translated from one language to another or from one culture to another. In their view, the fact that different studies on phonetic symbolism obtain significant results supports a notion of pre-defined sound-meaning relations. However, this is a misinterpreation of Tsur’s claim.

We don’t expect that “all aspects of [the word’s] meaning be deduced from its sounds”. We assume, rather, that phonetic symbolism can generate, at best, some vague psychological atmosphere, which the referent can individuate into a specific emotion by feature transfer from the meaning. This is part of our linguistic creativity. The results of such creativity may, indeed, fossilize into convention, e.g. a lexical entry; but in the bouba/kiki experiment, for instance, no convention is involved, both the words and their referents are unfamiliar, but participants do it spontaneously, and agree cross-culturally.

For example, let us consider the Japanese word ‘kirakira’. This word contains two elements that have iconic meaning crosslinguistically, reduplication and the vowel [i]. Crosslinguistic lexical surveys and laboratory experiments have demonstrated that reduplication can be associated with concepts such as ‘repetition’, ‘distribution’, and ‘intensification’ (O. Fischer, 2011; Imai & Kita, 2014)[16], and the vowel [i] can be associated with concepts such as ‘smallness’, ‘brightness’, and ‘sharpness’ (Blasi, Wichmann, Hammarström, Stadler, & Christiansen, 2016; Lowrey & Shrum, 2007; Newman, 1933). Indeed, ‘kirakira’, which means “glittering”, “shows sensory sound-symbolism in that reduplication in the word is associated with a continuous meaning and the vowel [i] is associated with brightness” (Lockwood & Dingemanse, 2015: 3). We propose that the above-mentioned meanings, associated with the reduplication pattern and with the vowel [i], are all present in the sound pattern of ‘kirakira’, and that the semantics picks out two of them (i.e. ‘repetition’ and ‘brigthness’) and eliminates the others (e.g. ‘smallness’, ‘sharpness’). Lockwood and Dingemanse suggest that “the vowel [i] is associated with brightness, but it also has conventionalized aspects in that not all aspects of its meaning can be deduced from its sounds”. We propose to handle the issue slightly differently. “Glittering” does not merely tilt the meaning in favour of brightness and repeated events (e.g. shimmering); it individuates the referent within the semantic field of light.

The stem “kiru”, in contrast to “kirakira”, means “to cut”. Here the meaning of /i/ is tilted toward sharpness and individuated as a specific, non-repeated action. Briefly, in phonetic symbolism, the sound structure of a nonsense word may pick out the appropriate unfamiliar referent in a forced choice; in a familiar lexical word, the meaning may pick out the appropriate meaning potential from a number of meaning potentials of its speech sounds. In a cross-cultural perspective, too, “the sound–meaning relation is content-dependent”. In Japanese, the principle works exactly as in English. Only in Japanese and Vietnamese there are formalized linguistic categories based on reduplication, whereas reduplications like “murmur” in English, or “rišruš” (rustling) in Hebrew, or “froufrou” in French, “ityeg-fityeg” (dangle repeatedly) in Hungarian are sporadic.

“The sound–meaning relation is content-dependent”, then, because the meaning components available in the semantic dimension of the text activate a subset of potentials derived from the universally available phonetic and acoustic features of the sound dimension. Characteristically, Auracher et al. rely on circumstantial evidence in the Stimulus–Response mode, “different cultures”, rather than cognitive evidence: whether semantic and phonetic information processing is similar or different in various cultures. This argument of Auracher et al.’s seems perfectly logical when treated on a wholesale, statistical level. But breaks down when treated at a more fine-grained, structural level.

A referee for this article made the following comment on our argument: “I don’t see how this claim [that the relation between sound and meaning is arbitrary] is consistent with the authors’ finding that ‘The structure of speech sounds determines their expressive potentials.’” However, we don’t agree with this objection. The following observation by the same person is a clear support for our argument.

Neologisms and relatively recent creations like English “splat,” which have no etymologies of the usual kind, are of very minor interest in the study of literature, but they pose severe problems for the claim that meaning has nothing to do with linguistic sound. According to Fidler (2014: 229), this is expected, since OpEs (onomatopoetic expressions) provide “the simplest way to express effectively maximum information with minimal effort and the simplest way for the hearer to process the information intuitively and with minimum effort.”

How do we produce and understand neologisms? How does “the simplest way to express effectively maximum information with minimal effort and the simplest way for the hearer to process the information intuitively and with minimum effort” work? We argue that speech sounds are part of a phonological system, and are bundles of phonological, acoustic and articulatory features. According to Jakobson (1968), the child’s language has two stages: first a babbling period, in which the child experiments with the articulation and the acoustic qualities of the speech sounds, which are emotionally charged; then the arbitrary referential use of the same speech sounds, governed by the will. Mastering the arbitrary referential use is perceptually governed, by maximum contrast. The first syllable children in all languages master for referential use is Pa, which consists in maximum opening and maximum closure of the lips; from this they derive “papa”. The reduplication indicates here that this time the articulation of speech sounds is no mere pleasurable experimentation with speech sounds, but used for arbitrary reference.

Then they master the contrast between labial and dental consonants, obtaining “tata”. Then they master the contrast between oral and nasal consonants, obtaining “mama” and “nana”, and so forth. The process is not iconic, but perceptual and articulatory; meaning is attached in an arbitrary manner. There is no iconic relationship between “papa” and the male parent, or “mama” and the female parent, the terms and references are derived from the system. But then, perhaps, children have an intuition that mothers are contrasted to fathers in being softer, assigning nasals to mothers and plosives to fathers rather than vice versa.

We argue that in adult language, speech sounds, as part of the phonological system, serve for arbitrary reference. The acoustic and articulatory features have a wide range of incongruent, dormant expressive potentials. When a label consisting of a sequence of speech sounds is arbitrarily attached to a meaning, it may (or may not) activate, after the event, some of the dormant expressive potentials. In the word “splat” and “splash” meaning activates certain expressive potentials of the speech sounds; in “split” or “plush” it does not. All language users have access to those dormant acoustic and articulatory features, so that they may activate them creatively and differentially. Sibilants have both hushing and noisy features; that is why they may abound, universally, both in words meaning noises of varying amplitude, or silence. That is why “Onomatopoetic expressions provide ‘the simplest way to express effectively maximum information with minimal effort and the simplest way for the hearer to process the information intuitively and with minimum effort.’” The alleged protolanguage is said to have been entirely onomatopoetic; symbolic language is typically arbitrary. Computer simulations show that iconicity is favoured in small systems, but arbitrariness has greater advantages as the system expands (Gasser, 2004). There is experimental evidence that iconicity facilitates for children the acquisition of a small, elementary vocabulary, but it obstructs the acquisition of a large and versatile vocabulary (Imai & Kita, 2014). Onomatopoetic words have two characteristics. First, their referents are sounds, so that the speech sounds may directly imitate them; second, in onomatopoetic words the fluid creative process described above has fossilized into a dictionary entry.

 

Future Research

Some of our experimental results were indecisive, owing to insufficient number of participants, or participants’ difficulty to understand such tasks as resonance judgment. We intend to repeat some of our experiments with a greater number of participants, and using interference tasks, where participants need not understand such elusive notions.

