Forms, Mechanisms, and Roles of Iconicity in Spoken Language: A Review.

Historically, debates over relationships between spoken lexical form and meaning have been dominated by views of arbitrariness. However more recent research revealed a different perspective, in which non-arbitrary mappings play an important role in the makeup of a lexicon. It is now clear that phoneme-sound symbolism - along with other types of form-to-meaning mappings - contributes to non-arbitrariness (iconicity) of spoken words, which is present in many forms and degrees in different languages.