Sound Symbolism
Task D - Our comments
 The
sound symbolic words are usually felt to be 'last oozings hour by hour'.
The rest of the words in these four lines are not sound symbolic - showing
that the majority of words in these lines are not sound symbolic but
arbitrary in terms of their phonetic composition.
The sound symbolic quality here is essentially based on length. A phonemic
transcription of the phrase is:
/lɑ:stu:zɪŋzaɑ:əzbaɪaʊəz/
All of the vowels except one are long. /ɑ:/
and /u:/ are pure vowels marked
for length in the transcription by the ':'
symbol. /aɪ/ is a diphthong, and all diphthongs
are long because they involve a pronunciation glide from one pure vowel
to another (in this case from /a/ to /ɪ/).
The repeated word /aɑ:əz/ is a tripthong,
and so is even longer! The only short vowel is the /ɪ/
in the second syllable of 'oozings', and this syllable is unstressed,
and so not very salient perceptually. In addition, the /s/
and /z/ sounds are long consonants because
they are fricatives, and the nasal is also easy to lengthen in pronunciation
if such a phonetic 'performance' is appropriate. The dense patterning
of long vowels and consonants is felt to be appropriate to the length
of time it takes to extract the juice from the apples, thus producing
the sound symbolic effect, and in perceiving this relationship readers
tend to ignore the few consonants (e.g. /j/
and /t/ which are short phonemes. The
sound symbolism relation here is one betweens length of sounds and length
of time, notice, and so is not onomatopoeic.
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