We assume that sound-symbolic and metaphoric productivity are driven by a homogeneous set of principles. Both are based on unpredictable feature interaction — one of phonetic and semantic features, the other of conflicting semantic features. We intend to explore this similarity.

Another future research plan aims to improve experimental methodology for literary studies, by exploiting new technologies. In recent years there has been an increase of literary studies employing experimental methods from social sciences, such as stimulus—response questionnaires. Such studies typically ask participants to evaluate entities on various pre-defined scales (e.g., rate how sad a poem is). Pre-defined evaluation scales are useful for answering specific research questions. However, such scales might be less suitable for evaluating the effects of aesthetic objects, since they can capture only a limited portion of the subjective experience and thus may predetermine the evaluated scales, missing important aspects of the aesthetic effect. Fortunately, recent advances in methods of natural language processing allow for sophisticated automatic analysis of texts. Such methods can be incorporated in experimental studies using, open-ended questions to evaluate aesthetic objects. Thus, instead of asking participants to rate poems according to pre-defined evaluative terms, the researcher can ask participants to provide their impression of the poem. Subsequently, using automatic text analysis methods, one can obtain a detailed, unbiased profile of the subjective experience. We plan to investigate the utility of such methods for analyzing responses to poetic text.

 

To Conclude

In this article, we reviewed three types of evidence for phonetic symbolism. First, certain types of phones tend to correlate with certain meanings cross-linguistically (e.g. the frequent occurrence of sibilants in word related to silence and to noise). Second, laboratory experiments demonstrate that participants tend to form consistent associations between speech sounds and concepts from various domains (e.g. made-up names assigned to rounded shapes tend to contain nasal and liquid consonants, while names assigned to angular shapes tend to contain voiceless plosives). Third, various literary devices (e.g. sound repetition) use sound patterns, detached from semantics, to induce a general psychological atmosphere in poems.

We claim that the various cases of phonetic symbolism can be accounted for in a unified manner via a structuralist-cognitive theory. Central to this theory is the innate, general-purpose human capacity to extract abstract features from sensory objects (e.g. sounds, shapes). This capacity, together with our ability to combine and compare abstract features, allows us to attribute meaning potentials to speech sounds based on structural similarities to various objects. Importantly, the cognitive model does not determine sound-meaning associations, but rather constrain them. A given phone can have multiple, sometimes conflicting, meaning potentials, such that different aspects of the same phone are highlighted across lexical items and semantic contexts.

We referred to the multiple meaning potentials of speech sounds as double-edgedness, and proposed that people can shift their attention from one potential meaning to another via the cognitive mechanism of aspect-switching. We described some empirical results supporting the ideas of double-edgedness and aspect-switching. Moreover, we claim that these mechanisms can account for conflicting, or seemingly arbitrary, findings in the literature, such as the conflicting associations of nasals and plosives reported by Fónagy (1961) and Auracher et al. (2011).

The double-edgedness of voiced plosives was of special interest to us. Previous studies, as well as our own experiments, demonstrate that voiced plosives can behave like their voiceless counterparts in certain contexts, while in other contexts they behave more like sonorous consonants.[17] Our structural analysis and experiments suggested that voiced plosives are double-edged. Some of these experimental results, however, may be due to participants’ misunderstanding of the task. More reliable is the fact that voiced plosives yielded significant results in experiments in which they were opposed to continuous phonemes, but also in experiments in which they were opposed to voiceless plosives. Likewise, a structural analysis showed, how [d] and [g] in poems by Verlaine and Hugo could be used to opposite effects. All this suggests that double-edgedness and aspect-switching may have psychological reality. However, more research is needed to investigate the cognitive mechanisms of double-edgedness and aspect-switching.

 

Appendix A: Double-Edgedness of the “Rolled” [r]

Across languages, rolled [r][18] is frequently associated with noise. Many linguists believe that in some time in the past r was rolled in English, French, and Hebrew.[19] English, French and some German dialects have lost their rolled [r] but, as the following examples witness, their lexicons still retain them as onomatopoeia (usually in combination with voiceless fricatives) for noise: In English, “rustling” and “whisper” contain /s/ and /r/. In French, bruit, froufrou, crissement, and susurrermean “noise”, “rustle”, “screech”, “to rustle, whisper”, respectively. In German, knistern and raschelnd mean “rustle, rustling”. In Hebrew, raʕaš and rišruš (in phonetic transcription) mean “noise” and “rustle”, respectively. sarasara in Japanese means “murmuring, rustling” (in both cases, reduplication indicates sound symbolism). Iván Fónagy writes to this effect:

Selon une tradition qui remonte à l’antiquité, le r est associé […] au combat. […] La distribution de fréquence des phonèmes dans les poèmes appartenant à deux populations sémantiques différentes, dans les poèmes belliqueux d’une part, dans les poèmes idylliques d’autre part, reflète en effet une forte tendance à associer les r à la violence […]. Le r français déjà «affaibli» à l’époque de Victor Hugo, n’est plus associé à la violence […]. Cette dureté de r apical semble qualitativement différente de la dureté des occlusives sourdes […]. Les R «sont les vrayes lettres Héroïques», écrit Ronsard dans la préface de la Franciade (1587, Œuvres complètes, Paris, 1914, VII, p. 93). (Fónagy, 1983: 96)

According to a tradition that goes back to antiquity, the r is associated […] with combat. […] The distribution of the frequency of phonemes in the poems belong to two semantic populations the bellicose poems on the one hand, and the idyllic poems on the other, reflects, as a matter of fact, a strong tendency to associate the rs with violence […] French r, already “weakened” by Victor Hugo’s time, is no longer associated with violence […]. This hardness of the apical r seems to be qualitatively different from the hardness of voiceless stops […] The Rs “are the true Heroic letters” wrote Ronsard in the preface to la Franciade (1587, Œuvres complètes, Paris, 1914, VII, p. 93). (Fónagy, 1983: 96)

Thus, [r] serves as onomatopoeia for noise as in roar, rustle. Yet, in the same languages, [r] may have a soothing effect as in Lili Marleen. Our cognitive theory of phonetic symbolism can account for this affective duality of [r]. The rolled [r] is periodic and multiply interrupted, thus, it is double-edged. Its abrupt nature makes it suitable for denoting noisy and hard qualities, but, in other contexts, its periodicity can induce a tender effect.

 

Appendix B: Articulatory Aspect-Switching

In this article, we discussed the mechanism of aspect-switching in the perception of voiced plosives. There is another theoretical possibility, namely that the pronunciation itself changes with context, emphasising either the plosion or the voicing. Alternatively, one may speculate that perhaps different acoustic cues for phonological voicing are at work here. There are several acoustic cues for a voiced stop, usually used in conjunction:

“In distinguishing between voiced and voiceless plosives, the exact moment at which periodicity begins is among the cues used by the listener. [… and] the distinction between post-vocalic voiced and voiceless sounds is carried very largely by the relative duration of the vocalic and the consonantal parts of the syllable; in /bi:t/ (beat) the vocalic part is relatively short and the interruption caused by the consonant is long, while in /bi:d/ (bead) the reverse is the case” (Fry, 1970: 36).

