Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, twenty-four leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. They consider sound symbolic processes in a wide range of languages from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America. Beginning with an evocative typology of sound symbolic processes, they go on to examine not only the well-known areas of study, such as onomatopoeia and size sound symbolism, but also less frequently discussed topics such as the sound symbolic value of vocatives and of involuntary noises, and the marginal areas of 'conventional sound symbolism', such as phonesthemes. The book concludes with a series of studies on the biological basis of sound symbolism, and draws comparisons with the communication systems of other species. This is a definitive work on the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language.

"All of the papers are sources of tantalizing, testable hypotheses....of considerable value and evidence of a welcome renewal of interest in some very old questions." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology