Tracking linguistic primitives: The phonosemantic realization of fundamental oppositional pairs

This paper investigates how cross-linguistic phoneme distributions of 56 fundamental oppositional concepts can reveal semantic relationships by looking into the linguistic forms of 75 genetically and areally distributed languages. Based on proposals of semantic primes (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2002), reduced Swadesh lists (Holman et al. 2008), presumed ultraconservative words (Pagel et al. 2013), attested basic antonyms (Paradis, Willners & Jones 2009) and sense perception words, semantic oppositional pairs were selected. Phonemes were divided according to: the frequency of vowels’ second formant and consonants’ energy accumulation, sonority, a combination of the aforementioned two, and general phonetic traits, e.g. voicing. Using a biplot, the phonological relatedness between the investigated concepts was illustrated graphically, and the phoneme distributions’ over- and underrepresentation from the average was calculated for each concept. Salient semantic groupings and relations based solely on phonological contrasts were found for most investigated concepts, including the semantic domains: Small, Intense Vision-Touch, Large, Organic, Horizontal-Vertical Distance, Deictic, Containment, Gender, Parent and Diurnal, and the sole concept old. The most notable relations found were: mother/i vs. father, a three-way deictic distinction and a dimensional tripartite oppositional relationship. Embodiment, oppositional thinking and evidence for more general concepts to precede complex concepts were proposed as explanations for the results.