Assuming that both kinds of cues work in conjunction, speakers might, involuntarily, emphasize one or the other cue, voice onset time or vowel length. As a rule, there is trade-off between competing acoustic cues for phonemes.[20]

With that said, note that although it is possible that the switch between alternative qualities of voiced stops is done by modifying their pronunciation, there is no evidence that the poets intended their poems to be read with such an overt articulatory aspect-switching, and there is no empirical evidence that readers actually do read the poems this way.

 

Works Cited

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Notes

[1]This article is derived from our book in progress on “Sound–Emotion Interaction in Poetry”, based on a group of chapters on phonetic symbolism.

[2]The term ‘continuous’ refers to airflow in general. This should not be confused with the phonological feature [Continuant], which refers only to airflow in the oral cavity. Nasal consonants are continuous but not continuant.

[3] We have borrowed the term “double-edgedness” from Ernst Kris, who speaks of the “double-edgedness” of the comic: a comedy about a cuckold may be very funny; but a husband in the audience, who suspects his wife is unfaithful, may find it offensive rather than funny. In poetry, double-edgedness is generated by changing contexts.

[4]The following anecdote can illustrate our ability to switch between alternative perceptions of the same speech sound (in this case, liquid). When Tsur was on a sabbatical in Yale, he was robbed at gunpoint on the parking lot of the foreign scholars’ lodgings. When his wife told their Japanese neighbour the story, he was shocked and exclaimed: “Vat, viz a livorvel?!” Later, Tsur told this story to Professor Yehoshua Blau, president of the Academy of Hebrew Language, and added: If he can say consistently the wrong phoneme, it means that he doesdistinguish between them. He answered “It is, rather, your ear that made the distinction. He probably pronounced each time the same speech sound, somewhere between [l] and [r]. When you expected a [r], it sounded too much like a [l]; when you expected a [l] it sounded too much like a [r]”.

[5]In Appendix A, we will also discuss double-edgedness of the trilled (“rolled”) [r].

[6]In the Rorschach test, for instance, responses based on colours and shadings (as opposed to shape responses) indicate emotional responsiveness.

[7]First published in 1987.

[8]There is another theoretical possibility, namely that the pronunciation itself changes with context. We elaborate more on this possibility in Appendix B.

[9]Although experimental studies have yet to demonstrate aspect-switching in plosives, evidence from other phoneme classes suggests that plosives are likely to show aspect-switching, as well.

[10]Formants are concentrations of overtones that uniquely identify vowels. Formant transitions are the rapid change in frequency of a formant for a vowel immediately before or after a consonant, and give information about the vowel and the consonant simultaneously.

[11]A priori, nasals are expected to be judged as more resonant than their oral counterparts since, in the nasals, the nasal cavity vibrates, in addition to the sound articulated by the oral stop.

[12]In the second edition of his book, Köhler (1947) changed baluma, for by now obvious reasons, to maluma.

[13]To be precise, all the effects of phonemic contrasts reported by Knoeferle et al.were calculated with glides as a baseline group. Thus, we only know for certain that liquids were NOT significantly different from glides while all the other classes WERE significantly different from glides. The distribution depicted in Figure 2 reflects our own interpretation of the results.

[14]We did not test glides and fricatives in our experiment. In addition, in our experiment the non-word labels were presented in a written form rather than in a spoken form. Also, the labels we used were disyllabic rather than monosyllabic, and each label contained two identical consonants but two different vowels (e.g. mamu, pupa).

[15]Note that stimuli in this study mixed voiceless and voiced plosives, affectively treating them as one group. As we have mentioned in several places, there is evidence that voiced plosives, and specifically /b/, are ambiguous. They can be grouped with voiceless plosives in certain contexts, and with sonorants, in other contexts. The Westbury study seems to force voiced plosives to be grouped with voiceless plosives.

[16]But also with completely opposite concepts such as diminutive and attenuative meanings.

[17]Note that Westbury (2005) puts voiced plosives in one bin with voiceless plosives, contrasting them to continuants, whereas Hung et al. (2017) and Ozturk et al. (2013) contrast the voiced plosive [b] with the voiceless plosive [k]. Köhler too puts [b] in one bin with [l] and [m] in “baluma”, contrasting them with the voiceless plosives in “takete”

[18]An alveolar trill, in more technical terms.

[19]It is unknown when exactly the quality of [r] had changed in these languages. Therefore, the ongoing discussion is somewhat speculative. For that reason, we decided to bring the analysis in an appendix.

[20]“While a listener typically perceives only a single change—viz., one of phonetic category—the physical changes that led to this unitary percept can only be described in form of a list with multiple entries. […] If one cue in such an ensemble is changed to favor category B, another cue can be modified to favor category A, so that the phonetic percept remains unchanged.” (Repp, 1983: 342)

 

Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, University of Oregon

Abstract. Hunting demands extensive knowledge of animal behavior, characteristics, and habitat, raising the question of how foragers acquire this knowledge. One potential source is etiological animal tales (EAT), which are pervasive in forager oral tradition and explain the origin of a species’ distinctive physical and/or behavioral traits. If these stories serve as a repository for traditional zoological knowledge, we would expect them to contain information about traits that are useful for identifying, predicting availability of, locating, killing, processing, and/or avoiding dangerous encounters with the animal. These predictions were tested in an earlier study that used story collections from 64 diverse hunter-gatherer societies (Scalise Sugiyama 2017). For each collection, one EAT was chosen at random for content analysis; all 64 stories evinced the predicted information, showing a strong cross-cultural trend. Here I present the results of a follow-up study that examines whether this pattern holds across all EAT within a given culture. For this analysis, ten cultures were selected from the original sample (two from each of five world geographic regions). All EAT from each culture were analyzed for the presence of information about the animal’s availability, behavior, diet, habitat, interspecies relationships, physical traits, sign, techniques used to hunt/process the animal, and hazards associated with the animal. Results suggest that EAT are an important vector of zoological knowledge transmission across forager groups.

This video lecture was prepared for the Literary Universals Workshop at the University of Connecticut, which took place on 24 May 2019. It is housed off-site and is available through the following link: Etiological Animal Tales as a Typological Universal.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

Recently, I read a number of Seventeenth-Century Chinese stories as well as some classical Roman works that reminded me of one another and that led me to recall some South Asian and Native American stories that I had read earlier. They were all versions of the cross-culturally recurring romantic story, but they were not prototypical. The interesting thing was that their deviations from the prototype were closely related to one another, clustering into a sub-genre. As I reflected more on this sub-genre, I realized that the pattern extended quite widely. The present essay is an attempt to define that sub-genre, to sketch some of its constituent varieties, and to suggest some possible explanations for both. More precisely, I refer to the sub-genre as “intensified romance.” It is intensified in the sense that it makes the lovers’ union appear to be not only socially problematic, but in principle impossible. That impossibility may be either ontological or moral, yielding two types of the sub-genre.

