Standard language ideologies on a Hungarian Frequently Asked Questions website

Onomatopoeia is a phenomenon crucial to examine in connection with arbitrariness of the linguistic sign; onomatopoeic representations of environmental sounds are often considered universally iconic. Investigating onomatopoeia can also lead to a better understanding of how humans perceive and represent environmental noises: fMRI studies show that Japanese sound-imitation words are processed by brain regions involved in the processing of both human speech and environmental sounds. With a multidisciplinary approach, the presentation will look at several studies from a wide variety of research areas (neuroscience, environmental sound recognition, phonostatistics and phonetics) showing results that can be integrated into the examination of onomatopoeic iconicity. While many of the linguistic studies on this topic usually describe iconic properties of single phonemes, the aim of the presentation will be to demonstrate how larger units of speech can represent acoustic features of the environmental sound. The presentation will focus on word-level onomatopoeic iconicity, specifically the connection between environmental acoustic events and sonority variation, length and reduplication of corresponding sound-imitation words. Recordings of animal sounds were analysed and their acoustic properties were compared to the following properties of the corresponding Hungarian onomatopoeic words: syllabic word length, sonority variation and frequency of reduplication (based on a corpus containing 1.2 billion words). My results show that the sonority variation of Hungarian sound-imitation words could represent the intensity variation of represented environmental sounds. Words with higher variation in sonority usually represent environmental sounds with more peaks in the power envelope. I have also found that the frequent use of reduplicated sound-imitation words may suggest that there are clusters of short sounds in the represented environmental sound.