Sound Symbolic Involvement

Abstract

This article examines an iconic form of communication, sound symbolism, which has been associated with oral cultures and implicated in paradigms of primitive mentality. I argue that Lowland Ecuadorean Quechua speakers use sound symbolic iconicity to create interlocutionary involvement. A speaker's performative foregrounding of a sound symbolic form simulates the salient qualities of an action, event, or process, and thereby invites a listener to project into an experience. This projected involvement, in turn, points the listener to deeper kinds of imaginative, intellectual, and emotional engagement with the narrative. The argument is based on an analysis of the formal and semantic characteristics of sound symbolic words in a conversational narrative translated from Quechua.

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