As some readers of this essay were concerned about how I might explain the cross-cultural recurrence of love stories more broadly, I should note that the present essay is not aiming to explain the genre in general. I have discussed that topic in The Mind and Its Stories, Affective Narratology, and elsewhere (for a summary of the account, see “Story”). The present essay explores one specific variant of the romantic story and seeks to give a preliminary account of that variant alone.

A Note on Simulation

Simulation is a cognitive process by which we imagine trajectories of actions or events (for an introduction to simulation and its relation to literature, see Hogan How; see also Oatley, “Meetings”). That process may be a matter of interpolating causal links between real events that we experience, projecting future outcomes of current conditions, envisioning counterfactual alternatives to what has occurred, or creating purely hypothetical scenarios. A key evolutionary function of simulation is to allow us to consider alternative courses of action “offline,” thus without the consequences of real activity. For example, if I simulate a dangerous course of action—say, swimming at a beach closed due to shark sightings—I incur no risk and may decide to avoid real swimming on the basis of the simulation (including its frightful image of the malevolent leviathan crushing my thighbones like toothpicks between its teeth). If I could learn only from actual experience, I might end up eaten by a shark the first time I am faced with such a situation.

For simulation to fulfill its evolutionary function, we must be able to make adjustments to our simulations at various levels. For example, suppose an office worker wants a raise in her salary. She has to be able to consider the various, broad strategies for pursuing this—applying for other jobs, arguing for particular salary evaluation procedures, engaging in a class action suit, approaching her supervisor to discuss an individual increment, and so on. In each case, she must be able to imagine more specific strategies as well—what would be the best evaluation procedures or just what points she should make to the supervisor in support of an individual increment. In connection with this, we may draw a relative distinction between two sorts of variables—first, parameters, which define classes of alternatives; second, local variables, which specify instances of those alternatives.

Stories are the product of simulation. Authors create stories by imagining trajectories of actions and events, commonly through synthesizing genre prototypes with memories of actual experiences, hearsay, trajectories from other stories, and other sources. Part of this simulation involves making both larger and smaller changes, thus altering parameters to produce types of story and altering local variables to produce particular stories.

In The Mind and Its Stories and Affective Narratology, I have argued that perhaps the most common cross-cultural genre or story universal is romantic tragi-comedy. In its most prototypical form, this genre involves two people who fall in love, but are prevented from uniting, often by their parents and commonly due to some social conflict (such as the opposition between the Montagues and Capulets in Romeo and Juliet). They are separated, frequently with suggestions or imagery of death. A rival may enter, producing a love triangle, before the lovers are finally united (or, in the tragic version, prevented forever from uniting).

The preceding comments on the nature of simulation would lead us to expect that there will be versions of any given genre that are produced by parametric variation. These are presumably most likely—as most consequential—at story “junctures,” the points at which significant causal changes occur in the trajectory of actions and events (on junctures, see my The Mind 91-93). One such juncture is governed by the nature of the restriction that separates the lovers. In most of the cases I considered in earlier publications, that restriction is contingent and social. Again, the Montague-Capulet feud comes to mind. There is no necessary reason why these two families must be enemies or why their children could not be united. However, there are other possible types of restriction. Specifically, some restrictions may be felt to be necessary, either necessary in the ethical sense or necessary in the ontological sense. In other words, the lovers’ union may be experienced as in some way unthinkable or impossible, either morally or practically.

The clearest case of moral intensification concerns incest. Ontological intensification bears most often on the union of humans and spirits of some sort—either superhuman spirits (such as gods, angels, or ghosts) or (usually subhuman) animal spirits. I will refer to the superhuman/human/subhuman order as ontological or, drawing on usage in linguistics, as manifesting an animacy hierarchy. Of course, it is not strictly correct to say that these are literally unthinkable or impossible. The moral violations occur in the real world, though they are paradigmatic of sexual taboo. The ontological violations are possible in the storyworlds of some fictions, though (presumably) not in the real world, unless the ontological difference is interpreted metaphorically. The point is that, in each case, there is something about the nature of the lovers that, in certain circumstances, makes it appear impossible for them to be united (in the sense that, on hearing of such a union in real life, one might exclaim, “That can’t be!,” as in “A mother marrying her own son? That can’t be!”). We may refer to the broad varieties of romance—where the restrictions on the lovers are contingent and social, on the one hand, versus necessary, on the other hand—as basic and intensified respectively. We may further subdivide the intensified varieties into moral and ontological.

We will consider some cases of each sort of intensified romance in the following sections. Before going on to that, however, it is useful to note that another variable or set of variables enters here. This concerns just who knows about the problematic identity of the lovers and just when they know. Readers of Romeo and Juliet may recall that the titular lovers become enamored of one another before learning that they are from the opposed families. Sometimes, the ethical and ontological versions of the romantic plot involve the lovers knowing about their difference early on; sometimes, both lovers learn only later; sometimes, one knows while the other does not.

Finally, I should note that two motifs recur with some frequency in intensified romances. As I am using the term, motifs are sequences that can be adapted to different genres and integrated into a range of stories. (The key point is that they cross genres.) Here, the motifs in question are the concealment of identity, where a character hides some important aspect of who he or she is, and mistaken identity, where a character misattributes a category to another person. In the ethical and ontological romantic plots, the concealment and mistake most often concern one or both of the lovers.

Romantic Stories and Animacy Hierarchies (I): Humans and Animal Spirits

A story told by the Arawak (see Lévi-Strauss 256-257 and Roth 203-204) concerns a hunter and a jaguar (or tiger). The jaguar has taken the form of a human woman and joins the hunter as his wife. However, they conceal her identity. The two live together happily; she is a good wife and hunting partner. At a certain point, they visit the man’s mother. Though the jaguar woman stresses that he should never reveal her identity, the man ends up informing his mother, who conveys the information to the society at large. The jaguar woman suffers from shame and leaves her husband. Despite great effort, he is never able to find her.

This is, to my mind, an intriguing and affecting story. It also manifests a structure that recurs with variations in different traditions. A forbidden—putatively impossible—union occurs. Since it is forbidden, the lovers conceal their identities. Despite being warned not to do so, one spouse engages in some action—constituting a tragic error or failure—that leads to the exposure of the identities. This in turn forces the separation of the lovers in a tragic ending. (It may be that tragic outcomes are more common in these intensified variations on the romantic genre than in the basic form.) Note that “tragedy” and “comedy” here are what we might refer to as “modes of resolution” for the genres defined by happiness goals. For example, romantic stories may be resolved by the lovers’ achievement of enduring union (comedy) or by a sequence of events (e.g., one lover’s death) that renders such achievement impossible (tragedy). Like genres, tragedy and comedy may themselves have recurring properties (such as the commission of a tragic error).

One striking feature of the Arawak story is that the inter-species union is, in fact, not impossible. Its putative impossibility is a function of knowledge. It is only when some people know the identities of the lovers—when society learns that they are not man and woman, but man and jaguar (or tiger)—that the impossibility appears. In other words, it is not an impossibility of the lovers or categories themselves, but of social opinion about those categories. This suggests that the restriction is ultimately a social restriction, though it is represented as ontological. In keeping with this, Alexandra Aikhenvald’s research indicates that “jaguar” might suggest a low status group (12), a point consistent with the woman’s feeling of shame. Alternatively, Roth’s work may point to a link between tigers and antagonistic out-groups (367). Thus, we have the usual sorts of social taboo—due either to social hierarchy within the society or conflict with an enemy group. The ontological romance intensifies this ordinary social problem through the animacy hierarchy (hence my name for this variant, “intensified” romance).

Pu Songling’s Strange Tales, an important, late Seventeenth-Century, Chinese work, includes several stories of this sort. In “The Girl in Green,” a woman arrives at the male protagonist’s lodgings unexpectedly. Though she conceals her background from him, they have sexual relations. The man asks her to sing. She refuses, warning that it may be dangerous. Eventually, she gives in to his pleas. When she departs, she is attacked, and he has to rescue her. At this time, he learns that she is not a woman, but a hornet. She thanks him for rescuing her, but leaves forever.

Here we have the same general structure. There is an inter-species union, though one in which the man is ignorant that the woman is not really a woman, but an insect. She warns him that they should behave in a particular way; he insists otherwise. The result is the disclosure of their species difference and their consequent separation. (As is undoubtedly clear, here and below I engage in the sort of structural mapping of story sequences that Lévi-Strauss developed so powerfully in his four-volume Introduction to the Science of Mythology. As is probably no less clear, however, the conclusions of my analysis and the psychological principles it involves are quite different from those of Lévi-Strauss.)

Another story along these lines is Pu’s “Princess Lotus.” In a dream, the protagonist meets a king, who introduces him to a young, beautiful woman. The protagonist falls in love and marries the woman. Everything seems to be proceeding with remarkable calmness. But suddenly the protagonist’s in-laws are threatened with destruction. He eventually learns that they are, in fact, not people but bees. This varies the structure, since the revelation is not the result of a violated taboo. It rather involves a danger to the family of one of the lovers. But there is still inter-species union connected with identity concealment, followed by disclosure.

Staying within the Chinese tradition, we find a further instance of this story structure in the often-retold “Legend of the White Snake” (for a summary of one version, see “Legend”). A magically powerful white snake transforms herself into a woman and marries a human. When the human discovers her identity, he dies. Through supernatural means, she manages to revive him; however, further tribulations follow. In some versions, she overcomes subsequent obstacles and the lovers are reunited enduringly; in other versions, she is unsuccessful.

Romantic Stories and Animacy Hierarchies (II): Humans and Immortal Spirits

The human-immortal romances are, on the whole, more insightful and engaging than the human-animal romances. They are also more abundant, though admittedly a number of stories could be put into either category. Another story from Pu follows the pattern of “The Girl in Green” and the Arawak tale. In “Sunset,” an unknown woman arrives at the protagonist’s home. Despite the intimate relationship that develops between them, she conceals her background and prohibits questions about it. He nevertheless tries to ascertain her identity, then continues this investigation despite further warnings. The man’s family has a crisis when his niece is possessed by a spirit. The mysterious woman helps through magical intervention. In consequence, her father learns about her affair with the human and forces their separation. Thus, we have the usual separation of lovers by the parent, but in this case due to an ontological discrepancy in the identities of the lovers. The woman, it turns out, is daughter to the Golden Dragon King. They are never reunited.

This story is particularly well developed. It takes up the motif of the threat to the family of one lover, which we saw in “Princess Lotus.” It also includes concealed identity, one lover’s attempt to prevent the disclosure of that identity, and the other lover’s violation of a warning.

A comic version of human-immortal romance may be found in Li Hao-ku’s early Thirteenth-Century, Chinese drama, Chang Boils the Sea. In that play, a scholar falls in love with the daughter of a dragon king. Through the use of magic, the scholar is able to join his beloved—although she is “thirty thousand fathoms beneath the blue sea” (170; the physical inaccessibility concretizes the ontological discrepancy between human and spirit). He is also able to secure the consent of the dragon king. Of course, this is not a concealment-revelation-loss sequence. Rather, this story indicates that the human-immortal romance may follow the more routine or basic form, with parental disapproval and the lovers’ work to overcome that disapproval.

The intensified romance is not confined to Chinese and Arawak traditions. In the Indian (South Asian) tradition, there are several versions of the romance between the mortal Purūravas and the celestial nymph Urvaśī. Consider, for example, the important early collection of stories from Hindu tradition, the Viṣṇu Purāṇa (see Wilson iv-viii). In that work, Urvaśī is condemned to a period of earthly existence, where she falls in love with Purūravas. They marry on the condition that Purūravas never violate a particular taboo. He is tricked into doing so and the lovers are separated, though they are ultimately reunited when Purūravas is elevated to the status of an immortal. In Vikramōrvaśīyam, the version by the most renowned Sanskrit playwright, Kālidāsa (fifth century C.E.), the human king Purūravas and Urvaśī fall in love. They are separated, as Urvaśī lives in heaven. However, due to her preoccupation with Purūravas, she commits a serious breach of etiquette and is condemned to become mortal for a certain time. The change of Urvaśī from spirit to human allows her union with Purūravas. But the temporary nature of her incarnation limits the duration of that union. In the end, she is allowed to remain human as long as Purūravas is alive.

In these cases too we see a variation on the intensified romance. In neither version is it a matter of concealment and exposure. However, the ontological contradiction of love between a mortal and a spirit is clear. Moreover, in theViṣṇu Purāṇaversion, there is a taboo on one of the lovers and the violation of that taboo leads to their separation. Interestingly, the human-spirit union is enabled by the change of status—the fall ofUrvaśī in bothversions and the elevation of Purūravas in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa. It is also worth noting that, the play seems particularly to recall death and grief. It thereby suggests a connection between separation in the ontological romance and the more mundane issue of bereavement, where the (still living) human lover is separated from (his or her deceased) beloved, who is now a spirit.

A particularly extended and complex version of the structure may be found in the Roman story of Amor and Psyche, as developed by Apuleius in the late second century. Due to a curse and subsequent abandonment by her family, the beautiful (human) Psyche ends up married to (immortal) Amor. However, Amor conceals his identity, and even prevents Psyche from seeing him. In keeping with the pattern we have considered, he warns Psyche that she should not seek to discover who he is. Convinced by her (jealous) sisters, Psyche tries to uncover her spouse’s identity, planning in fact to kill him. Instead of the dangerous monster she anticipates, Psyche sees Amor and falls in love with him. They are separated, and the separation is maintained by Amor’s mother, Venus, thus presenting the standard “familialization” of the pivotal conflict (in which the blocking characters are family members, thus giving their antagonism greater emotional force). Psyche now seeks reunion with Amor. Unlike the Arawak tale, this story develops the quest by the abandoned, human lover. Specifically, Psyche tries to win the approval of Venus by performing various tasks dictated by Venus—a scenario that we might expect for the male lover, rather than the female. (In Chang Boils the Sea, we see a sort of parallel for this, with the male lover undertaking the work of convincing the beloved’s father—in this case antagonistically, rather than deferentially.) In the interim, Amor recovers from an injury caused by Psyche’s misguided attempt to identify and kill him. He manages to procure immortalizing ambrosia. Drinking the ambrosia, Psyche becomes immortal, thus making possible her enduring union with Amor.

Thus, in Apuleius’s story, we have the concealment of identity, the taboo on seeking or revealing that identity, the violation of the taboo, and the separation. This is then followed by the usual familial conflict and a version of the lover’s attempt to convert the recalcitrant parent. However, the resolution does not come from a conversion of the parent. It comes, rather, from a transformation in the status of the lover, a change from mortal to immortal. This change erases the ontological difference that made the union impossible to begin with. There are two points to make in connection with this. First, there are two obvious ways in which the ontological difference may be overcome. One is the elevation of the human lover, as we see here. The other is the degradation of the spirit lover, as in the case of Urvaśī when she is initially joined with Purūravas in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa. The second point is that this is parallel with the more ordinary or basic romantic structure, in which the conflict is social, as when the lovers derive from different classes or castes. The elevation of one lover is, in this respect, parallel with the discovery that, for example, the slave girl is actually a patrician who was kidnapped as a child. The degradation of one lover is parallel to the discovery that the apparently higher class or caste beloved is in fact not inaccessible to the lover—as when Duṣyanta (in Kālidāsa’s Abhijñānaśākuntalam) discovers that Śakuntalā is not from the higher, Brahmin caste, but has only been raised by a Brahmin.

Thus, we find Native American, Chinese, Indian (South Asian), and European instances of the intensified romantic plot in which the lovers violate an ontological constraint defined by an animacy hierarchy. These stories also occur across a range of time periods. Further examples may be found in more recent works, both western and eastern. For example, Wings of Desire (directed by Wim Wenders), presents us with the story of an angel who falls in love with a mortal woman. He loses his angelic status, becoming mortal, and is united with the woman. Here, the sort of concealment we found in the Amor and Psyche story occurs before the union of the lovers, as the angel can observe his human beloved, while the latter has only vague intimations of the angel’s presence. In this case, there is no restriction, restriction-violating revelation of identity, and consequent separation of the lovers; it is, then, a reduced or simplified version of the structure.

Another film with this sort of plot is Postman to Heaven, a 2009 work from South Korea (directed by Hyung-min Lee). In this film, a young woman and a ghost fall in love. The ghost has been assigned the task of helping bereaved men and women work through their grief. The young woman had recently lost a lover, which leads to her connection with the ghost. The twist in this story is that the ghost is visible only to people who are in mourning. Thus, the young woman will no longer be able to see or interact with the ghost from the moment she overcomes her grief. But she overcomes her grief in proportion to the degree to which she falls in love with the ghost. Thus, she loses her new beloved precisely to the degree that she loves him; thus, she suffers a new grief precisely to the degree that she overcomes her old grief. The problem is resolved by divine intervention. Due to the ghost’s success in consoling the bereaved, particularly this young woman, Heaven returns him to his mortal life. As a human, he is now able to be united with his beloved, who is thereby freed from both the old and the new grief.

Neither film has the concealment-taboo-violation structure. But both still alter the more usual, basic genre trajectory, by having the lovers violate an ontological restriction and allowing their union by a change in status, from spirit to human. Further cases present other variations. For example, complex instances may be found in other stories by Pu Songling, such as “Grace and Pine,” “Butterfly,” and “The Laughing Girl.”

Romantic Stories and Same-Sex Love: An Intermediate Case

We will turn to the ethical form of the intensified romantic structure in the next section. Before going on to that, however, we might briefly remark on Ovid’s story of Iphis and Ianthe and the Śikhaṇḍinī story in the Mahābhārata. In both stories—one European, the other Indian—two women are married to each other due to concealed identity, though the concealed identity in this case is one of anatomical sex, not of ontological level (human, animal, or spirit). As with the cases considered thus far, the revelation of the concealed identity causes problems for the union, and in each case the misrepresented lover (Iphis and Śikhaṇḍinī) goes through a magical sex change, comparable to the transformation of a human lover into a spirit or vice-versa.

These cases are interesting in part because they show how the romantic structure may, through parametric variation, be applied to significant social issues, in this case same-sex love. This is not to say that either provides any solution to the social conflicts surrounding such love, any more than the animacy-based versions provide a solution to the love between people of extreme out-groups (as in the Arawak case). The transformation of one lover functions most obviously as a fantasy, perhaps giving some people imaginary satisfaction. In any case, its social function is complex and equivocal. For example, in the case of Iphis and Ianthe, it may be taken to validate lesbian love, indicating that the lovers should be joined. But it might also be taken to stress the necessity of heterosexuality, since they can be joined only when they are differently sexed. On the other hand, romantic stories tend to cultivate a very strong preference for the lovers’ union. Thus, my inclination is to see stories such as Iphis and Ianthe as functioning primarily to cultivate sympathy with the same-sex lovers, even as the ending gives the author and reader an out, enabling the plausible denial of such homoerotic sympathies.

I refer to this as intermediate because it is not clear how authors and readers conceive of the restriction in this case. I suspect that it varies with authors, readers, and cultures. Some would think of the restriction as ethical. I suspect that such readers would not, in general, be sympathetic with the same-sex lovers. Other readers would think of the restriction as simply social, comparable to the forbidding of intermarriage between Montagues and Capulets (this is presumably the view of most academic readers today). Finally, some would think of the restriction as part of the order of being, so to speak—in this case, related not to animacy as such, but to the issue of mating. Different species cannot interbreed; neither can spirits and humans. For some writers and readers, the relation of same-sex lovers is probably of this sort. Clearly, this is a topic that requires further research, with many more examples from a much wider range of traditions.

Romantic Stories and Ethical Restrictions: Incest and Adultery

In considering the ontological version of intensified romance, I could not help but be aware of the similarity to one of the most famous and influential stories in European literature, the story of Oedipus. Though not a romantic plot per se, the story does involve two people being united despite the fact that their union is rigorously forbidden. This is possible because the (familial) identity of one person, Oedipus, has been concealed. Thus no one recognizes that the union is incestuous. When that identity is revealed, the couple is separated. In this case, the results are tragic, with the woman hanging herself and the man blinding himself. Interestingly, as developed by Sophocles (in the fifth century before the common era), the story is not only principally romantic (despite the union of Oedipus and Jocasta), but sacrificial. Specifically, there is a plague in Thebes; it has resulted from Oedipus’s crime of (unknowingly) killing his father, which led to his further crime of (unknowingly) marrying his mother. In other words, in this story, a sin perpetrated by the primary representative of the society (the king) has led to social devastation. The result is the sacrifice of the guilty parties (Jocasta’s death and Oedipus’s blinding). In Oedipus the King, then, a sacrificial structure is integrated with a much more limited romantic structure.

As just noted, the form of identity at issue for Oedipus is familial. Some readers have been confused by this, because the identity issue is not one of humans and animals or spirits. That is right. Indeed, that is the difference between two sorts of intensified romance—the ontological and the ethical. Ontological problems keep people and insects from marrying; ethical restrictions bear rather on incest. Of course, the ontological stories may metaphorically represent moral conflicts—or mere social conflicts. The point here concerns the literal representations.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses (early first century of the common era) presents us with other incestuous romantic narratives. One is the simple story of Byblis, who tries to unite with her brother, but is rejected; weeping, she is transformed into a spring. Another, more interesting story concerns Myrrha and her father. Myrrha falls in love with her father and contrives a way of sleeping with him while concealing her identity. When he learns of her identity, he not only rejects her, but tries to kill her. She flees and is transformed into a tree.  The Byblis story is a simple tale of rejected love. The story of Myrrha, however, includes union with concealed identity, followed by revelation and tragic separation.

One might expect other moral restrictions to enter here as well. An obvious case is adultery. In European literature, works such as Anna Karenina come to mind. In Tolstoy’s novel, for example, we have love between Anna and Vronsky, leading to a partial union, which is concealed from society. Once revealed, inadvertently, by Anna, problems arise. On the other hand, this is not a concealment of identity; Anna does not misrepresent herself as unmarried—either to Vronsky or to the larger world. Rather, it is simply the (illicit) sexual relations that are concealed. Moreover, the revealing of the secret does not lead to the separation of the lovers. There are problems with the cross-cultural manifestation of this structure as well, since possibilities for polygamy or divorce limit the degree to which prior marriage serves as a restriction on the lovers. On the other hand, there are some similarities between the structure we have been examining and such adultery stories as Anna Karenina.

Implications of this Analysis

Clearly, the preceding examples of an ethical romance plot are taken from a single tradition. That may suggest that this specific form of the structure is parochial. However, the Oedipus and Myrrha stories remain cases of a larger sequence that does recur cross-culturally.

Again, the intensified romance is defined by a restriction on the lovers that is not simply a matter of social convention or other social contingency, but of identity bearing on animacy or ethics. In its most prototypical form, the intensified romance proceeds as follows:

• The lovers are united.
• However,  there is some (intentional or unintentional) concealment of the ontologically or ethically relevant identities.
• In connection with this concealment, there is often a warning about the behavior of one or both lovers.
• A violation of the warning results in the problematic identity being revealed.
• As a result of this revelation, the lovers are separated.
• In comic instances of the ontological version, that separation may be overcome when the identity of one lovers is changed.
• However, the ethical version of this structure does not in general allow for such a comic transformation (e.g., Psyche can be made immortal, but Oedipus cannot be made into the son of someone other than Jocasta).

Faced with the preceding examples, we might wonder why there is such a recurring pattern. “Why” here might refer to the generation of the sequence, just what gives rise to it; this could equally be referred to as “how” the structure is produced. “Why” might also refer to the function of the resulting sequence; this is “why” in the sense of “what for.” Note again that the pattern here is a pattern in stories. It is not a pattern in real life (where people do not marry insects either with or without concealed identity). It is, rather, a pattern in simulation.

The “how” question is relatively easy to answer. Again, we may think of simulation as involving principles with parameters and local variables. The simulation of romantic stories involves some restriction that separates the lovers. Obvious possibilities for such separation would include conventional versus necessary, with the latter category including ontological and ethical cases. Within each category, any given character might or might not know about the restrictions or the identities that trigger such restrictions at any given time. (For example, Oedipus and Jocasta do not know their restriction-triggering identities—son and mother—when they get married.) The stories we have been considering begin with an extreme restriction and vary the timing and extent of relevant knowledge. Typically, the knowledge comes to have social consequences only when it is socially available (as when the man’s society learns about the Jaguar woman’s identity). Usually, the lovers are able to maintain their union when they have the relevant knowledge but society does not, though the story of Myrrha suggests that this may be less true in the ethical cases.

The functional significance of this structure is perhaps less clear. However, there are some obvious possibilities. Specifically, we would expect the function to be either emotional or thematic. Emotionally, this sub-genre of romance provides some degree of novelty relative to the basic (and more realistic) form. In connection with this, it often organizes the trajectory of feeling somewhat differently. Specifically, the basic structure commonly begins with the main characters falling in love and recognizing their reciprocal feelings, but then being separated very quickly. The intensified version often involves the lovers joining together in a regularized union, such as marriage, and maintaining that state for some time before being separated due to the discovery of the concealed identity. Both versions treat love, loss, and (in the full, comic version) reunion. But in the basic version, the love is the feverish love of early romance and the loss is a loss of imagined possibilities. In the intensified version, the love is more likely to include a strong “companionate” element, a sense of bonding that may be less intense but may be more clearly enduring, and the loss is a loss not only of imagined possibilities, but of the ordinariness of regular life and ongoing expectation experienced for, in some cases, years of family life.

For the reasons just mentioned, the loss of the beloved in the intensified version may be more similar to the loss of a spouse in death. This too has emotional consequences. Specifically, in its ontological variant, the structure may suggest bereavement, while allegorizing that bereavement in the (perhaps less distressing) form of the human-spirit romance. I have already noted that there are suggestions of this in Vikramōrvaśīyam. The connection seems clear in other works as well. For example, in Postman to Heaven, the young woman falls in love with a ghost. Her former lover has died and her new beloved is actually a boy in a coma in a hospital. The lovers are separated as human and ghost, until his spirit returns to his body and he is revived from the coma, at which point they meet as mortals. The film repeatedly points toward the loss of a long-term partner by death. But it presents the main lovers’ separation as a matter of an ontological incompatibility which is resolved by the spirit leaving heaven to become a mortal.

These points are related to the thematic purposes of the ontological romance. In the comic version, the thematic operation of the structure involves a suggestion that the losses of death may be overcome—a point with obvious emotional consequences as well. In other words, it suggests that apparently irrecuperable losses might in fact be recuperable, and it does this without drawing our attention to death and separation too directly. Indeed, in some cases, it even serves to reconnect our companionate love with earlier, more romantic feelings. I say “our” here because the reader’s relation to the emotions of the protagonists is often intertwined with his or her own emotional memories (see, for example, Oatley, Passionate, 36, 179, 180). In that way, our empathic response to the lovers is in some degree connected with our own romantic histories.

On the other hand, the intensified romantic story is not always related to long-term attachment and bereavement. For example, the Arawak story has suggestions of death and grief. But it also suggests social divisions that have been rendered more extreme by being assimilated to species differences. There are two obvious thematic purposes of this sort of intensification of difference between the lovers. The first is to present an a fortiori case of romantic love in opposition to social divisions. If the Arawak hunter can live an ideal marriage with an actual jaguar or tiger woman, how much more readily could an Arawak live in marital union with another person who is from a class or other society associated with jaguars or tigers? As I have argued elsewhere (see chapter seven of Understanding Nationalism), romantic stories tend to challenge in-group/out-group divisions, preferring the union of the lovers to the maintenance of social oppositions. The ontological romance may simply extend this inclination.

This critical function of the ontological romance is clearest when the lovers’ initial union is untroubled. In the Arawak story, there is no real problem with the lovers’ life together. In other stories, however, there are difficulties, sometimes intrinsic to the lovers’ identities, as in the difference between mortals and immortals. For example, in Wings of Desire, the lovers can be joined only when the difference between them is overcome, when the angel becomes human. This too suggests that ordinary, social divisions are not absolute. If the difference between humans and spirits may be effaced, if immortal spirits can become humans and humans can become immortal spirits, then surely members of one society can become members of another society. This may simply be a matter of one lover being accepted into the other’s society, or it may involve some more elaborate assimilation into the culture of the latter.

Again, the obvious exception here is ethical, as in the case of incest. Incestuous unions are typically not open to this sort of resolution. Oedipus and Jocasta seem perfectly happy together. Everything appears to be going along well, with the family flourishing, including the children. But the union remains wrong for most readers. Thus, the ethical version does not fit with the most obvious thematic purposes of the ontological version of the intensified romantic structure. That may account for its apparent infrequency, relative to the ontological version, both within European tradition and across cultures. On the other hand, the success of the Oedipus story indicates that this version may be emotionally successful.

Before concluding, it is worth noting that concealed identity operates as a motif that may be used in various narrative contexts. Moreover, it may be taken up in complex and surprising ways in relation to romantic narrative. Particularly striking cases of this sort may be found in Shakespeare’s “problem” plays, All’s Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure. Specifically, in both cases, one main character sets out to engage in adultery, deceptively seducing a young woman, thus initiating a train of events that is commonly developed in the seduction plot (on the seduction plot, see chapter four of my Affective). However, the lovers meet in circumstances where the identity of the woman is concealed (reminiscent of the meeting between Myrrha and her father). However, in these cases, the concealed identity of one of the lovers does not mean that an apparently legitimate union is illegitimate. It means, rather, that an apparently illegitimate union is legitimate, for in both cases the man’s wife takes the place of the woman he was aiming to seduce. The resulting stories are highly interesting, due to this reversal. But they are problematic because the final union is not based on mutual love and it is therefore difficult for the reader (or audience member) to be entirely pleased by the putatively comic conclusion.

In connection with these final examples, one referee of this essay worried that concealed identity may be a motif produced by the romantic genre, not occurring elsewhere. I should therefore mention that in heroic plots we encounter spies who conceal their identities and heirs to the throne who are unknown to be heirs to the throne; in revenge narratives, we find revengers disguising themselves and killing people whose identity they misconstrue; in criminal investigation narratives, detectives take on disguises and innocent people are sometime mistaken for criminals—and so on, for all genres. Perhaps the most relevant case here is the (already mentioned) seduction story, which is often more appropriately termed a rape story. In this structure, the seducer or rapist often conceals his identity. This is significant to the present study because there are some famous cases in which the rapist is a god and the false identity is that of an animal—as in Zeus’s rape of Leda. This is related to the cases we are considering as the union is “impossible,” in the sense we have been considering. It therefore suggests a similar concern with the violation of putatively necessary social divisions, though in another genre.

Future Research

An obvious topic for research in this area concerns ethical restrictions on lovers and the degree to which the topics of incest and adultery, or other possibly morally objectionable unions, do or do not develop a version of this structure. A parallel point applies to same sex unions and the degree to which the relevant restrictions are presented as ethical, ontological, or merely social and conventional. Instances of these relationships and restrictions are clearly under-represented in the preceding discussions.

On the other hand, research on the incidence and varieties of more unequivocal cases of ontological romance is important as well. Again, we find a range of stories in different traditions in which lovers face a restriction that is not merely conventional or contingent, but in some sense viewed as necessary, either ontologically (in relation to animacy) or morally. Prototypically, the lovers in such stories are united, due to some intentional or inadvertent concealment of identity. But that concealment often renders the union unstable. In connection with this, one of the lovers may be warned not to engage in behavior that will reveal the concealed identity. In a tragic error, however, he or she may do just the wrong thing, precipitating the lovers’ separation. In a comic version, one of the lovers’ status may change, allowing the union, but this is generally restricted to the ontological version. We have evidence that the ontological version of this intensified structure occurs in a range of genetically and areally unrelated traditions. But it is not clear how frequent (or infrequent) the appearance of this structure may be. Further research is also important for assessing the preceding conjectures on the generation of the sub-genre and, even more, its function. The generation of the structure—deriving from the operation of variables in principles governing simulation—seems fairly clear in general. However, the specifics of the variables and the resulting variations on the sub-genre could be further developed and clarified. Moreover, the functions of the intensified romance appear more debatable.

Especially in connection with the last point, the relation of this variant to changes in cultural ideology and historical conditions may be worth investigating. For example, one might wonder if the ontological romance occurs more frequently in periods of extensive inter-cultural contact, where the contact has not become routinized; in other words, one might wonder if a particular degree of interaction with alien societies may not promote stories treating the romantic relations of extremely distant partners. For example, we might ask if the Pu Songling stories owe something to the early Qing dynasty experience of Manchu-Chinese cultural conflict (see Roberts 142), the divisive contact with the West and associated anti-Christian reaction of the time (see Rowe 138-139), and related matters. Similarly, we might consider if Apuleius was affected by the cultural interactions of 2^ndCentury Rome, with its extensive empire. Along the same lines, we might inquire into the possible relation between the Arawak tale and European contact. A correlation in this respect might constitute a statistical, implicational universal.

I should note here that I am referring specifically to the ontological version of the intensified romantic structure. Such issues as same-sex desire recur in a range of time periods and cultures presumably because same-sex desire recurs in all time periods and cultures. As one reader of this essay commented, stories of same-sex union (as well as adultery and other sexual behaviors) occur because social rules often relate to categorial identities and these are often in conflict with what I have called “practical identity” (see, for example, Understanding Nationalism 25-37), one’s actual capabilities and propensities. That practical identity may include, for example, same-sex desire. However, the case of ontological romance—and even, for the most part, that of the most extreme cases of ethical romance, such as those involving incest—are different. There is no social issue of people marrying insect spirits or even sons marrying their mothers. These stories are, then, fundamentally a product of simulation. Of course, in the end, our narrative simulations, here and elsewhere, are inseparable from real-world issues of categorial and practical identity, as suggested by the Arawak story’s possible allegorization of social identity conflict—just as our experiences of categorial and practical identity are inseparable from simulation. In this way, the two forms of analysis should ultimately be joined with one another.

Finally, one might wonder about the implications of these observations for other genres. The sacrificial operation of the ethical romance in Oedipus the King might lead us to inquire after the relation of this romantic structure to other genres with which it might be integrated. We might also ask if there are junctural points in those other genres—sacrificial, heroic, family separation and reunion, revenge, seduction, and criminal investigation—that define significant sub-genres, such as we have been considering in the case of romantic stories. More exactly, simulation is not confined to romance, but produces the other genres equally. As such, we would expect to find such complex, sub-generic patterns in those other genres as well. In some cases, such sub-genres will be related to the intensified romance, with its ontological and moral impossibilities. Stories such as the rape of Leda suggest that this may be found in seduction/rape structures. Alternatively, such a violation may serve as a recurring motif. For example, there is an element of this in the story of Mary’s conception of Jesus—part of a sacrificial narrative—with its divine/human union and its image of the paraclete as a dove.

[See also Nigel Fabb, “Comments on Hogan, ‘Impossible Love and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones’” and Geoffrey Russom, “Comments on Hogan, ‘Impossible Love’.”]

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